This week we continue my journey back to the Catholic Church. I begin studying Scripture and learn how the Catholic approach seems much more common sense to me than the fundamentalist literalist approach we hear about so much. Next week, the last of our series on faith and then we returned to disability topics.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 13 of Contemplating Life.

Last week, I promised that we would be wrapping up this series on faith but the script came out too long (as it often does) so I decided to split it into two episodes.

As always, I offer my standard disclaimer when talking about religion. I’m not trying to evangelize anyone. I just want to tell my story. If it happens to mean something significant to your own faith journey then that’s great. But if not, I hope you find it entertaining and informative.

In the last episode, I had just attended an Easter vigil ceremony where a group of adults was choosing to join the Catholic Church. Seeing these reasonable people choose to join the church, the warm welcoming atmosphere I felt that had been missing previously, and the acceptance of my doubts by my mom’s Bible study group started me on a journey back to the church.

That was in the spring of 1984. For my birthday in July, I asked for a Bible. I wanted the New American Standard edition which had the official Catholic-approved translation and footnotes. It’s the translation used in all Catholic liturgy. Mom got me a really nice one with a brown leather cover. Somewhere along the way I also got a Bible concordance. That’s a complete cross reference for Scripture. You can look up any word and it will tell you every chapter and verse where that word appears. Of course these days there are websites where you can search for any passage from a variety of translations. But in 1984 with no Internet, such a large reference book was valuable.

I figured I would start at the beginning. I only got as far as Genesis 2 before I started seeing contradictions. That wasn’t very encouraging. There are two different creation stories in Scripture. One of them is the traditional seven days of creation where God says let there be… whatever and it came into being. The other one in Genesis 2 talks about the garden where he created Adam. Then he creates all of the animals and brings them to Adam to see what he calls them. The order in which things are created is completely different between these two stories.

The footnotes say that these different creation stories came from different sources. Wait a minute… I thought Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible known as the Pentateuch. Of course, Moses dies part way through the fourth book but my understanding was that one of his followers finished it up for him.

I decided to bypass the Old Testament and spent some time with the New Testament but I still wasn’t getting much out of it. I could see that reading the Bible was going to cause me more problems than it solved.

By now, lots of parishioners had been through the CRHP renewal program and were hungry for more adult religious education. Lifelong Catholics began attending the RCIA classes to update their understanding of the faith. I started attending the classes in September along with Judy, and her husband Paul. They had enjoyed the experience so much that they wanted to go through it again and pick up some things they might not have appreciated the first time through. It also gave them the opportunity to become sponsors for non-Catholics who were going through the program. The classes were held every Thursday night from 7-9 p.m. with a break in the middle for refreshments. They were presented by our two priests. Our pastor, Father Paul, and our associate pastor Father Conrad.

Among the programs I attended was a series of lectures by a man named Jim Welter from Saint Monica Parrish. He called his lectures “The Ascending View”.

Jim explained how the Catholic approach to Scripture was much different than the literal “it means exactly what it says” approach of the fundamentalist Protestant. The Catholic Church, along with other mainstream Catholic-like Protestant denominations such as Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopal use what is called the historical-critical method of Scripture analysis.

While we believe in the inspiration behind Scripture, we understand that it was written by human beings who are the product of their culture and times. The Bible is theology. It is not history or science. When we say that the Bible is inerrant and true, we don’t mean the details of exactly how many days it took exactly 6 days to create the entire universe and that the universe is only 6000 years old. It is the meaning behind the mythology that is true. What it says about us, God, our relationship with Him, and His plan for us is true.

Jim explained there are two ways to look at Scripture. The “descending view” is that Scripture is the result of divine dictation. The Word of God was handed down to the authors pretty much verbatim and they simply wrote down “what God intended.” This was that Book of Mormon model that we talked about a few episodes ago that seemed so ridiculous to me that it contributed to my leaving the Church. It is the same view that most fundamentalist or evangelical Christians believe even if it wasn’t found on some hidden metal plates dug up by some church leader.

In contrast, Jim describes the “ascending view”. People of faith experienced God in their lives. Some would see God in nature. Some had spiritual experiences that they could not explain otherwise. They saw events in history through a theological context.

Nearly all of Scripture began as oral traditions handed down by word-of-mouth for generations before anyone ever put quill to parchment. Realizing the importance of these stories, they were eventually collected and written to be handled on faithfully to future generations.

These writings were in effect a letter to God saying, “This is what you revealed to me and I offer it up to you in recognition of its importance. We are handing them down to future generations to preserve your Word that you have revealed to us.”

When we say that a particular person was the author of a book of the Bible, it means that they compiled the oral traditions that had been handed down for generations. The community is the actual author and the person that we call the author is simply the one who put it in writing. In modern terms, we would call them the editor or anthologist rather than the author.

In some cases, like Moses dying before the work was complete, one individual may not have been the actual author. For example, there appear to be at least two different authors of the Gospel of John. That can be seen most easily in that there are two different endings. One was probably written by John the Evangelist himself and another ending was written by one of his disciples. In ancient times, to say that a particular person was the “author” of a work meant it was written under their authority. It represented their teachings. And those teachings were a compilation of oral traditions.

