Correct reading of a text respects author’s intent

The fable of the tortoise and the hare comes to us from Aesop, a fourth-century B.C Greek. In that rich Mediterranean ambit, it was common to instruct adults with fictitious stories to teach the value of things like perseverance. Israel’s Scriptures used such techniques centuries before, and all could recognize parables. Good Jew that he was, Jesus used this method when he told parables to adult audiences, faithful to the ways the Hebrew Scriptures’ authors frequently had used. What better source could he have had?

We know that Jesus used parables, devised stories with a moral, based not on historical characters but on the teaching of a moral. None of us thinks there was a real good Samaritan, with a name and an address. None thinks that the prodigal son or father were his neighbors. They were fictitious. They never lived. And no one is scandalized at saying so.

Why then are we disturbed when we hear that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not historical narrative but parable? These chapters include the accounts of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the ark and the tower of Babel. To learn that these are not historical people and artifacts comes as a lightning bolt to many otherwise learned Catholics and others. By a literal reading of these initial 11 chapters, many arrive at the conclusion that these characters are as historically real as were Jesus, David and Moses.

But the authors of those 11 chapters never intended us readers to read these passages literally. Neither did Aesop. What the Hebrew authors intended was that we would see the moral of their account: only the God of Israel created the world and humanity as its crown, that we humans introduced evil into the world God had made as good, that evil spread with breathtaking force and effect, and that humanity in its pride thought it could rival God with an ambitious construction job.

By reading an allegory as an historical narrative, contrary to its author’s intent, we with all our sophistication and technology embarrass ourselves by ascribing an historical reality to characters in a parable. Wouldn’t we feel foolish if we did the same with Aesop’s fables?

This unauthorized literalism has caused us to scoff at the various theories of evolution of human life from other life forms. We feel that Darwin assaulted our faith since he claimed that the world took several billion years to develop. It certainly did not take six days of 24 hours, as the Genesis text states, even though well meaning apologists have suggested that a Genesis day might have been several million years. Go back to the text and see that a day of our length of time was clearly intended, with God resting from his labor at the end of the week of six 24 hour days.

Pope John Paul II panicked many of these Catholics when he said we could subscribe to any of the several theories of human evolution as long as we attribute to God the credit for having started the process. So much ink and so much adrenalin have been wasted as well-intentioned but erroneous believers felt the need to attack Darwinian evolution, badgering public — and Catholic — school boards, thinking that they were rescuing true religion from godless scientists. It should occur to people that Catholic universities, dedicated to the pursuit of the truth, whether the scientific or the theological kind, have no problem teaching in one faculty the likelihood of evolution and in another the fact of God creating.

There is no conflict. One faculty tells us how the world came about. The other tells us that God made it. It is no flaw of science that it is, by its own inner criteria, barred from speaking about things it cannot observe, since the scientific method requires observation, explanation and formation of scientific law. It cannot observe God directly. Thus it cannot be expected to formulate theological affirmations.

Oddly enough, over-literalism has been an error against the biblical science of hermeneutics. This science deals meticulously with the correct interpretation of biblical texts. By ignoring the particular function of figures of speech, and by ascribing historicity to allegories and parables, we have misread our own texts — and impugned scientists for their own responsible findings. The correct reading of any text at all demands that the reader respect the intent of the text’s author. If someone opposes human evolution, let it be on scientific grounds since it cannot be opposed with any help from Genesis.