F or centuries Catholics were considered the laggards in terms of mastery of the Bible. Given that one of the defining fault lines in the Protestant Reformation was over Scripture, with Protestants insisting that revelation is a matter of sola Scriptura, meaning “Scripture alone,” a certain indifference or ambivalence about the Bible became a characteristic trait of Catholicism. To be honest, that instinct was sometimes fed and encouraged by an overweening clerical caste, which just didn’t trust simple laity to be able to read and understand the Bible on their own.
To put the point in the simplest possible terms, in many parts of the Christian world, a Protestant was the one who could recite verses from Scripture by heart; a Catholic, meanwhile, was the one who knew all the prayers for the Mass. I still remember my grandparents in rural western Kansas showing me their cherished family Bible, which they’d inherited from another side of the family. For a long time, they said, they felt they had to take it off the coffee table when fellow Catholics from the town were coming over to visit. In a largely Protestant environment, they worried, people might see it as a sign of a creeping “Protestantization.”
All that began to change in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which stimulated a widespread Catholic recovery of the Bible. Theologians, pastors, catechists, and others learned anew to see Scripture as fundamental, not just as a privileged source of revelation but also as a resource for faith formation and the spiritual life.
Early in his life, Barron says, it was actually something of a discovery for him that a Catholic priest could also be an expert on the Bible.
“When I was a little kid, I remember this was the sixties or seventies, there was a series of paperbacks that were done by Raymond E. Brown,” he says. (A member of the Sulpician religious order, Brown, who died in 1998, was considered among the foremost Catholic experts on the Bible in his day. He taught for almost thirty years at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and several of his books, including his final work, The Birth of the Messiah, on the infancy narratives of Jesus in the New Testament, are considered classics.)
“There was this picture of Brown on the back of the book with his glasses on, and his Roman collar, and there he was reading an ancient manuscript. That picture had a big impact on me. There’s this priest, this really smart man who knows the Biblical languages, and he’s poring over ancient manuscripts. That a priest would know all these high-level things, I thought it was just cool.”
The transformation in Catholicism had flowered by the time Barron was maturing as a young theologian and later, a pastor himself, and he found himself thrilled by it. When he was studying at the Institut Catholique in Paris, for instance, he says he picked up a more Biblical way of reading Thomas Aquinas from his Dominican teachers, for whom the focus was on not merely intellectual clarification but the whole narrative world Aquinas was trying to explicate.
Indeed, Barron has come to see neglect of the Bible as one of the cardinal sins, so to speak, in currents in Catholic theology both before and after Vatican II, and today he insists there can be no authentic presentation of Christianity that doesn’t begin with immersion in the “density” of the Biblical universe. Earlier, we saw that one of the realizations that began to cause Barron to distance himself from the thinking of the giants of liberal Christian theology, such as Paul Tillich and later, in the Catholic tradition, Karl Rahner—though without ever abandoning those influences—was the dawning understanding that their works are often “Christologically and Biblically thin.”
“That’s what I began to see when I read Balthasar,” Barron says, “because Balthasar is the Catholic Karl Barth.” (Barth was a twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian who’s often regarded as a more conservative alternative to figures such as Tillich.) “With all his limitations, I bought Barth in lots of ways. What I love about him is his willingness to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to go into the Bible, and we’re going to spend hundreds of pages interpreting it on its own terms.’ He doesn’t feel obliged to say at every turn, ‘Now, let’s make sure this is linking to my experience.’ ”
It’s fine to find analogies to your experience. I’m not opposed to that. Barth used to talk about the preacher standing with a Bible in one hand, and in the other a newspaper. That’s great. However, there’s a noncompetitive but asymmetrical relationship between the two things. It’s not just Bible and newspaper. What I was trained to do was newspaper first, Bible second. However, it ought to be Bible first, newspaper second. Begin with the Bible, and then move on to experience. Draw the experience into the Biblical world. In other words, don’t let the question so dominate that the answer gets compromised. There’s a correlation between the Biblical world and our world, but it’s asymmetrical and noncompetitive.
