Reading the Bible with the Eyes of Christ

This is an edited and abridged version of Joseph Pearce’s ongoing conversation with Polish scholar Jan Franczak, which is being published in the Polish journal, PCh24.pl. This is its first publication in English.

JF: In one of our earlier discussions, you explained why we cannot restrict our reading solely to the Bible, that it is not a good idea and that we should also read other texts. You said that the Bible was given to us by the Church. A reader commented that this is putting the Church over the Bible, which the reader considered to be blasphemy. How would you respond to this?

JP: On the contrary, this person is guilty of bibliolatry—the worship of the book. The Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. The book is merely something that the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ has given to the world.

The authors of the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and the authors of the Gospels especially so. But it was the Church—the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ—that decided which books are legitimate, which should go into the Bible, and which are apocryphal. The apocryphal books might have truths in them, but they’re not the absolute gospel truth.

Who decides what the gospel truth is? The Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, which is the Catholic Church. So, the Church comes before the Bible, and the Church gave us the Bible. To worship the book instead of the Person who gave us the book—Jesus Christ through His Mystical Body, the Church—is idolatrous and therefore blasphemous. The argument is turned on its head; the problem is with the reader’s idolization of the text.

JF: Maybe that’s because the reader didn’t realize that the Church actually is, as you have said, the Mystical Body of Christ?

JP: I think the problem is that many people have a humanistic view of the Church as some sort of human institution, like a political government or the United Nations. The Catholic Church is not just another political institution. We have to get our ecclesiology right.

The largest part of the Catholic Church is the Church Triumphant in Heaven—the saints and the angels in the presence of God. The part of the Church here on earth is the Church Militant, the Church at war, the Church in time and space. But the whole thing—the Church Triumphant in Heaven, the Church Suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Militant on earth—is the mystical body of Jesus Christ. We have to understand the Church ecclesiologically in this way, in the light of Christ. If we think it’s just another human institution, we’re going to go very wrong very quickly.

JF: I would like to continue the topic of the Bible. You’ve mentioned before that we cannot understand Western civilization without knowing the Bible, and we wouldn’t have had many works of art and literature without it.

JP: Yes, absolutely. And I’m really pleased that you are concentrating on the Bible because when we were discussing classic literature—the classical epics and the classic drama, Sophocles, etc.—I was stressing that we can’t understand the greatest Western literature without understanding the importance of Homer and Virgil. But, of course, more important than that is that we can’t understand Western literature without understanding the Bible.

In Shakespeare, for instance, there are all sorts of biblical allusions. Shakespeare knows the Bible, and his Elizabethan and Jacobean audience knew the Bible. For instance, when Hamletreferences that not even a sparrow falls without God knowing about it, it refers to a passage in the Gospel when Christ is talking about bringing a sword: “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” And, of course, this is just before the climax of Hamlet when there’s the swordfight which purges the “something rotten” that has plagued Denmark. You need to understand this biblical allusion in order to have the play open out to you in a way that makes much more sense than it would otherwise.

JF: Let’s talk a little bit about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Hobbit. To understand them better, we need to know the Bible, right?

JP: Yes. The point is we’re all called to make disciples—that’s one of the commandments of Christ. So we’re all called to be evangelists. You have to meet people where they are—not where they should be but where they are. And so if there are people who don’t understand the Bible at all, or aren’t interested in Christianity, or are antagonistic toward Christianity, they read The Lord of the Rings and, unbeknownst to them, unwittingly, they are reading something that is profoundly Christian—or to use Tolkien’s words, they are reading “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”

And then they come to realize that what they’re really attracted to—the idea of objective good and objective evil, the necessity of laying down our life self-sacrificially for the good of others—is fundamentally Christian. All of a sudden, their barriers to Christianity are removed, or at least weakened. They’re moved closer to Christ.

This is the whole idea: you have to meet people where they are. Some people, as soon as they see a Bible, they run away. So you have to find other ways of evangelizing, and that means meeting them where they are—not where they should be. If you meet them where they are with good literature, you can move them toward where they should be.

JF: Somebody compared the Bible and other works of literature to a set of mirrors that reflect the light from the distant past. And I like this comparison because it is like passing the light from the remote past forward. This is something amazing.

JP: Yes. The Bible obviously shows us ourselves in the deepest way. Other works of literature don’t show us ourselves as deeply. But we do need to be able to see ourselves in different mirrors, as long as the mirror is an accurate mirror. Tolkien says that great fairy stories hold up a mirror to man—they show us ourselves. We need to come to understand ourselves; and in order to do that, we need to see ourselves from different angles.

Especially when reading the Bible, we have to read it in the light of Christ. We mustn’t read the Bible subjectively, relativistically, or, as Protestants would say, in terms of sola scriptura—the text alone—because that means we’ll just project upon the text our own pride and prejudices and have reflected back to us not a true mirror but one distorted by our own presumptions.

We have to see the Bible in the light of Christ, which means in the light of the Church. We have to read beyond the literal text to see the Bible in context. If we don’t see the Bible in context, we will not understand the text.

JF: I’ve got a question for you: Talking about the Bible, do you have a favorite book of the Bible?

JP: Yes, I do. My favorite part of the Bible without any doubt whatsoever—because it’s a beautiful poem and extremely deep, and is said at the end of every traditional Latin Mass—is the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. That’s as good as it gets.

Probably my favorite book of the Old Testament is the Book of Job. It was also Chesterton’s favorite book of the Old Testament. But obviously I love the Psalms—you can’t not love the Psalms. But certainly the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. Nothing really gets any better than that, not just in the Bible, but anywhere else quite frankly.

JF: I must admit that my favorite book of the Bible is the Book of Jonah, and it is because I think that it is funny. There is a sense of humor. It is like a short story actually, and it has different layers of meaning, too, if you read it carefully. Of course, Christ Himself refers to the Book of Jonah; and in a way I think it is a book that is about each of us because it is about trying to run away from the vocation we have in life, the task that God gives us, and we have our own concepts of how to live and what to do, and God leads us toward our task.

JP: Yes. I love that. And, as the Church teaches, the Bible has to be read literarily, not merely literally—which means, of course, that the Book of Jonah and the Book of Job need to be read on the literal level but also on the allegorical level.

For instance, the Old Testament books of Jonah or Job prefigure and point toward their resolution and fulfilment in the figure of Jesus Christ in the Gospel. And then how this allegorical connection relates to us personally, morally—so yes, it is about us—and then how all this relates to our eternal destiny. So every single time we read the Bible, there are those four levels of meaning, three of which are allegorical.

The Book of Job is also a work of literature. In many ways it’s a mystery story—if you like—taking the problem that Sophocles brings to us in Oedipus Rex: the mystery of suffering, the problem of suffering. People suffer because of their own stupidity or their own sinfulness—big deal, we all know that; it makes sense. But what about people who are innocent who suffer even though it’s not their fault?

And this is what the Book of Job tackles—this mystery of mysteries, the problem of pain, as C.S. Lewis would say, or the mystery of suffering. It’s a mystery story, and it’s sort of resolved but not fully. It’s not resolved fully until we see the ultimate innocent victim, Jesus Christ, in His passion on the Cross, showing us what love really means.

It is not about blaming others, about whether I’m—as King Lear would say—a man more sinned against than sinning. It’s about the fact that we should simply take up our cross and ask our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to help us carry it, irrespective of why we’re carrying it. The cross itself is a blessing, and Jesus has promised that the burden will be light as long as we ask Him to help us. And it’s the path to Heaven.