Jaroslav Pelikan, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, will explore the similarities between the Bible and the U.S. Constitution in a series of four lectures in April co-sponsored by Yale's Divinity and Law Schools.
Titled "Interpreting the Great Code: The Bible and the Constitution in the Church and in the Court," the series will be presented April 1, 3, 8 and 10. All four lectures are free and open to the public.
The talks will explore a congruence in secular and religious traditions, explains Pelikan. "I've been intrigued for a long time by the similarities and the differences between the methods by which the church in its official action interprets the Bible and by which the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution," he says.
The evidence for similarities between the two texts begins with language, contends Pelikan. "I have a number of quotations scattered across the lectures from people of either one or the other community, which, with changing just a word or two ... would fit just as well in the other community."
But Pelikan's argument goes deeper. In both the Constitution and the Bible, he says, "You have a text that's hundreds of years old -- 200 or 20-hundred, as the case may be -- which is assumed to be able to speak to situations and problems that its writers could not have foreseen. And that means that there's got to be some way to tease out of the text a meaning for these new situations." For example, he notes, just as the phrase "Give us this day our daily bread" in the Lord's Prayer could apply to a Hostess Twinkie, the protections of speech and the press in the First Amendment are extended to communication on the Internet.
Societies remain faithful to their anachronistic "Great Codes" by interpreting them and build up "interpretive communities" of professionals, explains the Yale scholar. But no matter how baroque these formations become, they always look back to the original text, he says. "Interpretation must never be less than an effort to understand the text as well as possible, grammatically, in vocabulary and in usage."
Pelikan's talks will also delineate distinctions between the cultural histories of the two foundational documents. For example, he points out, "A complicating factor is that the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek. Therefore the authority of the Bible functionally in various cultures ... has been the authority of a translation."
Pelikan's first lecture, "Normative Scripture -- Christian and American," will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 1. The second lecture, "Issues of Interpretations in the Bible and in the Constitution," will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 3. The third talk, "The Sensus Literalis and the Quest for Original Intent," will be presented at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8. These three talks will take place in Rm. 127 at the Law School, 127 Wall St.
The final talk, "Development of Doctrine: Patterns and Criteria," will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 10, in the H. Richard Niebuhr Lecture Hall at the Divinity School, 409 Prospect St.
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