By the way, there are several people named John in the New Testament that you need to distinguish between. John the Baptist was a preacher who sort of paved the way for Jesus’ public ministry and was beheaded by King Herod. John the Apostle was one of the 12 chosen apostles. He probably was not the author of the Gospel of John. That person is generally called John the Evangelist. He not only wrote the gospel but also wrote three New Testament letters and the Book of Revelation. The Gospel of John was probably written somewhere around the year 100 so it’s unlikely it was written by John the Apostle.

Jim told a joke about a minister who had decided he would start using a more modern translation of the Bible rather than the traditional King James version. That version was written by a committee who were more interested in flowery language and pretty prose than creating an accurate translation. A little old lady went up to him after services when he announced the change and said, “If the King James version was good enough for Peter and Paul, it’s good enough for me.” Naturally, we know it wasn’t published until the early 1600s. But what you might not realize is that they didn’t walk around with the four Gospels tucked under their arm either.

The official Canon that decided what holy writings should or should not be in the New Testament was not made until the year 400. And as we previously explained, John’s Gospel wasn’t written until about 100.

Let’s re-examine those contradictory versions of the creation myth in Genesis 1 and 2.

The reason for the differences between the two creation stories is they were originally oral traditions by two different communities. We can learn a lot about those communities by looking at what they wrote.

In Genesis 1, what do we have? Light and dark, stars, the sun and moon, water water everywhere. The water is collected so that dry land can appear and only then do we have the creatures of the land and the sea and plants to feed them. These people were obviously sailors. They lived by the sea. Their life was connected to the sea. They saw God in the sea and the land and the sun and the moon and the stars.

Genesis 2 is the story of a garden. Man was created from clay. The animals were brought to him and none were suitable companions so God created woman out of man. The land came first. The water came up out of the land in the form of a spring to irrigate everything. Obviously, these people were farmers. It’s all about the land. Plants. Animals. And human beings’ relationship to all of that.

It was Moses, allegedly, who wove these two different oral traditions into the marginally continuous almost self-consistent narratives of the book of Genesis. In order to really understand Scripture, you have to understand the communities that created the oral traditions that were eventually be written down.

Let’s take one more brief example of how understanding the culture and times in which scripture was written helps us to understand it properly.

A rather controversial passage is from Paul’s letter to Ephesians 5:22-33. Depending on the translation, it says either, “Wives be subject to your husbands…” or “Wives submit to your husbands…” This passage has been used to justify the dominance of men over women. It does go on to say, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church.” On the surface, it hardly seems a fair trade.

Today, we understand it to be a partnership between equals. Marriage is not a 50-50 proposition. It is a 100-100 proposition in which both partners are totally committed to one another in the relationship. But consider the times in which Paul wrote. He was saying the same thing. He was talking about total commitment. But the culture expressed total commitment differently than we do today. In Paul’s era, wives showed their commitment by submitting to their husbands. And to say that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church, how did Christ show his commitment to the Church? He died for it. Men committed to their wives and children by working themselves to death and an early grave. The details of what Paul wrote are not pertinent to the world today. The message behind what he wrote is still true. It’s about total commitment. We simply express it differently in modern times.

Jim went on to explain various techniques that modern historical-critical scripture scholars use to get to the heart of the meaning behind the words. He also discussed ways that they try to reconcile various versions of the manuscripts that have been discovered. I won’t go into all of the details but it is a very common-sense approach.

In my studies, I also learned about another major difference between the Catholic and Protestant approaches to Scripture. Nearly all Protestant denominations, not just the fundamentalists, believe in a doctrine known as sola scriptura which means, “Scripture alone.” In a nutshell, if it’s not in the Bible, you don’t have to believe it. There are historical reasons why the Protestant Reformation adopted this stance that I won’t go into right now.

I heard the story of Presbyterian theologian Scott Hahn who was asked by one of his theology students, “Where in Scripture does it say that Scripture is the sole authority?” The professor cited various passages that talk about how Scripture is inspired by God and how important it is. But nowhere in Scripture does it actually say that Scripture is the sole authority. So if sola scriptura isn’t in the Bible… Then we don’t have to believe it!

I won’t go into all of the other logical inconsistencies of the doctrine but there are several. Long story short… Professor Hahn converted to Catholicism and has made it his life work to explain why sola scriptura doesn’t hold water.

The Catholic approach is that divine revelation is handed on in two forms. Sacred Scripture and sacred tradition. The explanation of this is in a Vatican II document called the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation.” While Catholics have often over-emphasized tradition and underemphasized Scripture, Vatican II calls for a balance. I linked the document in the description.

The Church also has published a monitoring document called the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” which is not a bunch of memorized questions for first-graders but rather a detailed explanation of the church’s teachings on a variety of topics. I’ve also linked to an online version of that book. It too is much more common sense even though I can’t say I agree 100% with everything in there.

All of this commonsense approach to Scripture and a precise explanation of church doctrine in the modern Catechism solved the major stumbling blocks for me. I could now contemplate Catholic theology from the point of view of an adult and begin to see some of the logic behind it.

There was just one more problem… Is there a God?

That is the topic we will tackle next week and then I promise we will go back to disability issues the following week. No more stretching it out.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.