by Matthew A. C. Newsome ©2002

    What is this book that we call the Bible?  After nearly 2000 years of Christian history, we still find ourselves periodically asking this question.  Despite the many different sects that Christianity has splintered into in the centuries since the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants, for the most part, could at least find common ground in the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God.  Of all of the different beliefs and practices that Catholics have at times been forced to defend against Protestant challenges, one would never suspect the very infallibility of the Bible to be one of them.  The Bible is the sole authority of faith for all Protestant denominations, isn’t it?  The rallying cry of the Reformer was “Sola Scriptura,” after all.

     As it turns out, the very authority of the Bible is being ever more increasingly called into question by Protestant theologians.  I am not talking about the rank-and-file Protestants that fill the pews on Sunday.  For the most part, their belief in the Bible is unshaken.  No, I am not pointing any fingers at the sheep.  But they are being led by some questionable shepherds these days.

     The catalyst for all this was a letter, written by a local Methodist minister to certain of his congregation.  This letter was not published publicly, so I will not reveal the minister’s name or church, but it can be taken as representative of a lot of modern day thinking about the Bible.

     The letter says, in part, “Love in Christ is the major thing, much greater in import than where we disagree. . . [Wesley] would not quibble over minor details of belief. . . He also said that ‘Methodists think and let think.’ . . . All the sudden, agreement with ‘right doctrine’ . . . has become the essence of faith for many and it is destructive within the body of Christ, and in some cases misrepresents the message of Christ. . . Jesus must be incredulous.”

     He goes on to say that he has studied the Bible most of his life, is “drawn to” Jesus Christ through the Gospels, and is “compelled to look at” the rest of the Bible through them.  He writes, “If love, compassion, and forgiveness are kingdom essentials for Jesus, then some of the words, passages, and stories of the Bible got God’s message confused.  The Bible is authoritative, but not infallible.  Not all of it is of equal value if Jesus is Lord.”

     Attached to his letter was an article by another minister that is unremarkable except that it makes two points: 1) the Bible cannot be infallible because certain parts of it cannot be taken literally; and 2) there are no definite, set in stone doctrines of Christianity.

     What is one to make of this?  When this letter was shown to me, I was surprised, but not really shocked.  Why not?  Because the views expressed in this letter are not as uncommon as they once were among Protestant theologians.  The ones who extol the Bible as their supreme authority in matters of faith have come to question that very authority.  How could this have happened?

     To begin to answer this question, one has to first understand exactly what the Bible is, and why we (as Catholics and Protestants) believe in it.  Christianity, along with Judaism, has often been called the “religion of the Book.”  But our religion, the Christian religion, is not founded upon a book, but upon a man, the God-man, Jesus Christ.  Our religion is the only one that can claim to have God as its founder.

     Now, if we are to know anything – anything at all – about our religion, we must acknowledge that God has revealed Himself to man.  And furthermore there must be someplace where this revelation can be found, for us to know of it.  Christians believe that the ultimate revelation of God was in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the second person of the Holy Trinity.  When He came to us, He came to us as a Jew, one of God’s chosen people, in the Royal line of David.  He based His teachings in the Jewish Scriptures, and this validated them for Christian use, even among the Gentiles.

    There were many translations and compilations of Scriptures in use among the Jews.  The version that Jesus used, and quoted from in His teaching, was called the Septuagint.  It is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (Greek being the common tongue of the Mediterranean at the time) that was made some 250 years before the birth of Christ.  It contained 46 separate books, and those 46 books are what make up the Christian Old Testament. So the Old Testament has been around longer than Christianity, but where did we get the New Testament?

     The twelve Apostles had many things revealed to them from Jesus and later, at Pentecost, from the Holy Spirit.  This Divine Revelation we call the “Deposit of Faith,”  and it has been passed on orally, through the teaching authority of the Church, for almost 2000 years now .  Some of this teaching has been written down , and this written part of the Deposit of Faith is called the New Testament.

     As you can imagine, there was much being written by the early Christians, excited about their new knowledge of God and salvation.  What we call “gospel” accounts, or stories telling the good news of Christ, were written.  Bishops and church leaders wrote various letters full of teaching.  After a very short time, it came to be known that some of this new writing was itself inspired, like the Jewish Scriptures, and people began to read from these texts at Mass.

     Different churches were reading from different texts during their liturgies, and it was apparent that not all of these texts were inspired Scripture.  Some assurance was needed as to what was and was not to be believed in, as a matter of the faith.  Christians were being actively persecuted, and if one is to risk death, it is only fair to know what one is dying for!  Would you lay down your life for a fallible, ordinary book, no matter how inspiring?