We’ve also seen, of course, that part of Barron’s passion for Bob Dylan—though admittedly, this is a take on Dylan that occurred to him later, as opposed to being fully formed in his teenage years—is that he regards Dylan as being the most “Biblical” of pop stars. Moreover, some of Barron’s favorite figures in contemporary Catholicism—from Archbishop Mark Coleridge in Brisbane, Australia, to Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture to Brant Pitre, Scott Hahn, and Gary Anderson—are figures whose training and intellectual backgrounds are in Scripture studies.
Barron believes that in the post–Vatican II period in the Church, many Catholic scholars went so far in the direction of an overly technical and historical reading of the Bible that they never really got around to unleashing its spiritual power.
“I still think it’s a largely unrealized goal of Vatican II, to awaken the Biblical consciousness. Part of the problem was that the intelligentsia became so dominated by the historical-critical approach, they didn’t preach. It’s a good tool, and we need it and all that, but it didn’t preach. There was a rupture with the spiritual experience of ordinary people, which is an important point because it has crucial evangelical consequences.”
Further, Barron argues, a lack of familiarity with the worldview shaped by the Bible means that many well-meaning Christians, including many Catholics, take their points of reference from alternative narratives in the contemporary culture. He cites British scholar N. T. Wright in this regard.
Wright says we’re all dressed up for Hamlet , we know the lines and themes of Hamlet , but the trouble is we’re supposed to be in Macbeth ! We’re in the wrong play. The play we’re in is the play of secular modernity, which reached its climax in, say, 1776 and the great political revolutions whose purpose was to throw off oppressive forms of government. Everyone knows that story, and everyone knows where we are in that story, moving toward ever more freedom and equality. But the Biblical story does not climax in 1776; it climaxes in A.D. 33. It does not climax in Philadelphia with the Declaration of Independence; it climaxes on that weird instrument of death, the Cross, which positions everything else. That’s the story we’re supposed to be in. Now, there’s room within that story for 1776, but that isn’t the story. The Bible is the story, and to get that is to be evangelized.
Among other things, Barron believes that immersion in the Biblical worldview could help American Catholics reflect better on the binary nature of national politics, and how it often skews perceptions of the Church’s social teachings and the social and political priorities delineated by the U.S. bishops.
That’s the key to this left-right dichotomy that many people don’t get. When you say, “I’m not a Republican or a Democrat, I’m a Catholic,” what you’re invoking is a whole different set of criteria. Because the Democrat-Republican contest breaks along a very modern fault line for understanding politics and economics. But when you say, “No, I’m actually going to move onto a different ground,” then your relationship to those two warring factions is going to be a very complicated one. Christianity, the Biblical universe, inculcates a bigger worldview. There’s something skewed about the way we’ve configured the conversation, and that’s why it’s often hard for people elsewhere to get the liberal-conservative thing and our mania for situating everybody within it somehow. You have to say, “I want to change the subject; it’s a different game we’re talking about.”
As a final introductory point, Barron is convinced that Catholics in the early twenty-first century have to understand and be able to discuss the Bible intelligently, because for many people in his target audience as an evangelist—meaning fallen-away Catholics and secular nones, people of no religious faith—the Bible remains a problem.
“The Bible is this huge, huge stumbling block for some people,” he says. “They think it’s simply a holdover from the Bronze Age, to use the language of [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins.”
A special challenge, he says, is helping people understand that Catholicism isn’t committed to a literalistic reading of Scripture, which tends to be the only Christian approach to the Bible with which many nones are familiar.
People often think that the Bible’s a book. I always say, begin with the etymology of the word Bible —it’s Ta Biblia , “the books.” It’s not a book; it’s a library. Then my next move is typically to ask, “Do you take the whole library literally? Well, it depends on what section you’re in.” You’re wandering around the library, and some of the books are relatively straightforward. Then you wander into the poetry section, the mythology section, the fiction section, and things are different. We’re dealing with books here with widely different authors, genres, audiences, purposes, and so on. To make sense of it all, you have to read it within an interpretive tradition. You don’t just pick it up and start reading it. It’s like saying, “Here’s Hamlet , knock yourself out.” No, you’d say, “Read Hamlet within this long tradition of interpretation, and then you begin to understand it.” In the same way, with the books of the Bible you need so much contextualization.
