ANSELM ACADEMIC STUDY BIBLE: Catholic Edition: New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) 2015. Anselm Academic, 702 Terrace Heights, Winona, MN 55987-1320 paperbound 398 Pages $43.95 ISBN 978-1-59982-632-5 www.anselmacademic.org.

Organized and developed with the twenty-first reader in mind, the Anselm Academic Study Bible is a late entry into useful and informative editions of the New American Bible Revised Edition that will be welcomed especially by Roman Catholics yet valuable for all Christians. In addition to its excellent translation and notes, it has articles on important and neglected topics such the social context of the Bible, the Christian Bible and Jews, and Contextual and Transformative Interpretation. Other topics in the in-depth, scholarly articles by thirteen writers are informative and compelling features of this Bible. They are The Formation of the Bible; Geography, Archaeology, and the Scriptures; Deuterocanonical and Noncanonical Scriptures; Jewish Biblical Interpretation; The Distinctiveness of Jesus; The Many Faces of Jesus; The Lectionary: A Canon within the Canon; A Brief History and Practice of Biblical Criticism; Critical Issues in Contemporary Interpretation; and Sacred Scripture in the Catholic Tradition. Other important features of this complete study Bible are Engaging scholarship. Recognized and emerging scholars, all expert teachers, present the best and latest research on the formation and interpretation of the Bible. Distinctive approach. Addresses diverse readership and sound pedagogy that encourages critical thinking and informed dialogue. Navigation-friendly organization. Two introductions immediately precede each biblical book, and other resources are sensibly and accessibly arranged. Rich support materials. Full-color and black-and-white photographs, charts, maps, and timelines enhance learning, with online resources available as well. The NABRE is the first major update of the New American Bible (NAB) in twenty years. Reflecting the work of nearly 100 scholars and extensively reviewed and approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, it takes into account the best current scholarship as newly discovered ancient manuscripts improve knowledge and understanding of the biblical text. A statement on the copyright page states, “It is permitted by the undersigned [bishops] for private use and study.” In any case, it is a welcome addition to the many new translations and revisions being published, some commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011. The difference between the New American Bible Revised Edition and the New American Bible is that the NABRE is considered to be more verbally equivalent and the NAB more dynamically equivalent, although like most modern translations, each has elements of both translation philosophies. These words to the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s preface to its Interpretation of the Bible in the Church is apt: “This study is never finished; each age must in its own way newly seek to understand the sacred books.”

Maria Pascuzzi puts Paul in his place without losing sight of his status as an apostle. For those who want an introductory textbook that might become the standard introduction to the subject, she has given a lively Paul who stands out from both his Jewish and Roman contexts. She sorts through the vast literature on the transformed rabbi, not shying away from historic and contemporary controversies, and enlightening contentious partis pris.  Her trim but ample book can inform without riling Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and even secular readers.

Pascuzzi’s approach to Paul is thematic, not chronological, or epistle-by-epistle.  Ten chapters are organized around the Roman and Jewish contexts, Paul’s distinctive message of “cruciform” faith, his criticism and appreciation of Judaism, the Gospel community, his attitude toward sexuality and women, and his anti-imperial challenge.  She presents also the various ways that Paul has been read, throughout time, by the early church, Luther, and contemporary scholarship.

Her irenic tone does not mean that she does not take stands on Paul. In Chapter Ten, for example, which could serve as an example of her method throughout the book, she supports the view that Paul preached a dangerous, anti-Imperial message (one that the anti-Christian West might now especially heed) even though he also famously counseled obedience to the authorities in Romans 13: 1-7.  Her evidence is his subversive appropriation of Imperial titles for Jesus Christ in every epistle, his rejection of the Roman patronage economic system for self-sufficient and “abasing” manual labor (2 Cor 11:7), and shared collection (Gal 2:1-10), and his counsels to avoid imperial courts (1 Cor 6:1-9), and temples (1 Cor 8:10).  So why should “every person be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1)?  These seven verses in Romans, according to John C. O’Neill, “have caused more unhappiness and misery in the Christian East and West than any other seven verses in the New Testament by the license they have given to tyrants, and the support for tyrants the Church has felt called on to give.” 

