Editor's Journal: Good News

by Brian K. Mahoney, February 25, 2008

Though I was raised Catholic in the 1970s, I didn’t do much Bible reading as a child. This might seem odd for someone who spent 12 years taught by priests and nuns. The liberalizing influence of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, however, directly influenced the progressive education I received and the structure of the Catholic mass. As students, we didn’t read the Bible in religion class, we were told that we needed to know ourselves before we could know God. In church, the folk group led the congregation in rollicking banjo-and-guitar settings of songs from “Godspell” in-between recitations of the Nicene Creed and the transubstantiation, that magic the priest performed that turned the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. (I can still recall the end of the Nicene Creed from memory, the bit my classmates and I used to recite rapid fire in church as we raced to see who could finish first, without upsetting Sister Dorothy at the end of the pew: “We believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”)

There were Bible readings during the mass, of course—an Old Testament snippet, usually obliquely presaging the coming of Christ; one letter from Paul, usually to some hard-to-pronounce, far-flung, and undoubtedly mercilessly oppressed early church community, like the Philippians; and a reading from one of the four gospels—but little emphasis was put on knowing “chapter and verse.” The Bible seemed to be some sort of founding document, like the Constitution—an arcane written artifact whose encoded mysteries I could not directly access. It required legions of intermediaries to interpret and form the ritual of the mass and the sacraments for it to be made understandable. For what 10-year-old could unravel both the Bible’s stilted language and the complex spiritual dynamics explaining the tripartite nature of God? I was content to mumble that I believed in “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Whatever that was.

I can’t recall exactly where I first saw the book with the title Good News Bible. I must have been a fairly young child, because I remember thinking: Wow, a whole book of good news, how wonderful! And it’s a Bible to boot. Maybe this will explain why I should be so pleased with being a Jesus-lover. Perhaps this is a history of all the cool stuff that has happened to people who love Jesus.

And in a way, it was (and is), as any Christian will tell you. But taking nothing away from the quite accessible translation by the American Bible Society (an evangelical Protestant organization) that is the Good News, it was still just a dusty book full of the “begats” to me. The mystery of faith remained a mystery. But what I’ve never forgotten is the idea of a book full of good news.