nation.

It was one nation ruling all of the other nations, as we sing so frequently in Psalm 2 and elsewhere, asking me to make all the nations your inheritance.

So the international breadth of the Church is already prefigured in the covenant with Abraham.

All the nations of the earth will be blessed through you, but especially the royal family of David.

And when you pick up on all of these sub-themes, you end up seeing something emerging with a composite unity that, again, just takes your breath away, and you realize this man was not only a literary artist, not only an eyewitness one of the Twelve, but someone who must have been a contemplative, a theologian himself.

who basically applied himself to the study of the Law and the Prophets to illustrate exactly what Jesus says in Matthew 5.17, think not that I've come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, I've come to fulfill.

And that pattern of fulfillment, pleurosis, just really turns the Gospel of Matthew into something three-dimensional.

Bible,

Shamar.

You have basically the job description given later to the Levites, now given first to Adam.

So he's a son, having received the word of God.

He's a prophet to know that he's a son.

He's also exercising royal dominion as the king of creation.

Psalm 8 celebrates that.

But above all, he's a priest.

[laughs]

And that's why, right, Jerome would call it the epitome of the old covenant.

Now, he goes so far as to say, and I, I quote him, that, uh, the Book of Things Omitted, Paralipomena, as we know Chronicles is called in the Septuagint, is of such importance and value, Jerome says, that, uh, anyone who should claim to himself a knowledge of the scriptures but who doesn't know the chronicler would make himself a laughingstock.

You know, and it's a funny thing, too, because Bishop Fernandez of the Columbus Diocese blurbs the book, and on the back of the book he says, "People often claim to have read the whole Bible.

I ask, 'Well, what did you think of one and two Chronicles?' Usually a blank stare or an admission of guilt follows.

With Hahn's new volume, these books of the Bible come to life, drawing the reader into the rich liturgical patrimony of the Old Testament while offering practical application for life today." And I think that's the key.

It really is a kind of liturgical historiography, whereas when you cover the same historical ground, as you mentioned, in one and two Samuel and one and two Kings, it is the rise but mostly the fall of the kingdom of David.

And, and so Martin Noth and Gerhard von Rad and others would characterize it as damnation history because the curses of the Deuteronomic, the Deuteronomic Covenant are actualized because of the infidelities of Israel.

Mm-hmm

Can you tell us a bit what it was like to kind of live through that period and what did you see kind of happening?

That's an interesting question.

Not easy to answer, but let me take a shot.

Because as I mentioned, I came into the church in 86.

I was a doctoral student at Marquette, studying under the Jesuits.

And for the most part, historical criticism was hegemonic.

It was the only way you read the Bible, not only in the PhD seminars, but even in the graduate and undergraduate classes.

Yeah, tell us a bit about the Emmaus Road project and also about this.

What does it mean for a society, though, when you separate sex from procreation and marriage, and you allow for what we have today, which is really sex is what I want it to be as an adult?

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's a great question, and it's not easy to answer because of the common viewpoint that almost everybody shares.

And that is, you know, what happens in the bedroom ought to stay in the bedroom.

And of course, I would agree.

But on the other hand, to say that these private vices that we have, uh, whether they're infidelity or just immorality, these are never merely private, uh, because, you know, even pagans in antiquity recognized that the society is a social organism, and you can't have one part of the body that is very sick and not have it affect the rest of the body.

Are they the same? Are there differences?

What advice would you give to Scott Hahn around that time in 1986, whether it be to how to discern whether the Catholic faith were true or how you should act or interact with friends and family after your conversion?

Nobody's ever asked me that before.

And so, okay, on the spot, I would say, first and foremost, stay focused on the life of prayer, because things traveled from the heart to the head too often, too easily.

And so much of my interaction with non-Catholics with my own wife, with my family members and colleagues was just simply brutal, you know, and I wish now that I'd prayed for them more than I would kind of target them, that sort of thing.

You know, another thing too would be spiritual direction.

I ended up finding a priest and getting spiritual direction before I entered the church.

And I wish that I'd done it even sooner because the idea of balancing not only the head and the heart, but also my professional life, studying, preparing for a new career, having given up the ministry, my profession as a Presbyterian pastor, you know, and at the same time, focusing on family life as a husband, but also now as a father, Uh, and I look at all of the mistakes and I realize, okay, God's grace made up for all that I lacked.

What advice do you give to someone like that?