Booknotes

REVEREND PETER GOMES, AUTHOR, "THE GOOD BOOK: READING THE BIBLE WITH MIND AND HEART" Well, there are two of them. The really Good Book is the Bible and the second one is the one I wrote about the Bible. Someone asked me, `Well, where's the--where does the term Good Book come from?' I was brought up when people referred to the Bible as--`Better check it out in the Good Book.' Everybody knew it meant the Bible. But it's a corruption of an old Anglo-Saxon term which really means `God's book,' and `God' becomes `good,' like Good Friday. And so the Good Book is the book everybody is supposed to know something about and everybody needs, and my book is about that book.

REV. GOMES: Oh, I can. I can. It was long before I read it. I was brought up in a very churchy household, very pious Baptist upbringing and the Bible was something of an icon. I mean, in our church, where you didn't have crucifixes or saint statues or stained-glass windows, the one thing that had attached to it the feeling of holiness and sanctity was the Bible, the Good Book. And so I can remember holding it before I could make any sense of it.

And then when we began to learn how to read in Sunday school, about the third grade, every third-grader in the Sunday school was given his or her own copy of the Bible, inscribed by the minister with a life verse, Red Letter Edition. I still have that Bible, and that meant you had graduated into sort of a knowledgeable acquaintance of the Bible.

REV. GOMES: Plymouth, Massachusetts, land of the Pilgrims' pride. I was--I lived all my life there, still live there and maintain associations now that are 55 years old, as old as I am.

REV. GOMES: No, both my parents are now dead. My father died in 1968 and my mother in 1982. But I still live in the house I was brought up in and surrounded by neighbors and friends that go back for many, many years. It's one of--it's a sense of deep-rootedness in--in--in Plymouth for me, and that's where I expect to end my days and where I expect to be buried.

REV. GOMES: Well, my father was a cranberry grower. He was an immigrant. He came from the Cape Verde islands with his father just after the first war, and they followed first the sea and then the cranberry business. And he ended up as superintendent of Ocean Spray Cranberry Company, one of their very big bogs in--in Plymouth.

And my mother came from an old African-American family in Boston, and that's where she was born. And her father was a minister. And these two met, fell in love and married and settled in Plymouth and produced me. I was all that they produced, so they lavished all their energy and their attention on me.

REV. GOMES: Well, southeastern Massachusetts. To be very simple-minded, it's the sensible middle between Boston and Provincetown. If you look at that big hook of Massachusetts and Cape Cod, Plymouth would be just about in the center of it.

REV. GOMES: Oh, yes, yes. I was, as a child, fascinated by all this Pilgrim stuff and, for many years, was involved with the historical society, the Pilgrim Society. I was librarian and then secretary for many years and then ended up as president, and I kept 32 years of association with that outfit. So I've seen a lot of Plymouth Rock and talked a lot about it.

REV. GOMES: Well, I'm a Harvard graduate--Harvard Divinity School--and when I graduated in 1968, that I felt was the end of my happy and loyal association with Harvard. I would go off and do my life's work and be a loyal alumnus, but that was it.

In the fall of 1969 the then-preacher to the university wrote to me--I had been his student, and he wrote to me and said he had an opportunity to hire a new assistant an--and would I like the job. And I replied, `No, I wouldn't.' I was very happy with what I was doing, and I had just got used to being out of New England for the first time and I was quite content where I was, teaching at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. But he persisted and my mother living in Plymouth thought it would be a good idea to have me nearer than Alabama.

And so something of a conspiracy took place, and he finally made me an offer that was impossible to refuse. So I came back to Harvard in the fall of 1970 as the assistant in Memorial Church. In 1972, my senior resigned and went back to teaching in a Virginia seminary. I became acting minister, and two years after that, in 1974, I was appointed his successor. So I'm the eighth Plummer professor of Christian morals and preacher to the university.

REV. GOMES: There was a woman in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1855, Miss Caroline Plummer, and she had more money than she knew what to do with and decided to create a professorship at Harvard in honor of her late brother. And she was inspired by John Henry Newman at Oxford. And so she wanted a professor who would be a professor of the heart, as she called it, the experience of religion and who would have charge of the college chapel.

