In His Own Society

"Piety based on error is indefensible," says Father John Lawrence McKenzie, and the error that he refers to is the fundamentalist misreading of Scripture. A witty and outspoken Jesuit scholar from Indiana, McKenzie considers it his right and duty to set his fellow churchmen straight about the Bible, which was not open to critical study by Roman Catholics until Pius XII encouraged it in his 1943 encyclical on Scriptural studies. In so doing, McKenzie, at 55, has become the nation's most controversial and quotable Catholic theologian--perhaps because there is all of a sudden so much of his work to quote from.

Besides a steady stream of lectures and learned articles, the tireless McKenzie has within the last year shepherded four books into print, including a popular interpretation of the New Testament (The Power and the Wisdom) that is already in its fourth printing and a 900,000-word Dictionary of the Bible, six years in the writing, that both Protestant and Catholic scholars are acclaiming as a classic. Last month Sheed & Ward published his Authority in the Church, a series of reflections on the spiritual understanding of power and rulership. In addition, McKenzie is translating Second Isaiah for Doubleday's Anchor Bible (TIME, Oct. 23, 1964), and he recently signed a contract to write a history of Catholicism.

Accuracy & Judgment. McKenzie's accuracy and sound judgment as a Biblical theologian have gained him the wholehearted respect of his Protestant peers. Last year he became the first Catholic scholar elected to the presidency of the largely Protestant Society of Biblical Literature, and he is currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the first Catholic to hold this post. Within his own church, however, McKenzie is something of a maverick. Other Jesuits consider him a loner, and he now prefers to seek teaching assignments outside his society's institutions. Next fall, after summer teaching at the United Presbyterians' San Francisco Theological Seminary, he takes up residency at Notre Dame, which is run by the Congregation of Holy Cross.

McKenzie is that rarity among academics, the readable expert: his trim prose glitters with aphorisms--and with, for a Catholic priest, unconventional ideas. He has kind words to say for Protestant Demythologizer Rudolf Bultmann, carefully argues that parts of the Gospels are not historical in the modern sense, accepts the validity of form criticism, which assumes that certain sayings of Jesus were created by the early church. Under the circumstances, it is no surprise that the Vatican regards him as a rather disturbing thinker. Besides the normal prepublication censorship to which all priest-scholars must submit, McKenzie has to have all his writings cleared by Rome. He makes no secret of his opinion that "the practice of censorship is basically immoral and irrational."

What makes McKenzie's scholarly prestige all the more impressive is the fact that he is largely a self-made expert who spent only a year in doctoral studies and taught himself most of the ten languages he reads, writes or speaks. The son of a salesman, he grew up in Terre Haute, decided while still in grade school to join the Jesuits. McKenzie was ordained in 1939 and three years later was assigned to teach at the Jesuits' seminary in West Baden, Ind. There, "out of sheer desperation," he began to write.

McKenzie spent 18 years at West Baden, and "hated every minute of it. The place was a cultural desert." He finally got a new assignment only when a fellow Jesuit complained that his afternoon typing disturbed the seminary's customary siesta. McKenzie then went to the Jesuits' Loyola University in Chicago, where he taught Biblical studies until last year.

Authority Is Love. "I know of no other U.S. Catholic scholar who loves the church more than McKenzie," says Jesuit Robert Fox, one of his old West Baden students. Not the world's most patient man, McKenzie frequently expresses this love by openly chastizing ecclesiastical persons and institutions that do not live up to his ideal of what Christianity ought to be. Of Rome, he says, half in jest: "It stinks. There are too many clergy there."

The basis of McKenzie's criticism is always the Bible, which he considers not merely a book to be studied but a challenge to action, a living document that is the judge of the church and the source of its inner renewal. In Authority in the Church, he contends that the church should have its own unique understanding of authority: not power and control but, as Jesus clearly indicated, humble service and love. Too often, argues McKenzie, church leaders have forgotten this divine instruction and adopted secular standards in its place. McKenzie points out that "the Basilica of St. Peter is one of the few places in the world where one can see a full-scale live reproduction of the pageantry of a Renaissance court." The Christian concept of authority, McKenzie concludes, is not an impersonal rule of law, but an I-Thou rule of men over other men who freely choose to obey their governors and who have a right to share in decision making.

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