Awaiting the arrival (via Amazon) of Pope Benedict's new book on Jesus, I've been spending the time reading my favorite ecclesial exegete, Luke Timothy Johnson.

In a book of more popular essays, The Living Gospel (Continuum: 2004), Johnson sums up some of his longstanding convictions regarding Catholic biblical scholarship. He writes:

One is the conviction that the inspired text speaks God's word as well as human words, and that the task of interpretation is essentially to seek the divine as well as or even more than the human word. Another is the openness to Scripture's speaking in many ways and at many different levels, able to feed the imagination as well as the analytic mind. Another is that scriptural interpretation is more than a matter of knowledge (scientia); it is also a matter of wisdom (sapientia), so that the scholar's work cannot stop short at explanation, it must seek transformation. Another is that it is possible to exercise the mind freely and critically without losing loyalty and love, that indeed the highest loyalty demands criticism, just as criticism demands the deepest loyalty.

In another essay Johnson, whose Benedictine background sensitizes him to the crucial place of liturgy in the life of the Church, writes:

There exists a perfect fit between the Gospels and the liturgy based on the fact that they speak of the same Jesus. Each in its way and each together bears witness to Jesus, not as a dead person of the past, but as a powerful person in the present. The very thing about the Gospels that is the biggest obstacle to the questers after the historical Jesus -- namely, their resurrection perspective -- is the very aspect that makes them most valuable to believers and most true to their experience of the living Jesus.

Finally, an overriding concern finds trenchant expression in Johnson's essay, "On Taking the Creed Seriously" (full disclosure: the essay appears in a volume I edited, Handing on the Faith: The Church's Mission and Challenge [Crossroad: 2006]):

[It is] astonishing that Christology from below has been so universally applauded by ordinary Christians. Most Christians are little disturbed by the various and sometimes contradictory versions of "historical" Jesus on offer at Barnes & Noble, and consider anything "historical" an improvement on "doctrine."... How do we account for this remarkable phenomenon? The causes are undoubtedly multiple, but they must include the failure of preaching and teaching within the Church to powerfully communicate the true significance of the resurrection life and the transformation of human identity by Christ, the corresponding success by scholars to position themselves as mediators of truth more trustworthy and uncorrupted than priests or ministers, and, finally, the breakdown of a creedal consciousness among most Christians, who no longer have a sense of the connectedness of the truths of faith, or their inner logic, so that a purely human Jesus "just like us" seems to them like an unexpected addition rather than a fatal subtraction.