And so she gave this money in 1855 to establish the Plummer professors of Christian morals, and seven people prior to me served on it. I'm the eighth incumbent. She--herself was not actively involved in the affairs of the university, but it's believed that she is the first establisher--first woman establisher of an academic chair anywhere in the United States. And I'd like to think there's a little bit of justice here because her family had earned their money in Salem in the 17th and 18th century, doubtless in the sale of my ancestors. So I feel I got a little of my own back on her platform.

REV. GOMES: About a quarter of a million now, I'm happy to report.

REV. GOMES: That's--yes.

REV. GOMES: November 1st, 199--'96.

REV. GOMES: Still in the stores. I still get letters from people about it. Every once in a while now, even after this long a period, somebody discovers it for the first time and reviews it. I was just in England--got back from England and I found it in the stores there. I was in Switzerland, I found it in Zurich, which was wonderful, to find your name in a Zurich bookstore. So I've been very happy with its reception.

REV. GOMES: Well, it's been on several. It was on The New York Times' just about a week, which was fine as far as I was concerned. I'm not "Angela's Ashes" and envy is not a Christian virtue. But it got--it made it there. It was on the Boston best-seller list, which one might understand because I'm from there. It was on there about 16 weeks. And it's been on the Short List of The New York Times, their additional list, the five that they print on the Internet but not in the paper--it's been on that list for about five months.

REV. GOMES: Yes.

REV. GOMES: Yes.

REV. GOMES: Yes.

REV. GOMES: Not very many. Not very many. I'm my own Guinness Book of Records, I guess, and--but since I've always been something of an oddity--I think only children aren't, by definition, oddities--I'm not unused to this collection of identities that tends to confuse people. And that makes it interesting, I find. But it is an odd assortment if you're not used to it. But I am perfectly used to it. I've been this way all of my life, so I have had plenty of chance to get used to it.

REV. GOMES: Well, both quite by flukes, interesting flukes. The first one was Mr. Reagan's second inaugural. I am not--I was not then, nor am I now, an overtly political person. I mean, I'm a Republican because that's, by and large, how I was brought up, and in Massachusetts, to be a Republican is a perfectly honorable thing. And so, by and large, that's where I start from. I don't always stay there, but that's where I start.

So I had not had any sort of political credentials. I hadn't pounded the pavement for anybody or worn as much as a sticker for a candidate. But, ironically, in the fall of 19--whatever that election was--I can't remember when it was, Mr. Reagan's second--I got a call from--about Columbus Day, just about a month before the election. I got a call from the then-senior senator from Maryland, Charles Mathias, and I knew him only because I knew his mother-in-law, a great Boston woman, a great Harvard figure.

And that's how he introduced himself. He didn't say, `This is the senior senator from Maryland.' He said, `I'm Rebecca Bradford's son-in-law,' and that opened--that was sufficient to open the door for me. And he said something like this. He said, `If things go as we expect them to go, in a month my party will be inaugurating the president again. And I am chairman designate of the committee if we win this election. And we now are anxious to orchestrate the religious elements of the inauguration.'

And you may remember there had been a very evangelistic flavor to the Republican Convention of that summer. And I think Charlie Mathias and some others didn't want a repeat of that particular tone at the inauguration. They wanted to be embracing and inclusive.

So he called me because I preside over a great ecumenical chapel and, in theory, knew lots of people and it was for advice. He said, `Can you name four people who could participate in the president's inaugural, very much like Mr. Kennedy's inauguration with four religious traditions, from your acquaintance and send those names down to us and--and help us in making these selections?' I said, `Oh, that's an easy task.' So I set about--I came up with a wonderful list, so it seemed to me, of Orthodox rabbi--Orthodox Christians, rabbis, Protestants, Evangelicals, Roman Catholics. I did the whole lot, sent it on down.

And just after Thanksgiving--the election had been won, as predicted--I got a call back from him, saying, `Well, we've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that for a lot of reasons which we can't go into, nobody on your list survived the cut.' For all sorts of reasons, there was something against them all. `The good news is the committee would be honored if you would do it.' And I said, `You must be kidding.' I said, `I live in Cambridge. If I went down to Washington to pray for Ronald Reagan, I would have to take a sabbatical or whatnot. My liberal friends in Cambridge would be just outraged by this.' He said, `This is the call of your country.'

And so--well, anyway, the long and the short of it was I thought about it for about 30 seconds and said, `I think I could manage to do it,' and so I did. And that was tremendous--that was tremendous fun. I was there with Tim Healy, who was then the president of Georgetown; President Gottschalk, who was president of the Hebrew Union, a theological college in Cincinnati, and Donald--Ronald Wuma, who was President Reagan's pastor in Pasadena. So the four of us did the honors.