For all those reasons, therefore, understanding how Barron thinks about, talks about, and makes use of the Bible is key to penetrating not only his own thought but also how he sees the missionary enterprise within a secular culture.
As an evangelist, Barron says, he frequently encounters secular seekers and nones for whom the Bible is a major stumbling block. For one thing, he says, they’re often unaware that a literal reading is not the only approach to Biblical interpretation among Christians, and in particular, that it’s not the sole method of the Catholic Church. Further, he says, they’ve often imbibed a truckload of prejudices about the Bible that are hard to get past—that the Bible condones violence, for instance, or that it approves slavery, or that it comes out of a patriarchal world in which women are seen as second-class citizens.
On the back of that experience, Barron has developed a couple of rules of thumb for proper Biblical interpretation. The first, he says, pivots on a distinction between “what the Bible teaches” and “what’s in the Bible.” He laid that point out in a 2012 YouTube video, prompted by an episode of the Real Time show hosted by the comedian, and inveterate critic of religion, Bill Maher.
I agree with the theologian William Placher [an American Presbyterian who shares Barron’s postliberal outlook], who said we have to distinguish between what’s in the Bible and what the Bible teaches. The authors were in the cultural milieu of the time; they drew on the intellectual furniture of a given time. What the Bible teaches is not always reducible to what’s in the Bible. What the Bible teaches is what God intends us to know, what’s inspired by God through the Bible for the sake of our salvation. To get that, we have to be attentive to the patterns, themes, and trajectories within the whole of the Bible. A good example is slavery. Was slavery part of the scene during the whole period in which the Bible was written? Yes, sure it was, as it was in almost every ancient culture. It was along for the ride; it was part of the mental furniture of the time. We shouldn’t be surprised that Bible authors mention slavery, even sometimes offering indirect words of approbation. But is slavery something taught by the Bible, encouraged by the Bible? Is it what God wants? I would say no, and to get that we look at the totality of the Bible, its great themes. Mind you, the people who opposed slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and brought it to an end, in both Europe and America, were precisely Biblical people. They were listening to what the Bible teaches, and not simply reading, dumbly, what’s in the Bible. I think that distinction is very important for Biblical interpretation.
At the same time, Barron cautions against allowing that distinction between the Bible’s teaching and its content to become an excuse for simply disregarding or playing down anything that’s uncongenial, essentially refashioning the Biblical message in one’s own image, or suppressing the idea that the voice of God still comes through. That, he believes, was the Achilles’ heel of much early Biblical interpretation, among both Protestants and liberals.
“I don’t want to make this sound pious, but Aquinas said that it’s the divine author that you’re really interested in and after,” he says. “Yes, the divine author speaks through human authors and their intentionality, and to some extent you have to distinguish the two. But the danger my generation got into was that there was such a focus on the human author, and his intention, that the Word of God got lost.”
Second, although Barron is hardly trying to refight the theological battles of the Protestant Reformation, one fixed point for him is that there’s just no way to understand the Bible properly apart from the community of the Church. As he puts it, “Who gave you the Bible in the first place? It’s a product of the mystical body of the Church.” In that sense, though he didn’t himself use the term, Barron could be said to be an exponent of what’s called canonical criticism, which means pushing beyond the study of individual texts in isolation and instead focusing on the meaning they possess within the finished canon of the Bible, and for the community that regards that entire collection of texts as normative.
To take a practical example, Barron says that one canard he frequently runs into when trying to reach out to secular culture is the charge that the Bible encourages violence, often based on certain Old Testament passages, such as this line from Psalm 68: “God will crush the heads of his enemies, the hairy scalp of the one who walks in sin.” Barron says the right way to respond is to put such passages in the broader context of the entire Bible, Old Testament and New.
This is a very ancient problem, and some of the earliest Christian apologists addressed it. You’ve got these texts in the Bible that seem really out of step with the Cross, with Jesus. In the third century, Origen insisted on reading the whole Bible from the standpoint of the last book of the Bible. He was talking about the Book of Revelation, with its imagery of the Lamb, standing as though slain, who opens the seven seals of the great scroll. That scroll represented the meaning of history and the Scriptures themselves. Who interprets it? Who alone can open that scroll legitimately? It’s the Lamb, so the weakest littlest animal—and just to press the point, a lamb that’s slain. Of course, that’s the crucified Jesus, he’s the interpretive key. Origen says once you get that, then whenever you say the Bible must be sanctioning horrific violence, you’ve obviously got to be wrong. That has to be the wrong interpretation.