     So the Church met in a council at Rome and this issue was discussed.  Prompted by this council, in 382 AD, the leader of the Christian world, the successor to Peter, Pope Damasus, put together a list of what he considered to be inspired texts.  This list contained 73 books – the 46 from the Jewish Scriptures and 27 new writings that we now call the New Testament.  Some were left out that many thought should be included – like the epistles of Clement, and the Gospel of Thomas.  Others were included that many thought should be left out, like John’s Revelation.

     In 393 the Council of Hippo examined this list and agreed that it should be recognized as the Christian Sacred Canon.  In 397 the Council of Carthage again decreed that this list represented Sacred Scripture.  And finally, in 405 AD, Pope Innocent I officially declared as a matter of faith that these 73 books were the inspired word of God, and those same books have made up our Bible ever since.  Case closed.

     I give this mini-history of the Bible to show where it comes from, and why we believe in it.  Ask any Christian, of any stripe, why he believes in the Bible, and the answer you are likely to get will range from, “because that’s how I was raised” to “I don’t know, I just do.”  There is nothing wrong with believing in the Bible as a sheer matter of faith.  But God created us rational beings, and He wants us to use our reason in conjunction with our faith.  The two should not oppose one another.  We should believe in the Bible as a matter of faith, but that belief should not be irrational.

     For Catholics, the answer ultimately comes down to the authority of the Church.  We believe that Christ established a Church with divine teaching authority , charged her with preserving and promoting the Deposit of Faith (see above) and gave her the special charism of infallibility to safeguard that teaching so that it would never be corrupted.   God wanted His teaching to endure for all time, and He is fully capable of ensuring that it does so.

     Exactly why Catholics believe this is another matter, and one that whole books can be (and have been) written about .  It is not the scope of this article.  Suffice it to say, we know we can believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, and inspired Word of God because the authority of the Catholic Church moves us to do so.  (St. Augustine said “I would not believe in the Gospels were it not for the authority of the Catholic Church.”) The Church, we are told, is the pillar and bulwark of truth (1 Tim. 3:15).  The gates of hell shall never prevail against the Church founded on Peter (Matt. 16:19) and it is Peter’s successors that assure us that the Bible is divinely inspired.

     But what of our Protestant brothers and sisters?  Martin Luther successfully did away with the notion of an infallible, authoritative Church.  Without that, on what are we to base our belief in an infallible, authoritative Scripture?  Luther himself had an idea.  He believed that “inspired” writings are those that have the power to bring men the assurance of forgiveness through Christ.  Of course, this is very subjective.  One could write a book today that addressed this theological topic, and that would not make it inspired.  And not every book in the Bible is able to pass this test.  Luther was able to justify the removal of 7 Old Testament books (the duetero-canonical books, called by Protestants the “Apocrypha.”)  In fact, he advocated removing even more than this, including the entire Epistle of James (because it contradicts his sola fide theology), but he was eventually convinced not to do so.  His contemporaries were more protective it seems of the New Testament than parts of the Old.  They would agree with our letter-writer; “not all of it is of equal value.”

     Other Protestants had other criteria.  Calvin wrote, “The word will never gain credit in the hearts of men till it be confirmed by the internal testimony of the Spirit.”   But what is the “internal testimony of the Spirit,” and how are we to judge it?  Is this any more than a “feeling” of being inspired?  What if the Spirit gives me a different testimony than you say He gives you?  Would our “Bibles” be different?  The works of Shakespeare are inspiring to many – certainly much more so than the Book of Numbers.  More to the point, the writings of some of the early Church Fathers, like St. Irenaeus, or St. Augustine, are surely more eloquent, more moving, and contain more Christian teaching than certain books of the New Testament, like 3 John.  But these books are not divinely inspired.

     What it boils down to is that Protestants have no higher authority than themselves to tell them what are and are not inspired Biblical texts – or indeed, that the Bible is inspired at all. What they ultimately rely on is tradition -- the tradition, handed on to them from their forefathers in the faith, that this is the Bible, this is the inspired Word of God.

     This is, of course, the same reason Catholics have for believing the Bible.  But we acknowledge our tradition as Sacred Tradition, the Tradition of an authoritative Church that we are bound by obedience of faith to follow.  The Protestants make no such claim for their tradition.  Dare we call it a tradition of man?

     Recognizing that our earliest sources for the Biblical canon are the fourth century councils of Hippo and Carthage, most Protestant scholars readily acknowledge these councils.  The problem arises when one asks the simple question, “Why?” Why are we to take the Councils of Hippo and Carthage as binding on our faith but not the Council of Trent (that affirmed the same Biblical canon)?  Why do we recite the creed given to us by the Council of Nicea and ignore the second Lateran Council?  What did these early councils have that the later councils lacked?