Second time around, Mr. Bush's inaugural, the call came from the bishop of Washington, John Walker. He was, in some sense, father-confessor as the dean and the bishop to George Bush, a very good Episcopalian. And it was he who proposed that I take one of the roles at George Bush's service, which he had in the National Cathedral. So I was the preacher on that occasion, so that's how that came about. So those are my two moments in the Washington firmament.

REV. GOMES: My mother. My family is one of those black families that never forgot that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. And as--old Yankee black people felt this historic allegiance to the party of Lincoln, which was true for most black people up until 1932. It's forgotten now, but the phenomenon of black people in the Democratic Party as a given block is a fairly modern phenomenon. Most black people, once Emancipation had taken place and had begun to participate in the voting process, were, by nature, Republicans. The Democratic Party was the party of the South, of slavery and secession, and no sensible black person would want to give aid and comfort to them. And so I sort of inherited this in my bones.

And in Massachusetts, as I say, the Republican Party was always the party of enlightenment and the party of honorable discourse. They weren't engaged in graft or fraud or corruption, so we liked to believe. And they were the party of the establishment of which we thoroughly approved. So all of those factors meant that this was natural for me.

REV. GOMES: Right in the center of Harvard Yard. If you can find Harvard Yard, you cannot fail to find Memorial Church. It's the biggest thing in the middle of the yard--a great steeple, huge pillars. It's an unmistakable religious symbol in the middle of that special place.

REV. GOMES: Most Sundays from September to the first week in June at 11:00. We have what we call stated preachers--10 a year, five each term. But I do most of the preaching when we don't have stated visitors, so I preach probably 25 Sundays of the academic year.

REV. GOMES: I'm happy to say it is.

REV. GOMES: Well, I won't go so far as to say that. That would be boasting, but it is very, well-filled. We're delighted with that.

REV. GOMES: Well, I do two things. There are two levels of preparation for me. I spend the month of August, for example, preparing the outlines for the 22, 25 sermons that I'm going to give during the year. And so when I begin in September, I have a pretty clear idea of how the year is going to go and what I want to deal with.

Then there's the immediate preparation, which is the week in which I'm preaching, and I go over my notes and I prepare my manuscript. I make sure that I have clear in my mind what the principal points I need to address are. And then, come Saturday, I do what every minister does. I go into a sort of a white heat of anticipation and frenzy. I still wake up Sunday morning both excited and terrified at the prospect that I'm going to be on in a few minutes and, for 30 minutes, I hope, have the undivided attention of 800 or 900 people and not do any harm or disgrace myself.

So it's a bit like acting. I know this sounds dangerous to say, but it's a bit like, I imagine, any opera singer or Broadway star or even rock musicians, something I know next to nothing about. Just before you go on, it seems to be all your forces, all your psychic energy, is concentrated on the job ahead. And as one great musician said, `If you're not nervous and terrified by that, you've been at it too long and you should get out of the business.' So I'm still terrified every Sunday morning and I still have this rush of adrenaline when the service begins.

REV. GOMES: I--all the time. I talk about the Bible almost exclusively in my preaching because I'm convinced nobody else will. I mean, you--anybody can talk to you about the crisis in Bosnia or the state of the economy or the cultural revolution or Arab-Israeli relations. There are hundreds of forums for that kind of conversation--radio, television, the newspapers--anything. The Bible is almost exclusively left in the hands of the churches and in the clergy, and if I don't address that and deal with that, there's no other place nowadays where that's going to be dealt with. That is my subject. That's the field and, therefore, I feel I've got to deal with that because no one else will.

REV. GOMES: The Old Testament--the very term `Old Testament' is a Christian term referring to the books of the Jewish Bible. For Christians, the Bible consists of two witnesses, two revelations: the Old Testament, which is the Christian appropriation of Jewish Scripture, and the New Testament, which is exclusively Christian, reflecting both upon the Old Testament and upon things the Old Testament itself could not have really anticipated. So for Christians, Hebrew Scripture and their own writings are combined together in the book called the Bible in two major chapters, the Old and the New.