“Church Fathers say that all the time, in different ways,” Barron says. “If you come away from the Bible with the view that God is a terrible tyrant, you are ipso facto misreading it. That’s an ancient, ancient bit of hermeneutics.
“Reading the Bible as whole is not about pulling something out at random, but asking, What are the great themes and patterns?” Barron says. “They all lead toward the Cross and resurrection of Jesus. It’s the resurrection that pulls the whole Bible together. It’s like the final cause that draws all the themes and trajectories together, and that’s the only way you can really read it properly. You’ve got to read the whole Bible from the standpoint of the end.”
The next step, according to Barron, is to assimilate another traditional way of reading the Bible within the Church, which is what’s sometimes called the allegorical method, and which stretches all the way back to St. Paul in the New Testament and comes down through fathers such as Origen and Augustine. In essence, it means understanding when Biblical passages are meant to be taken literally, and when they’re being deployed for their symbolic or figurative value.
Consider the “ban.” [The reference is to an Old Testament passage in which God orders King Saul to slaughter evil neighboring peoples as well as their cattle.] It can be understood as illustrating the way we have to battle certain forms of evil, which is that they have to be put all the way down. In fact, that’s Saul’s problem—he plays around with evil. He says, “Well, yeah, I killed almost everybody, but I left a few people and animals alive.” He kept the king and the animals for himself, which is a metaphor for how most of us deal with evil most of the time. We sort of address it, but then we leave a little bit on the side for ourselves. Or, take the scene of Samuel hacking Agag to pieces. It’s horrific, and the atheists cite that to me a lot. Here’s your prophet, here’s Samuel, and he’s hacking this man to death. But if you follow Origen, it’s a figurative illustration of battling evil, in this case an evil king, all the way down.
Further, Barron insists, the Catholic Church over the centuries has developed an approach to Scripture that navigates between the twin temptations of skepticism on the one hand and blind credulity on the other.
I go back to the great statement of Vatican II, Dei Verbum , “The Word of God.” There’s a line there that’s enormously clarifying. It says, “The Bible is the words of God, expressed in the words of men.” That little iconic statement really packs a punch. In the Bible God speaks to us, and the whole Bible is inspired by God. But God did not dictate to automatons who took down the words literally. Rather, he worked much more subtly, and respectfully, with real human subjects, writers. He expressed himself through these altogether culturally conditioned figures, whose writings were conditioned by the audiences they were addressing and by the genre they were employing. That’s why one of the great questions we have to attend to when we’re reading the Bible is that of genre—what’s the genre of the text we’re dealing with? Is it a saga? Is it a legend? Is it a letter? Is it an apocalypse? Is it a history? There are all kinds of genres on display in the Bible. That’s why “Do you take the Bible literally?” is just a stupid question. You take some books literally; others you don’t. Sensitivity to genre is absolutely key to correct Biblical interpretation. And the ultimate question remains What is God trying to communicate through these texts?
Reading the Bible just in terms of one’s own perspective and experience, Barron says, is “a banalization of the Bible. It’s a flattening out. Let the Bible be the Bible. You’ve got to get comfortable in that world, and it’s not our world. There are analogues to it, and that’s fine. You learn from it and all that, but you’ve got to get into it first and move around. It’s like a jungle, the Bible, and you need a good guide.”
Keep those two rules in mind, Barron argues—focus on what the Bible teaches, not just what it contains, and read it within the context of the Church—then virtually all of the standard barriers to embracing it will fall away.
To appreciate the contextualized, canonical, and nonliteral approach to Biblical interpretation Barron advocates, it’s helpful to touch upon two enduring debates in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Catholic theology, both of which depend, in part, on which way one chooses to read the evidence of Scripture.
The first, strikingly, concerns Hell. Although Barron’s great intellectual role model Hans Urs von Balthasar was generally seen as fairly conservative, some of his theological ruminations have run afoul of the Church’s more traditionalist wing. Nowhere has that been more the case than in Balthasar’s celebrated claim that it’s legitimate for Christians to hope that Hell is empty.