Pascuzzi explains this “contradiction” by offering contemporary scholarly perspectives: the Anglican, N.T. Wright, argues that the passage, in fact, demotes the imperial authorities by placing them below the one true God; post-colonial theorists demonstrate that subjugation requires ambivalent and pragmatic strategies for survival.  This forceful lining up of the crucial arguments is Pascuzzi’s methodology.

A second dispute that Pascuzzi negotiates is the traditional Lutheran-Catholic difference on Paul’s criticism of the “law.” She presents this as the “old” and the “new” perspective on Paul, which she attributes to Luther and summarizes neatly thus:

Paul was a Jew who tried to earn his salvation by doing the works of the law. However, he was always frustrated and discouraged because no matter how hard he tried, he could never quite do them perfectly (Rom 7: 7-25).  In consequence, he was filled with anxiety, afraid he would not attain salvation.  Then, one day, Paul had an encounter with the Risen Lord.  As a result, Paul converted from Judaism, a legalistic religion of works-righteousness, to Christianity, which he perceived to be a superior religion of grace. (138)

She recounts an unfortunate consequence of this interpretation, one that is still frequently heard from the pulpit and in schools, which was both anti-Catholic and anti-Judaism: Roman Catholic works of mercy, devotions, and even sacraments were seen as Pharisaical attempts to buy grace. The breakthrough to a new perspective came, Pascuzzi maintains, first from a Lutheran revisionist, Krister Stendahl, who argued that Luther misread Paul as a result of his own anxiety and scrupulosity, for Paul in fact shows a “robust” conscience, one that was “as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:6). Further, scholars have added a new perspective that Paul rejected the law, not because it failed to yield grace, but because it excluded Gentiles (“covenantal nomism”), but of course academic consensus on this point has not been reached.  The heart of Pascuzzi’s book is thus the heart of Paul’s theology.

Two more areas of even more contemporary controversy, not only academic, occupy two more chapters: Paul’s sexual ethics, and his view of women. She negotiates these choppy waters not by offering the usual excuse that Paul was a product of benighted times, but by probing Paul’s Greek, and by comparing Hellenistic, Roman, and Jewish sources to discover an original thinker who promoted “cruciform living,” and “total body ethics,” beyond sex and gender.  The linguistic evidence for Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality is there, she maintains, as well as that for women deacons, but she claims that such evidence alone cannot settle current cultural and intra-ecclesial wars.  She lays the foundations, however, for using Paul today.  The reader at times wishes to know Pascuzzi’s own conclusions on such questions, but she (and/or her publisher) probably decided that this textbook was not the place to do so.

Features of the trim paperback (not expensive for a undergraduate textbook) include extensive footnotes on nearly every page; excellent bibliographies, key Pauline passages, and questions for reflection for every chapter; engaging sidebars; precise chapter summaries; decent photographs; and suggested Internet links. I’d also recommend it for an adult formation group at a parish or church: it’s readable and yet scholarly, and it wouldn’t immediately start a fight.  It might even help a priest stop one.

Kenneth Colston’s reviews and essays have appeared in New Oxford Review, LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Commonweal, St. Austin’s Review, The New Criterion, and First Things

“Each of the four authors contributes a chapter to this small but handsomely produced and illustrated book. Their general aim is to show that religion and science can be comfortable partners, without a sacrifice of either critical intelligence or religious faith. They focus in particular on approaches to the theory of biological evolution.

“Birge begins with some astute general observations about how to read scripture and follows through with a compelling exegesis of the specific context, historical and cultural, which lie behind the Jahwist creation story in Gen. 2–3 and then the priestly account in Gen. 1, all done clearly enough for even a high school student. Birge makes it clear that a literal reading of the six days is unjustified.

“Taylor provides a cogent description of the method of science as a process of testing [an] hypothesis, over time and widely, until the success of the hypothesis at meeting countless tests allows it to become a “theory,” strongly supported even though never finally proven. He then shifts to the theory of evolution, offering a sampling of the many kinds of evidence which support evolution, followed by a critical look at charges that creationism wrongly levels against it. Again, a very readable account.