REV. GOMES: I enjoy talking about Paul, interestingly enough. Paul is a lightning-rod figure, and there are very few neutral opinions about Paul. Either you like him or you can't stand him. You know, he just has this kind of edge to him. He was a perfect Jew, then he became a perfect Christian. He was a model Roman citizen, and he was an aggressive Greek intellectual. He was the first instance, I would argue, of multiculturalism in one person. He had all of these worlds, all of these languages and all of these ideas conflicting in him. And his zealousness for goodness sometimes got in the way, made him a very difficult and testy person. And yet, he rises, I think, above even his own ambitions--sometimes those ambitions are destructive--and becomes a man, in my opinion, who is constantly wrestling--and wrestling for good both with himself and with his idea of what God has in store for him through Jesus Christ.

So he is a kind of model, in a way, for aggressive, ambitious, driven and slightly confused people, many of whom I know and much of which resembles myself.

REV. GOMES: More religious than you think, but not as religious as it ought to be. The--when Harvard gave up chapel as a requirement in 1886, the first college in the country to do away with mandatory attenc--attendance at daily chapel, people at Yale termed the phrase `Godless Harvard,' and we've been stuck with that reputation ever since. So no one expects much of religion at Harvard, and thus, from where I sit, it's always a bonus or surprise when we're able to tell people that, one, we have a service every day; two, it's--about 40 people come, Monday through Saturday at 8:45 in the morning. We have a large service on Sunday morning and we fill a chapel that seats close to 900 people. And, in addition to those who come to Memorial Church, there are literally thousands of our students and faculty and staff who are engaged in well over 39 different religious communities connected with the university in one form or another.

So it's--it's quite remarkably religious in the sense that there are people who both study and practice religion and people who discover religion, and not just Christian religion these days. But we have a very large Muslim community, for example; a very lively, dynamic, very diverse Jewish community, everything from Egalitarian to ultra Orthodox. The Roman Catholic Mass on Fri--on Saturday evening in St. Paul's Church is consistently standing room only. And every variety of Protestant you can shake a stick at, they're all there and they're all practicing their faith within the context of this very large, secular and, some would even argue, hostile community to the practice of religion. That has not been my experience in 28 years. Harvard is not hostile to religion, but you have to discover it and make it work for yourself in that setting.

REV. GOMES: And it--so they did, but I...

REV. GOMES: Well, it's a great dominical number.

REV. GOMES: Well, I can't remember how that list quite worked. It was so long ago now--1979, 1980, something like that. But I think they picked seven because seven is a magical number. It sounds theological, sounds important. It's the equivalent of 40 days or something around--it's a big number. And I think it --also was a gimmick. I think Time and other news magazines, every once in a while to boost circulation, you'll discover they devote an unusual amount of attention to religion because they discover that religious issues still sell magazines. So in Holy Week every year, Time and Newsweek compete with some new theory of the Crucifixion, and around Christmastime they've all got Virgin Mary stories or Holy Ghost stories or angel stories.

So I think I came as part of one of their periodic attempts to generate trade and discover interest in religion, and so they looked at preaching. And, again, they did it, I remember, very well. It's in this guise of taking a poll. And they called various preachers and they called me and said would I list for them my seven favorite preachers. Well, that was easy to do because I appoint my seven favorite preachers to preach at Harvard whenever I can get them. So I came up with my list. And what they did was take the list from about a dozen people that they'd asked this question of, and if any names appeared two or three times on them, they began to do some background work, and I think that's how they came up with their list.

I was, by far, the youngest there and I was the only one on that list connected with a university, so it was a very curious process, I thought. I don't disavow it, but it was simply curious.

REV. GOMES: Well, I think the Bible remains the most potent symbol our culture has. We may want to deny that or we may find it curious, but nevertheless, it remains a very powerful symbol in American public life and has been since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. So anybody who wants to speak to this culture or have a role to play in this culture, at some level or other, if they're interested in affecting people's ideas and their behaviors, have to, in some way, deal with the Bible.

So the Bible has always been a part of our political discourse. Even though people argue on the principle of the separation of church and state, that's a neat principle but doesn't at all reflect the reality of the centrality of the Bible as part of our cultural inheritance. So if you're going to try to rouse people's consciences or get them to behave in a certain way or to motivate their forces for positions you wish to take, historically, we've always tried to find a way to do that, and the Bible playing a part in that process.