That proposition has run into resistance for a variety of reasons, including claims that it clashes with official magisterial teaching in the Catholic Church ranging from the Fourth Lateran Council to St. John Paul II. However, most critiques begin with the Bible, and what appear to be some fairly unequivocal statements from Jesus himself. One oft-cited verse is Matthew 25:46, where Jesus says, “And they [the wicked] will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Barron, however, is basically in the Balthasar camp. He insists, as did Balthasar, that in light of free will the human person can “definitively” refuse God, and thus Hell is always a “real possibility.” Whether anyone has actually exercised that option, however, is another matter.
I take the Balthasar view, which is not that we know if all people will be saved, or even that we expect all people to be saved. It’s merely that it’s legitimate to hope for universal salvation. Further, it’s a reasonable hope. It’s not just a hope against hope, a wild, unwarranted move. Rather, it’s grounded in what Christ accomplished on the Cross and in the resurrection. In that sense, there are reasonable grounds for the hope that all people might be saved. I’ve gotten in trouble with people for that because there are many who do want Hell to be really emphasized, but I don’t see that in John Paul II, in Benedict XVI, and certainly not in Pope Francis.
Note the key interpretive move—Barron is arguing that what the Bible teaches about salvation has to be understood in terms of its great trajectories, all of which, of course, culminate in the Cross and the resurrection. Read in terms of how it ends, in other words, he believes the Bible does not resolve the question of whether Hell is empty, but it at least provides a reasonable basis for hoping the answer just may be yes.
Another concern that I have is evangelical. For the overwhelming majority of unchurched people today, the very idea of Hell is just an appalling absurdity. Beginning the evangelical process by emphasizing it and stirring up fear of it just strikes me, therefore, as a complete nonstarter from a practical standpoint. Look through the writings and speeches of John Paul II, one of the greatest Catholic evangelists of modern times, and you will find precious little on Hell. And you won’t find one mention of it in Evangelii Gaudium , Pope Francis’s magisterial summation of the synod on evangelization. Mind you, this doesn’t mean for a moment that we should never talk about Hell. Indeed, I have done so frequently, I daresay more than the vast majority of Catholic preachers. I just don’t think we should lead with it evangelically.
Another focus of controversy in which the Bible was keenly relevant was a decades-long tug-of-war among liturgists and theologians over how a phrase of Christ used in the Mass, when Catholics believe the bread and wine become his body and blood, should be translated. Some argued passionately that Christ’s reference to the pouring out of his blood should be rendered as “for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins,” while others insisted it should be “for many.” In English, it was “for all” in the translations approved following Vatican II, but in 2006, Benedict decreed that from then on it would be “for many.” (Similar changes were ordered in other languages; in Spanish, for instance, it went from por todos to por muchos .)
In general it’s fair to say that the advocates of “for all” came from the liberal wing of liturgical and theological thought, seeing it as the best way of expressing the doctrinal truth that Christ came to save the entire world, not just a limited portion of it. More conservative voices insisted that not only is “for many” the better translation of the Latin original pro multis in the Mass, but that “for all” risked promoting a universality vision of salvation that didn’t take adequate account of sin and the need for conversion.
Once again, Barron takes a balanced view, in which the accent isn’t on slavish attention to one Biblical phrase seen in isolation but rather is on how it ought to be understood and rendered in light of the whole.
I think pro multis was a Latin rendering of a Hebrew term that can be construed to mean “for everybody.” It was an idiomatic way of saying “for everybody, for the many.” I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on the transition to “for many,” as if it clearly means that there are some who will not be saved. It’s a rendering of a term that idiomatically includes both ideas. Depending on what your perspective is, I think it’s fine to say Christ shed his blood for everybody. Now, will everybody benefit from that shedding of his blood? That’s a different theological question.
One reliable way to gauge how important a subject is to someone is by looking at the role it plays in the things that individual truly cares about, his passions, the apples of his eye. If that’s the measure, there’s no doubt at all that the Bible is a defining preoccupation for Bishop Robert Barron, because it looms large in the two undertakings to which he might be said to be most personally committed: preaching, and his Word on Fire ministry.
