My homily of last Sunday compared the departments or disciplines of a university to the different ways God is revealed in the Scriptures. While the Bible is the story of God’s self-revelation, our understanding of revelation is conditioned by the constraints of human consciousness. Grace builds upon nature. 

The ways humans understand the world are evident in the pages of Scripture. How human beings count, how we understand where things are located, how we experience the natural world around us, or experience our place in the universe, how we arrive at the truth in a world filled with deception—all these disciplines are found in the Scriptures. 

Some simply want to cast the Scriptures aside because it represents knowledge of another time when human beings just simply didn’t understand a lot of how the universe works. In many respects, we are still coming to terms with the questions the Copernican notion of the arrangement of the sun and the planets posed to biblical truth. Each of us somewhere in our journey of faith must grapple with what might easily be summed up as the problem of Galileo. 

Rather than just rejecting the Word of God outright, we can rely on the tradition of the Church to understand the truths of Sacred Scripture. Two important documents give insight into the Catholic approach to the Bible in the modern era. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical in 1893 Providentissimus Deus [The God of All Providence] and Pope Pius XII’s encyclical in 1943 Divino Afflante Spiritu [By the Divine Inspiration of the Spirit] are the primary guides to an ecclesial understanding of the Scriptures, especially how to navigate what might be the apparent contradictions that reason and modern science pose.

In my own journey of faith, my respect and admiration for the truths found in Sacred Scripture have grown, even as I strive to keep up on the continual advances of sciences such as evolutionary biology, cosmology, and the many disciplines that explore human consciousness. That the Scriptures give us the truth about God and His creation, I have no doubts. Understanding how that truth applies to our daily lives? That takes work, just like any serious study. And my homily of last week represented one way I  approach the reading of the Bible to get a better handle on just what God was up to back then, and what He is intending for me and the People of God.

The easiest discipline of knowledge that is evident from the very first pages of Genesis is what I call theological mathematics. There is some special reason that creation is presented as taking six days with a day of rest tacked on to the end. The math in the Bible was trying to solve a different problem from what we might think. So yes, the first chapter of Genesis is about the creation of the universe. But it also is a story of how human beings ought to order their lives, lest our work totally define us. 

Think about the idea of a “self-made man”. That is a compliment in a culture that prizes rugged individualism and productivity above all things. We are told to ignore the crowd and make our own path. In the biblical world, we find our identity in relation to our Creator. That seventh day of rest, along with many other religious and civil customs found throughout the Old Testament, gave order and substance to the life of God’s children. These customs also regulated how people got along with each other. Something quite important in a world that without God is pure chaos (the Greek translation of the Hebrew word that is best thought of as “gobbledygook!”)

The forty days and forty nights of the deluge, the forty years wandering in the desert, the forty days of fasting and prayer of Our Lord—this is divine mathematics. Not in the sense of some mystical numerology, although there are hints of the special powers of numbers in the Bible. Each of these numbers are used for very particular and special purposes, mostly to let us know that God was in charge. But also to indicate that sufficient time was given to whatever needed to be given. 

I find it fascinating that many productivity gurus say that it takes six to seven weeks to develop a new habit. Hmm. Sounds pretty close to forty days. Recall that the People of God used a lunar calendar, and still do today. Forty days is more than a month, but less than two months. What is that all about? Reading the Bible without at least a little appreciation for the Hebrew calendar is bound to make you miss some important truths.

My favorite biblical discipline is theological geography. The peoples and the places of the Bible are quite particular. The journeys from one place to another make up large sections of the text. The Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, the Wandering in the Desert, the Exile, the Holy City of Jerusalem, the pagan nations, the Missionary Journeys of Paul, the New and Eternal Jerusalem; appreciating all these places and movements of persons is a fruitful way of knowing the truths of revelation. 

I often think that the Mystery of the Incarnation can best be entered into by seeing it as a feature of the geography of the Bible. The Gospel of John says that God “pitched his tent” among us when the Word was made flesh. That is how John tells of the nativity of Jesus Christ in the prologue to his gospel. Matthew and Luke’s nativity narratives make the places surrounding the birth of Jesus central to the story. People are on the move in those first chapters of these Gospels. Of course, because this is when God makes a major movement in salvation history.

I know there are books available that treat these many themes way better than I ever could. I read a lot of John J. Pilch’s commentaries on the Gospels. He has written many books about the cultural anthropology of the Bible. Some of the characters in the Bible do some weird things, quite foreign to our sensibilities. He spent a lifetime researching and explaining why the people we encounter in the Scriptures do the things they do. 

I’d like to develop this idea of scriptural disciplines or departments a bit more. I’m sure in the years to come you’ll hear more from me about theological cosmology or scriptural psychology or even a rare insight into biblical physiology (the heart does a lot more than just pump blood!) In the meantime, I encourage you to be patient and receptive when you take up the Bible or hear it proclaimed. God wants you to understand. Evidently the words of the Bible meant something important to someone somewhere along the line. A little bit of common sense, a bit of perspective, some fruitful wondering, plus a little guidance from the experts, and above all, faithful study will make the Scriptures come alive.