It's not from any accident at all that our presidents, invariably and very conspicuously, are sworn into office on a Bible. The Constitution doesn't provide for that, doesn't require it and certainly doesn't prohibit it, but there it is, and everybody understands the symbolism of that. So that if you can find your political program or your social program justified or mandated or vindicated by the Bible, you have a big moral leg up in the political discourse, and our leaders and our would-be leaders have always known that.

REV. GOMES: Well, many people wrote the Bible. When we talk about--refer to the Bible as the Word of God, by that we mean that--an understanding of God and the will and power of God is available to inspire the authors. But the authors are human beings, and all you have to do is look at the books to see that they are written by a variety of human hands over a long period of time.

The first five books of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, historically were attributed to Moses because the notion that anonymous writers put this stuff together simply didn't carry the same weight as the implication that a very famous and very distinguished, very holy person did. And so Moses becomes the sort of generic name for the authors of this book. But they never said that God wrote these books or that a committee wrote these books. These books are the result of compilations, collections, additions over a long period of time.

There is somebody named Isaiah who's written a portion of the book that bears his name, and there are other books that are--sound like Isaiah and there are--and that people who wish to be connected to Isaiah are part of his book.

In the New Testament, the same process applied. The evangelists--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, people close to Jesus--are credited with writing memoirs which bear their names and give authority because these are by people who knew Jesus. Paul writes a lot of letters and then there are a lot of letters written in the name of Paul. These are human people--some of whom we know, some of whom we don't know--all of whom the church believes have been ex--inspired and have things to say that are important to be collected, preserved and interpreted.

REV. GOMES: Yes.

REV. GOMES: Yes, yes. Well, I didn't design the cover, but I happen to like the Gospel of John. Of the four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John--the first three--Matthew, Mark and Luke--are described as synoptic Gospels because they provide a synopsis of the life of Jesus. They have variations, but by and large, they tell essentially the same story, sort of biographical memoirs, whereas the Gospel of John, the fourth Gospel, is distinct from those other three because it tends to be much more theological and philosophical, is of a somewhat different style, has a different agenda, is not a biographical memoir as such of Jesus, and in many ways is a bit more theologically sophisticated.

I'm not sure why they picked John, but I'm glad they did because I think it's perhaps, in many ways, the most beautiful, from a literary point of view, of all four of the Gospels.

REV. GOMES: Well, many years after the death of Christ and over, probably, a span of 200 years. The four Gospels that we have are what is left of a much larger collection of books called Gospels written by a whole host of people. By the end of the present era, the Christian era, by the end of the second century in the Christian era, the Christian communities, of which there were many, had come to some consensus about--of the many books called Gospels which were the ones they regarded as most authoritative and that came down to the four that we have now in our Bible.

It was an editorial process, and an editorial process that resulted--that was the result of concensus, custom, local usage and over a long period of time. No one person sat down and said, `These shall be the Gospels.' This was the result of a long process.

REV. GOMES: Well, many Americans say they read the Bible all the time, every day, every week, and many, many, many Americans own copies of the Bible, and even more, I think, would like to read the Bible. But I suspect not a great many read it with any regularity or any avidity. And that is slightly out of sync with our public profession and our cultural reputation as being Bible-toters???, Bible-thumpers and Bible readers.

REV. GOMES: Mm-hmm.

REV. GOMES: 1991.

REV. GOMES: I did that because there were--there was a group of conservative Christians at Harvard who made a great deal of the fact that they believed that homosexuality and Christianity, not to mention the Bible, were utterly incompatible and felt that if one were a homosexual, one couldn't be a Christian and vice versa. And they made that argument in a particularly thuggish way, as far as I was concerned, with regard to the general homosexual community at Harvard. And I felt that, one, it was not true, the assertions that they were making, that there was a wide variety of ways in reading that material. And secondly, I knew it wasn't true because, one, I was a homosexual and, two, I was and am a Christian. And, therefore, I felt I had both a responsibility and an opportunity to correct what I felt was a rather egregious misreading of those relationships. So that's why I did it.

REV. GOMES: Well, there was a--there was a student rally outside in the college yard sort of in protest of this particular point of view that had been published in a conservative student magazine. And so while I had never made any particular secret of my homosexuality, it was not by any means at the center of my being and it is not now. So I was not, in some sense, a sort of conspicuous homosexual leader of any sort. I was asked by the homosexual student group, whom I think knew next to nothing about my sexuality, if I, as the preacher, would say a word of solidarity in support of them, and they felt they had been abused by people who were calling themselves Christians.