As we’ve seen, Barron identifies himself primarily as an “evangelist,” but his evangelical activity takes multiple forms—TV series, YouTube videos, podcasts, columns, books, media interviews, and on and on. Yet in that array of activity, Barron would acknowledge a special pride of place to preaching, which is the way most Catholics become evangelized. As a professor at Mundelein Seminary, and later as rector, he devoted special attention to preparing future priests to be good preachers and homilists, a reflection of how crucial he believes the art of good preaching to be.
Today, Barron says, he regards his range of ministries as “almost entirely” forms of preaching, in one way or another.
Asked to tick off what he regards as the signature qualities of effective preaching, Barron doesn’t hesitate about what he puts at the top of the list: Above all else, he says, inspiring preaching has to be Biblical.
“I remember years ago, I listened to a tape of Fulton Sheen, and that’s the first thing he said about preaching—good preaching is Biblical,” Barron says. “I say that because my formation was in the opposite direction. I think you begin with the Bible. You open up with this weird, strange, beguiling, beautiful, puzzling, mysterious world of the Bible,” he says.
“The formation of a Biblical consciousness, a Biblical worldview, is the indispensable thing in preaching,” he says. “You’re a man of the Bible, and you see the world with Biblical eyes. That’s the way to do it. A good sermon allows you to see the world with Biblical eyes.”
Asked what makes for a good homily at a Catholic Mass, Barron sounds like something of a broken record, once again insisting that its defining quality ought to be that it’s Biblical.
It has to be clearly, unapologetically, and compellingly Biblical. My biggest complaint, and again this goes back to the liberal-postliberal debate, is if your basic orientation is to begin with experience and you try to draw the religious symbols into it, then they get positioned by it. And if you’re preaching out of that perspective, you’re going to offer a lot of experience and just a little bit of the Bible: “So, here’s our Bible story, and that reminds me of my vacation, so let me give you fifteen minutes about my vacation.” I think that was a move a lot of us were trained to make, and the idea, obviously, was to engage the people. I’ve come to see it as a paradox, because it actually works the other way. People are less engaged by that approach, one which so positions the Bible according to our experience that it robs the Bible of its power. I would say instead that what works is densely textured Biblical preaching that takes you on a tour of the Biblical world, opens you to the Biblical spaces and characters, and the Bible’s strange way of speaking and its oddity. A preacher is a guide to that world, and I think it’s good for a sermon to show how odd the Bible is. My experience is that it’s very positive, that people like it, when the Bible opens up. They’ll say, “I never thought about that. I never knew that.” Or, “That’s weird, that’s interesting.” I find that they like it. It may be a paradox, but my experience is when you lead with experience, it gets tedious fast. So, in terms of homilies, I’d say being Biblical is the number one thing.
Barron says that over the years he’s become a student of good preaching. Two figures, admittedly very different, whom he admires in terms of their mastery of the craft are Martin Luther King Jr. and the American Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
“I’m a big fan of African American preaching, because I think it’s very Augustinian,” Barron says. “It’s lyrical and it’s rhythmic and it rhymes; it’s like music. I’m a great admirer of Martin Luther King on many levels, but in regard to his preaching, what I particularly admire is how he sings his sermons. Listen to a recording of one of his homilies, and you’ll hear these long notes coming out of his mouth, and he’s seizing on rhythms. I used to teach the seminarians that way of preaching at Mundelein. It’s not just communicating ideas, but you’re doing it in this songlike, rhythmic way. Attentiveness to poetic rhythms, I think, is a key to good preaching. All the great ones certainly had that.”
Barron is convinced, though, that what made King so effective in the pulpit wasn’t just his style or tonality but also his content, which was thoroughly drenched in the language and the spiritual worldview of the Bible.
My favorite sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr., is the “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, from near the end of his life, which is a wonderful example of good preaching. It’s also theologically interesting. King studied Tillich too, so we have that in common. But what King really had was the Bible, the Bible, the Bible, all through him. King had cultivated this deeply Biblical view of life. When you listen, he sang the Bible, so he was Barthian in that way. So that’s not a bad characterization of a preacher, someone who knows how to sing the Bible.
