Congress session: The psalms as Jesus Knew Them (Fr. Lawrence Boadt)
This was a fairly difficult session because it was so packed with information. The others who went didn’t like the session much because Fr. Boadt was covering so much biblical territory that they had a hard time understanding.
For me, I was able to keep up… just barely. It was a re-affirmation that there is SO much structure to the Bible that is not immediately obvious. The psalms are clearly not just a random collection of psalms but a progression through a spiritual journey that parallels the Jewish struggle to find and defend Israel culminating in glorious praise for God. It was quite fascinating.
The one thing I took away from this session (beyond the specific information about the structure of the psalms) was the danger of extensive scripture study. I noticed about half way through the lecture that I hadn’t heard much about God’s authorship of the psalms. At that point I keyed into listening for him to make any statement about God’s message in the psalms and it never came. He frequently talked about the writer’s message, but you could tell he was talking about the human writers and seemed to attribute a lot to human development.
I’m not trying to question Fr. Boadt’s faith, particularly because you could tell from his enthusiasm for scripture that he was a man who loved God’s word, but merely to point out that we must be vigilant in not letting our knowledge de-mystify the glories of God like science so often tries to do. It is a core teaching of our faith that God is the author of scripture. We must not be too quick to give human motivations to what is in scripture. Whatever human motivation there is was guided and formed by God Himself. Whatever insights we may have are just that, insights, and that only when we are called from this earth will we have the privilege of understanding God’s glory in its fullness.