So it was in that capacity that I was asked to take part in this and I did, and I choose my rallies very carefully. I mean, it was a rally an hour and one could be out there all day. So I rarely participated in these things. But this seemed to be pretty close to the bone, and if I couldn't speak to this issue, it seemed to me there were very few issues that I could speak. So I accepted their invitation and decided that the best case to make for the principal case I was trying to make was the example of my own life. And as St. Paul himself argued in theological debates, that, `I am evidence of that of which I speak,' and so that was the position I took on that occasion.

REV. GOMES: Well, to some degree, yes. The downside of it was that, from my point of view--I think I'm a very interesting person and I have lots of complex views to offer on all sorts of things. And the thing I worried most about all of this was now that I would be forever `the gay preacher' at Harvard. Happily, that hasn't worked in quite that way. But one's sexuality is a rather intimate thing, I've always felt, which is one reason why I don't define myself exclusively by my sexuality. And so I, in a sense, resented the fact that this is what people fastened on, 'cause it's easy to do. That was part of the liability of such a thing. And essentially, since I--though I have a very public position, I'm essentially a private person. To be dealt with at the most intimate level of one's sexual identity all of the time is sort of mildly annoying to me, and I--that I don't particularly relish. But I started it, so I must now live with it.

The upside of it is here I am talking to you and that wouldn't have happened, I think, had I been quietly reticent. I've gained a new pulpit in a sense. I've gained a new opportunity to speak beyond the confines of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard and not just on questions of sexuality, so that in a way, the coming out thing was much more a win than loss, much more plus than negative.

And perhaps the very best thing that it has done is to be a source of some encouragement. I have reason to believe, from correspondence and letters I've received over these years, too many other people who struggled with the question of their relationship of their faith to their sexuality and the degree to which they should or should not come out, as it were, and confront the forces that really thrive on silence and anonymity.

REV. GOMES: Well, it's true. You can. I mean, the Bible is a library and it's like saying you can go to the New York Public Library and find anything you want on any subject. You certainly can, contrary to, I think, a rather simpleminded view of the Bible which often obtains in this country in particular. The Bible is not a work of systematic theology, nor is it a work of philosophy. It is a collection of experiences, opinions, points of view, life tales in 66 different books by as many, if not more, authors over a p--collected together over a period of a thousand-plus years. You're going to find in this combination of history poetry, philosophy, theology, erotic verse, the sorts of things such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes--you're going to find the whole range of human experience. And if your interest is in finding something that reflects your particular view of things or your corner of the world, the chances are fairly likely, because this is such a comprehensive book, that you will.

The real task in dealing with a vast collection like this is to find: What are the large, overarching principles that may hold this together? How do we distinguish between what is, in a sense, universally and always true, and what is locked and located in a particular social and cultural circumstance which no longer exists? Which means that the Bible is a book that demands constant interpretation. You simply cannot accept it as the--the telephone directory of life or as a kind of invarying--unvarying road map that is the same today as it was 200 years ago or 2,000 years ago. It's simply not so.

REV. GOMES: Oh, hundreds. Hundreds. I mean, there--the Bible is the most published book yet in the world, and translators and editors and religious constituencies have always been ingenious in coming up with a version that is particularly suited to their particular point of view. There are women's Bibles, for example, that highlight the presence of women and the perspective of women. There are Bibles for people of color these days that bring up from the depths of the text and the history the multicultural perspective, which is not always them. Evangelicals have their particular versions of the Bible in which they are keenly interested. And there are Bibles for scientists. There are Bibles for ethical culturists and so on and so forth. Same text, but the emphasis is placed in different places for these various constituencies.

This all began at the point where the Bible began to be translated out of its original tongues, first Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament, and then Latin in the early eras of medieval Christianity. When the Bible began to be translated into the particular cultural languages of people, when Luther translated the Bible into German--and the German Bible is understood to be the Shakespeare--the equivalent of Shakespeare for German--for the German language, he took these biblical idioms, these Jewish and Greek idioms, and turned them into German idioms that the German people would understand, so that the Germans had their own version of the Bible.

When the English began to do this with Tyndale and various other translators, they did the same thing and cast their own particular reading upon that. Everybody has done that. And the great test, the great question is: What is the relationship between our particular reading of this book through our language and lens and the truths that the book contains that transcend, that go beyond our particular language and lens? That's the task of interpretation.

