Another installment from the Knights of Columbus newsletter (with modifications). Remember our working definition of the Bible? "The collection of writings that the Catholic Church accepts to be inspired by God." One might ask - & many have - if the Bible is inspired by God, then why do we need a Church?
As we discussed last time, before the Council of Carthage in 397, there were widely varying lists of Christian writings accepted by the various regional churches, & none of them could with certitude be called the New Testament. The Church used various criteria in deciding what writings belonged to the scriptural canon: Was the writing credibly linked to an Apostle or one of his close collaborators? Did it enjoy wide acceptance throughout the Christian world? Was it proclaimed in the Sunday liturgies? Did it claim anything that was not already known & accepted by the Church? While much of this seems to be mere literary archaeology, the last point is critical to understand the place of the Scriptures in the Christian faith; for just as the Bible is not the Bible until the Catholic Church declares it to be so, its contents cannot be properly understood without her help & guidance.
The Lord Jesus while he walked among men preached & taught by the spoken word, & his Apostles did the same throughout the world, converting thousands, establishing local churches, & appointing episcipoi (bishops), along with presbyterio (priests) & diakonio (deacons), to continue their work. Thus, the Christian faith is primarily one of the spoken word - an oral handing on of what has been handed to us. The Church carries in her bosom the living memory of her Lord Jesus & what he has revealed to her. It is ultimately against this divinely-protected standard that any judgement in matters of faith can be made. This living memory is Sacred Tradition (from the Latin tradere, "to hand on"), what has been handed on to the Church by God for her own good & for her mission to proclaim the Gospel to the world.
Though the Apostles & their immediate successors eventually felt compelled to put some matters of the Faith into writing in the latter half of the first century, the New Testament writings themselves declare that not everything that our Lord Jesus said & did was written down, or that the Bible itself contains everything we need to know for the sake of our salvation, or that what was written down is self-explanatory. In fact, the writings of the New Testament continuously point either explicitly or implicitly to an authority outside of itself as the rule of Christan belief & life.
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The Church's Magisterium is the divinely-guided teaching office that brings forth the truths contained in Scripture & Tradition for the sake of the salvation of the faithful. Though Protestants may proclaim the Bible alone as the solitary & self-interpreting rule of faith, the simple observation that any two well-intentioned people can read the same passage & arrive at wildly varying & even contradictory conclusions debunks this man-made myth. The New Testament Scriptures, then, were composed in the heart of the Church & are interpreted by her to help her children on their earthly pilgrimage. The Protestant notion of a purely private interpretation of the Scriptures by reading them apart from the source that produced them is not only harmful, but also utterly alien to the Scriptures themselves & to the Christian Faith as believed from the beginning. The Church is the People of God, so fracturing, division, or individualism has little place in it.
Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on Divine Revelation, sums up this interdependence this way: "It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, sacred Scripture, & the Magisterium of the Church are so connected & associated that one of them cannot stand without the others. (DV 10)" As Scottish Bishop Henry Graham said so eloquently in his classic work, Where We Got the Bible, "It was written by the Church... it belongs to the Church, & it is her office, therefore, to declare what it means."
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Here are the other articles in the series:
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