This Sunday's first reading from Sirach says, No they aren't:
The LORD is a God of justice,This reading says God cares about the weak because he cares about everyone and therefore is just to everyone. But, as the emphasized line insists, he shows no special favour to the poor.
who knows no favorites.
Though not unduly partial toward the weak,
yet he hears the cry of the oppressed.
The Lord is not deaf to the wail of the orphan,
nor to the widow when she pours out her complaint.
The thing is that you can, by quoting certain other lines—such as, for example, the line about the eye of a needle—make the opposite case. That is the case that the Bible says, as Luke's Gospel appears to do, that it is blessed to be poor as opposed to the case that Matthew's Gospel appears to make that it is blessed to be poor in spirit. So which one is true?
Well, you have to make up your mind for yourself.
What I will say is that this is one of those cases where the Catholic approach to the Bible stands in sharp relief from the Protestant one. Father Z put it very well a while ago when he said that the Catholic position is that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors and not that the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible. The Bible is not absolutely consistent and that is one of many reasons it is not self interpreting.
Sirach, Matthew and Luke all had a particular perspective of their won and it makes sense to ask what it was and to ask whether that should affect the way we apply Biblical teachings to our lives. Strange as this may seem, it makes sense to approach Biblical readings with a Hermeneutic suspicion particularly when you get one reading that is being used to make a very particular point.
This is true, you have to look at the entire picture, all 4 Gospels, to try to ascertain a sense of the overall message the Holy Spirit was trying to convey. I've also heard that the Eye of the Needle was an actual physical place in Galilee or Nazareth--a natural rock formation--that would have been very tight--but not impossible--for a camel to fit through.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that Father Z. is entirely accurate that the Protestants believe that the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible rather than inspired its authors. He might be right, but I never heard that distinction made--either in graduate studies or among my Protestant friends. But I understand that Orthodox Jews believe that God dictated the Pentateuch to Moses, who transcribed it word for word, but that's all I know in that regard.
Some maintain that each of the four gospels is intended to convey a different aspect of Jesus' message. Luke says at the very beginning that he "brings good news to the poor" while John's narrative is much more mystical in approach. But for the average person Luke is much easier to understand than John.
Yes, the Bible is inconsistent, and you also have to take into account that it wasn't written in English, which comes as a surprise when I point this out sometimes. Some words in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek are simply un-translatable into English, so you're not only dealing with whatever biases the original redactors from the oral tradition (in the case of the Old Testament) and the Gospel writers (in the case of the New Testament) might have had, but also the biases of those who did the translations. The translators had to made their own often subjective judgements about what was being said, which is why Hermeneutics exists as an academic discipline. But I also think that gives everyone some latitude in how certain passages are interpreted.
Nonetheless, in their "Pastoral Letter on the Economy" from the mid-'80s (which had little play in the media and even less play from the pulpit), the USCCB said that Justice demands a "preferential option for the poor." I don't think this is based entirely on Luke's Gospel, but on the overall message of both the Old and New Testaments. And Martin Luther King, Jr. often compared the American Negro's struggle for civil rights to the Jew's struggle for freedom as recounted in the Book of Exodus, which is also often cited as a basis for Theologies of Liberation.
Regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in composition of the Bible, the difference is that Protestants believe that the Bible is sufficient for salvation. They don't use the expression, "written by the Holy Spirit" but that is what it comes to.
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