REV. GOMES: I do. I teach...

REV. GOMES: Well, I teach half-time. I teach--half my duties consist of sort of running the church, and the other half consist of teaching both in the divinity faculty, where I teach preaching, homiletics, and in the college faculty, where I teach the history of the interpretation of the Bible. So in the fall term I'm in the divinity school with my preaching seminar and in the spring I'm in college with my lecture course on the Bible.

REV. GOMES: No, no. I had--once thought it would be wonderful to be the first appointed president of the United States, but that was in high school. I was very politically active in high school politics and whatnot. Always--my father said I always liked to run everything and I--and I did. I liked to run things, but I didn't like to run for things and so--the hurly-burly of politics and suffering that process as well as fools gladly is not something that would necessarily appeal to me.

REV. GOMES: Well, I tell my students that every sermon must have at least one point. I don't care how many more, but there ought to be at least one point that you know is what you wish to communicate, and that you use every trick in the trade, every tool at your command to advance that one point. Now ideally, that one point has something to do with the text--the biblical text that you're using. And one hopes that it does. You don't want to be accused of the old preacher's trick, which says take your text, depart from your text, never return to your text. I say don't get caught in that. But remember, you have only one task. That is to persuade the people who are listening to you. The...

REV. GOMES: No. I wasn't quite sure what was before me, unlike on Sunday morning, when I'm in charge. I know exactly what's going on. But I'm at your mercy, so my job here is to be as articulate as I can without losing complete control of the situation. But I had some sense that you were going to ask me about my book and that there might be far-ranging questions and that my job was to be as articulate as I could within the range of the questions that you ask.

REV. GOMES: I--b--about my book?

REV. GOMES: I want them to know that my book is designed to help them come better to terms with the Bible and to appreciate the fact that the Bible and the complex life that they lead today have something to do one with the other.

REV. GOMES: A politician must be very careful about using the Bible. The Bible is not a cultural prop, and it must not be used as just part of the arsenal of winning votes and selling one's own program. To some degree, if a politician's going to use the Bible, the politician's going to have to submit himself or herself to both some of the demands and some of the ambiguities that the Bible represents.

REV. GOMES: I have always been as a strong admirer of Billy Graham, which is strange to say, given the setting in which I do my work. But I'm proud to say I invited Billy Graham to Harvard and he came in 1981 and preached for us. And I hope he'll--I hope he'll come again before he retires.

What I've always admired about Billy Graham, even though he himself will concede to having had various flirtations with political power and being chaplain to the White House, as it were, that he has never tried to push the Bible as a social program. He has tried to get individuals to come to terms with their own spiritual needs and to see the Bible as part of that process, and he's been consistent in that for now nearly 50 years. And I admire that and I think there'll never be another one--a person quite capable of that particular role and function in this culture that takes the Bible so seriously.

REV. GOMES: Oh, I do everything that I can to amplify that message, and I say to my students, `You need to understand that an audience comes and goes in listening to a sermon or a talk like this. They're never with you all of the time or all of them. So you have to have sort of a mini cycle within your Sunday sermon to catch people on the way in and on the way out.' I divide my congregation up into sort of psychic thirds: A third of them at the very moment I'm speaking are with me, another third have just left me, and another third are ready to come in. So I have to be able to sort of recycle within the course of my discourse the subject, the language, the illustrations in such a way as to deal with all of those groups at whatever stage they happen to be.

That's one reason why preachers tell stories, because stories repeat themselves. They drive home the theme. They leave you with one thing to hang onto. And then between the --stories, you have the development of the point, and then you might have a --an illustration in opposition to what you have just said. You're getting people at many different levels of listening. It's just like listening to music. It's just like listening to the symphony. There are different movements and people are listening at those different movements at different rates--speech is the same thing--and you have to orchestrate that.

A sermon is very much an artistic creation. It's not just beginning at the beginning and boring through all the way. It's setting out a theme. It's providing some variation. It's providing some contrast, some recapitulation, stating the theme again, moving on.

REV. GOMES: I do.

REV. GOMES: I write out every word that I preach. Now the sermon that I give is not necessarily verbatim--the-- manuscript that I have in front of me. The manuscript for me is something of a security blanket. I want to get it out once, but then in the pulpit other forces take over--literally take over. And I often just abandon the manuscript because I've dealt with that. I know what I have to do, and I want to respond to what's happening with the dynamic of the audience.