As for Swaggart, Barron acknowledges that “the poor man had his problems, personally”—a reference to the fact that in 1988 and again in 1991, Swaggart was caught up in prostitution scandals that led to his being defrocked by his denomination, the Assemblies of God, and becoming independent—but despite that, Barron says, he could be a rock-’em, sock-’em preacher when he was at the top of his game. What made Swaggart’s preaching so effective, Barron says, is how deep it was in the world of the Bible.
As a kid, I watched Jimmy Swaggart, and I admired him as a preacher; he’s darn good. I heard him one time, this was in recent years, well after his fall from grace. He was speaking on King David, and I’d just done all this research on Second Samuel [an Old Testament book in which David figures prominently]. The sermon was on David and David’s fall, and it was really impressive. Swaggart was just sitting down, which is unusual, but I think his knee was bothering him. Even though he was sitting, he just had the audience in the palm of his hand. What he was doing was talking about David as the sweet singer of the house of Israel, so basically, he was singing the Bible. That’s what great preachers do.
The other towering concern for Barron, and where the Bible also enjoys pride of place in his thought, is his Word on Fire ministry, which is the umbrella under which his various media projects fall. Over the years, Barron’s attracted a network of people who share his basic vision, some of whom are full-time staff and others contributors, collaborators, and supporters. As we’ll see in Chapter 10, Barron hopes to see Word on Fire develop into a full-fledged movement in the Catholic Church, whose mission is the New Evangelization.
Though Barron concedes that aim lies down the line, he’s already elaborated a set of core principles to flesh out what a Word on Fire movement would be. High on the list, he says, is the Bible, and seeing Word on Fire as a way of fostering a deeper familiarity with and appreciation for Scripture in the Church. Even before the transition to a movement, Barron says, he and his team are hard at work on a project called Word on Fire Bible.
“The idea is to produce an edition of the Bible that would include all kinds of commentary,” he says. “Some of it would be from me, things I’ve written and sermons, and so on, and some of it would come from people such as the theologians and spiritual writers who have profoundly marked me. This Bible would be sort of a focus for formation of Word on Fire groups, with the idea of using that Bible to evangelize young people. That’s one of the tools we’re developing right now.
“The next step I would see,” he says, “is forming our friends more carefully, especially in the use of the Bible. An immersion in this Word on Fire Bible has the potential to form our core group in this common vision and common lifestyle. I’d like to get to that place.”
Ever the intellectual, Barron over the years has developed a short list of Biblical scholars he particularly enjoys or finds valuable. One is a figure we’ve already met, N. T. Wright.
Wright had a big impact on me when I first read him, because he was someone who combined the best of the historical-critical method and all that stuff, while still defending classical Christianity. I thought, Here’s a Biblical theologian from whose work I can preach. When I was coming of age it was all Raymond Brown, and I admire him immensely. I saw him several times, and he was a master. He was at Mundelein several times for our Biblical events and he would show up with a tiny New Testament in Greek and that’s it. No notes, just that, and he would give a compelling lecture for an hour. Despite my sincere admiration of Brown, though, I think he’s hard to preach. I don’t think you preach him as readily as you preach N. T. Wright.
Another role model is closer to home for Barron, a Biblical scholar under whom he studied named Father James Doyle.
Jim was a fascinating man. In the early 1960s he decided to become a Trappist monk; he went to Gethsemani and Thomas Merton was his novice master. He was there for two or three years and then decided it wasn’t for him, so he went to Rome and got a degree. He was a Bible man. When we had him, we were taking a Gospel of John class, and we were reading Raymond Brown’s great commentary on John. Jim said on the first day, “I’d like you to read the first one hundred pages of that for the next class, take it in, and then we’ll really get to work” with the Gospel of John itself. It was absolutely the right approach, and it was an eye opener for me. The idea was, yes, know that stuff, the historical-critical method, but what Jim wanted us to do was to get into the real soul of it and to be able to preach it. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I have great respect for Dr. Scott Hahn, who has emerged as the father of a whole generation of Catholic Biblical scholars, including Brant Pitre, Michael Barber, Timothy Gray, and others. And I’d really be remiss not to mention Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, who splendidly exemplifies a renewal in Catholic Biblical studies.