“Henning offers a history of materialism, as it were, beginning with Democritus’s’ atomism, contrasting this with Aristotle’’s hierarchical universe of forms and teloi. Descartes represents a shift to a bifurcated creation made up of mechanical nature and spiritual human soul, in which humans are exceptional, different from all the rest of nature. Henning uses evolutionary theory to reinsert humans into nature, not as an exception but as an exemplification of the patterns of life. This allows Henning to argue against both the mechanistic view of life in general and the “arrogant anthropocentrism” that has allowed humans to treat other animals as merely property. This also shows that evolution and Christian faith can be quite compatible.

“Finally, Stoicoiu seeks explicity to reconcile evolution with a theology based on a faith seeking understanding. She rejects three alternative attempts: creationism, intelligent design, and separatism between religion and science. She adds to Taylor’’s critique of creationism, criticizes Behe’’s “irreducible complexity” argument for intelligent design, calling it a version of “God of the gaps,” and insists that theology and science cannot be so neatly separated as Gould tried to do with his nonoverlapping magisteria. She favors process theology’’s interpretation of suffering in the world as part of evolution, as well as the Teilhardian-Rahner notion of an evolving universe moving towards God.

“The authors achieve their goal well. This book provides a very useful starting point for an undergraduate religion and science course, leaving openings for many supplementary readings.”

“Few ENY readers will need convincing that the theory of evolution by natural selection is essentially scientifically correct. Rather more, perhaps, may find themselves wondering, in moments of doubt, if those who claim that it does away with the need for a God at all may have a point. This book, primarily aimed at undergraduate readers, is a calm, lucid and concise introduction to all the relevant arguments, and would make an excellent starting point for anyone interested in exploring the subject further. It will also, if you are considering venturing forth to argue with fundamentalists (whether Christian or atheist), equip you to do so.

“In the first of the book’’s four chapters, Mary Katherine Birge considers the question of biblical “’factual”’ inerrancy. The main point here——elucidated by a fairly close reading of the texts——is that the different authors of the stories of creation contained in Genesis never believed or intended what they wrote to be revealed descriptions of how creation actually happened. Evolutionary biologist Ryan Taylor follows this, first with a description of the theory of evolution, its mechanism, and the evidence for it, and then by addressing and dismissing common popular arguments against evolution from creationism and intelligent design. In the third chapter, philosopher Brian G. Henning surveys the intellectual debate over evolution from ancient Greece via the anthropocentrism of Descartes (“’beasts  .  .  .  …have no reason at all’”) to Darwin himself, who “’fundamentally challenged how humans view their place in the cosmic order.”’ He then examines the neo-Darwinist claim that the universe is strictly mechanistic, and that organisms, including humans, are “’merely “‘vehicles’” for genes.’” Finally, Rodica M.M. Stoicoiu addresses responses to evolutionary theory from a theological perspective. On the Christian side, these responses include creationism, intelligent design, and the total cop-out of separatism (the idea that theology and science run on two entirely separate, never-meeting tracks). Somewhere in the middle she dismisses the “’God of the Gaps”’ concept, in which God simply fills the spaces in evolutionary theory that science has not yet filled, before proceeding to the scientific materialism of atheists like Richard Dawkins. Acknowledging that evolution raises the already high stakes on suffering, she considers how Christians may “’make sense of the ‘”blind chance’” of evolution over eons of natural selection.”’ Finally, with reference to the work of Karl Rahner and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, she introduces the concept of evolutionary theology. ‘Evolution is constantly open to new permutations,”’ she writes, “’and while such a world tends not to be ordered but chaotic, it is also hopeful and directed to the future’.””

“Genesis, Evolution, and the Search for a Reasoned Faith  .  .  .  covers important ground in a clear and concise manner. There is material on Genesis, on evolutionary biology, on Darwin and the place of humans, and then a general wrap-up about some of the perennial problems of faith and of the significance of science—suffering for instance, and whether the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin is still relevant to us today. It is more obviously a text than the Giberson-Collins book, with questions for study and so forth. But as I have said, I think it would be a great introduction for a younger reader.”