A speaker can tell--a speaker can listen to a congregation just the same way that a congregation listens to the speaker. Congregations move. They breathe. They heave. They sigh. They rock. They move about. And you can tell exactly where the various bits of that congregation are and you respond to that as you go along. If you've just got a written manuscript and you just start at the beginning and read all the way through, you're oblivious to that chemistry that's going on out in front of you.

REV. GOMES: Portuguese, not Spanish. With all due respect to the Spanish, my father always resented the fact that people just assumed the name Gomes was Spanish. It is not. It's Gomesch with an E-S-C-H, and it's Portuguese. My father was born in the Cape Verda islands, a fact of which he was enormously proud.

REV. GOMES: Where this country is? Contrary to what many preachers would say, the Bible is not about the American political system. No writer of the Bible conceived of the United States of America. It is not God's Constitution for the USA. So the strict answer to the question is it's nowhere. The Bible is not concerned about the American social, political or even moral situation at this point.

The larger question ought to really be: In what way does the American experience relate to those larger, overarching truths of which the Bible speaks and which it spoke to ancient Rome, to ancient Israel, to medieval Europe, to the British Empire, to anybody over the course of the last 2,000--2,000 years? And I think the answer to that question is America, like any other collection of people under God's heaven, sits under judgment. And that judgment is between what it aspires to do as a collection of pious people and what it, in fact, does as a collection of very fallible and fallen human beings. That's the perpetual judgment.

And there'll be no building of the kingdom of God on Earth in a political, a social sense because that is not where the kingdom of God ultimately is meant to be. So we stand always between what we aspire to and profess on the one hand and what we actually are and actually do on the other.

REV. GOMES: Well, I think it would be very clear that there is a biblical ideal to which if we --regard ourselves -- as Christian people and religious people, we are meant to conform, we are meant to love God and our neighbors as ourselves; that is, we are meant to show reverence and deference to God and all of God's work--the creation, the environment and our fellow human beings. And we are meant to treat our neighbors, universally defined--not just as our constituents, but defined the world over--as we would wish to be treated.

So there's an ethical imperative that comes from the Bible--inescapable ethical comparative. It means that the rich must take care of the poor. It means that we're supposed to look after those who are marginalized or neglected. It means that we are to share our wealth. It means that we must not be rampant and rabid individualists, that we must not be obsessed by material gain or sort of social position. It means, in a way, we must do all the things that are very discomforting for us to do, particularly as a culture. And so in that sense the Bible ought to make American society like every other society: nervous and uncomfortable. And it reminds us of how far short we have all fallen of the glory of God.

REV. GOMES: I hope to, yes.

REV. GOMES: Well, this was so much fun, in one sense, that I'm going--my--the book I'm working on now is called "The Virtuous Life." It could be called "The Good Life," but there's an ambiguous term about `the good life.' And so I decided that I wanted--that--ask--the question that I am asked almost more than anything else by both parents of undergraduates and parents of young children who were once undergraduates, `What can I do, what ought I do for both myself and my children to be virtuous people?'

The search for virtue is a real and powerful factor, I think greater than the search for riches or power or fame. And how do we define what good is, and how do we go about finding it for ourselves and transmitting it to our posterity? That's an enormous sort of subject. I'm going to try to find a reasonably packaged way in which to at least formulate the questions, because I think that's the question of the rising generation.

REV. GOMES: Well, that's the--there are two answers to that question. If part of the question is, `What of all the characteristics that people ascribe to me, is the characteristic that I accept as my ultimate and defining experience?' it's none of the above. I am first and foremost--above everything else, I am a Christian. That is my identity. That is how I was formed. That is how I live. That is how I expect to --conform to my eternal destiny as a Christian. All the others are adjectives to that noun, as far as I am concerned.

But if the other question is, `Which of those categories is the one with which I sort of resonate most?' given that they choose these categories, I'd have to add one that you didn't use by which I find--find also useful. I'm a preacher. That's what I do. That is my profession. You know, I am a Republican, I am a homosexual, I am an African-American, I am a New Englander, I'm a historian, I'm a pastor. I'm all these things. But I am a preacher, and I'm passionately concerned about communicating ultimate things to people.

REV. GOMES: Thank you.