     The justification given is that these early councils represented a pure church, before “corruption” set in (before the gates of hell prevailed?).  But at what date did the Church become corrupt?  And why do we see all of the characteristically “Catholic” doctrines being taught during the first four centuries – prior to the proclamation of the Biblical canon?  This includes the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Apostolic Succession, the primacy of the Pope, the veneration of saints, devotion to Mary, the doctrine of purgatory, infant baptism, confession to a priest, and a host of other things that Protestants question.  Why do Protestants accept the early councils when they tell us that the Bible is inspired, but not when they tell us these other things?  And why do they believe the councils when they say the Bible is the inspired Word of God and then leave out seven books that these councils included in it?

     One is almost afraid to look too deeply into these questions, for fear of the implications the answers would have.  This is why, for a lot of Protestants who have examined this issue, their sole authority becomes not so authoritative.

     Our Methodist minister finds himself among plenty of company when he says “the Bible is authoritative, but not infallible.”  What does that mean?  He is on the fence,  not yet willing to say the Bible is not authoritative, but undermining the very justification for its authority.  What can it mean to be authoritative yet fallible?  Infallible means “without error.”  If we truly believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then we know that it must be without error, because God is perfect.  Error is the absence of perfection.  God is not – and cannot be, by definition -- in error.

     We do not mean that every single word in the Bible, in any particular translation, must be taken in its extreme literal sense.  This is the mistake that many fall into, believing that if parts of the Bible are not literally true then they are in error.  No, the Bible is a collection of books, some allegory, some genealogy, some poetry, some history, and so on.  The books of the Bible can only be truly understood in the context of the literary forms in which they were written.  And, taken as intended, in context, the Bible is without error.  Yes it can be confusing, but that is why we have the Church to guide us.

     If we believe the Bible is fallible, that it does contain error, we are forced to admit one of two things.  That God, too, is fallible and capable of error; or that we do not have an accurate account of the Word of God.  If the former, then why do we worship God?  If the latter, then how can we truly know what to believe about Him?

     To say that the Bible is fallible and yet still accept it as authoritative means that we are willing to put our faith in – and bet our eternal souls on – something that is less than perfect, less than divine.  I say that anyone willing to make that bet does not fully grasp the sobering reality of his own immortality.

     If we dispense with the authority of the Church, we undermine the authority of the Church’s book.  And if we forsake the authority of the Bible, we are no better than the agnostics, wanting to believe that there is a God, but knowing absolutely nothing of Him.

    “All of a sudden,” the wayward shepherd writes, “belief in ‘right-thinking’ has become essential to the faith.”  But the sheep have been seeking out right thinking, called in Greek orthodoxy, for the entire history of mankind.  And for the past 2000 years they have had it.  But now -- not “all of a sudden” but subtly and slyly -- orthodoxy has been denounced as “destructive of the Body of Christ.”  We are even told that it “misrepresents the message of Christ.”

     Did you catch that?  Orthodoxy, right thinking, gets Christ’s message wrong.  And does wrong thinking, a.k.a. heterodoxy or heresy, get it right?  If standing up for orthodoxy is divisive – as the recipients of this letter were labeled in their church, and as thousands of orthodox Catholics are labeled in their churches – if there is no right or wrong, no “set in stone” doctrines for us, as Christians, to believe in, then forgive me for asking, but why are we going to church on Sunday morning?  Why go to Mass?  Why listen to what the pastor preaches to us?  Why bother?

     What did St. John Fisher, St. Thomas More, and countless others give their lives for during the Reformation, if right doctrine does not matter?  What did the first four Popes gladly accept their martyrdoms for, if we can’t really know anything for certain about Our Lord?  Why was Stephen stoned?  And what did Jesus die for on the cross, if there was no objective truth He meant to give us?

    Jesus is Love.  Our pastor friend has that right.  And we agree with him without hesitation on that point.  But he must realize that there is something perverted about the idea that he is learning of the love of Christ from a book he claims to be in error, and therefore untrustworthy.  There is something perverted in the ego that says, “The Bible must have gotten God’s message confused,” for it establishes the self as the final interpreter of God’s message .  If God loves us – and I know that He does – it is with a perfect love that would never conceive of leaving His children without an accurate and authoritative means by which we may know of Him, and know Him, so that we may give all of our trust, our obedience, our very selves to Him, so that we may one day be with Him.