7/21/02

Scripture within the heart and life of the Church

In recent months I’ve been talking to professors of theology who teach in local Catholic colleges. Some of them teach courses in Sacred Scripture, and a few of these teachers have put forth the opinion that Scripture study, as they do it, is not formally part of Catholic theology. I suppose that, depending on how one goes about it, you could make the argument that Bible study belongs in a literature department rather than in a theology department; but the people who put Scripture study in the theology department in the first place must have had some notion that Scripture and Catholic theology were closely related. How are they?

The Church is founded upon God’s self-revelation to his people. This revelation is made in events in which God intervenes in human history, acting to unite people to himself here and for all eternity. People gather around these events and become a community, God’s people. The witness to God’s action is carried in the memory and living faith of the people, called sacred tradition, and in written form in books called Sacred Scripture. Abraham, to whom God began to reveal himself, didn’t write a book; one doesn’t have to be literate to be a believer. Abraham believed, and the community of faith traces its origins to his response to God. Writing as such enters the history of salvation only centuries later on Mount Sinai, when God himself is said to have inscribed the Ten Commandments on stone tablets. As the community, from generation to generation, remembered God’s revelation, the Holy Spirit inspired authors to set down a written witness to what God had done; and the community of faith, in turn, recognized these books as genuinely inspired, as Sacred Scripture.

In God’s final revelation in the sending of his eternal Word made flesh, a community, the new Israel, was formed around Jesus. Jesus didn’t write a book, and one doesn’t have to be literate to believe that Jesus is Lord. The risen Lord structured a Church which tells literate and illiterate alike which books, written in the two generations after Jesus death, resurrection and ascension, are inspired by the Holy Spirit and are part of Sacred Scripture. If the Church didn’t tell us which books are Sacred Scripture and which are merely personal religious tracts, how could we make the distinction? The faith of the Church recognizes in the canonical books of the Bible, the 46 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament, “the speech of God entrusted to writing under the divine impulse of the Holy Spirit” (Dei Verbum, 9; the constitution on divine revelation from the Second Vatican Council).

The sacred text is revealed in a community of faith, and it is interpreted within that same community. As Catholics, we do not come to the Scriptures as individuals to a text we have to interpret for ourselves. We are neither literalists nor fundamentalists in our approach to the Bible. We read the Bible with the Church, in the Church and under the guidance of the Church, because the Catholic faith existed before the books of the New Testament. No one reads the Bible with a neutral or value-free approach. A distinguished biblical scholar, the late Father Raymond Brown, often pointed out that one could not come to the complete meaning of Sacred Scripture without a knowledge of the Church’s teaching. Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition together form one source of revelation.

With this understanding of the relation between Scripture and Church, the Fathers of the Church and the great scholastic theologians did Catholic theology as a series of commentaries on Scripture, on the Sacred Page. They did their commentaries, they wrote their theology in constant dialogue with Scripture, because Scripture both judges everything else written or said in the community of faith and is also able to be understood only in the light of that same faith. One will understand Scripture adequately only by using methods of interpretation which are themselves open to faith.

This is a point made tellingly by Father Brian Daley, of Notre Dame University’s theology department: “... modern historical criticism—including the criticism of Biblical texts—is methodologically atheistic, even if what it studies is some form or facet of religious belief, and even if it is practiced by believers. Only ‘natural,’ inner-worldly explanations of why or how things happen, explanations that could be acceptable to believers and unbelievers alike, are taken as historically admissible. So God is not normally understood to count as an actor on the stage of history; God’s providence in history, the divine inspiration of Scriptural authors and texts, even the miracles narrated in the Bible, are assumed to be private human interpretations of events, interior and non-demonstrable, rather than events or historical forces in themselves.” Salvation history, God’s work, then becomes something very American: the history of personal religious consciousness. This might be very interesting, since there are a lot of interesting people, including those who wrote the books of the Bible; a record of human religious consciousness, however, has nothing to do with anyone’s salvation. If Sacred Scripture is read and studied in this manner, it is simply old religious literature. And, finally, who cares?

People of faith care how Scripture is read and interpreted because, like faith itself, Scripture is a gift given to the care of the Church for our salvation. God gives us these gifts because he wills us to be saved: “We proclaim to you the eternal life that was present to the Father and became visible to us; what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you so that you may share life with us and that our communion may be with the Father and with his son, Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:2-3). With these words of St. John in mind, the bishops of the Second Vatican Council wrote: “In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them” (Dei Verbum, 21). Whatever our level of education, we can truly read and understand the Scriptures in the light of our faith in Jesus, the living Word, who is present and speaks to us today in and through his Church. Outside of that faith, no one can do theology or understand Scripture as God intends it to be understood. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Archbishop of Chicago

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