Seek First the Kingdom - The March of Hope - Chapter 5
The Language of the Kingdom
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The next and immediate thing that changed for me after I visited the Eucharist regularly was that my understanding of sacred scripture began to change. Scripture began to open and take on a new light. Scripture reading had always been a very laborious and unfruitful task, leaving me in a fog. But I was now beginning to sense a mystical family of vibrant souls walking through the mist with me. They were from the kingdom, bringing me light, that special light of Christ that allows us to begin experiencing this beautiful place. “I am the light of the world; anyone who follows me will not be walking in the dark but will have the light of life.”[1]
I must take a moment to discuss how this light coming from the kingdom, indeed the light of the Holy Spirit, overcame a severe dead-end I had reached with scripture. I will critically discuss the dangers of the spirit of intellectual skepticism that finds its way into Catholic scriptural scholarship. This skepticism is demonstrated subtly by elevating the role of man's intellect above God's revelation.
Some intellectuals believe that the only valid interpretation of scripture is that from the natural world using only man's natural reasoning. By their standards, they have "unlocked" the mysteries of the Bible by explaining everything as if it had no supernatural essence of its own. In an arrogance of the mind that is wholly typical of the modern mentality, we are led to believe that ancient people could not grasp the world as we now believe it to be through the true gods of the contemporary mind, empirical science, and materialism. In short, miracles do not and did not happen, according to these unfortunate thinkers. Angels, to them, were mythological literary devices used to explain physical and psychological forces these poor ancients could not comprehend. Praise God for the modern intellect, I suppose, would be our new mantra under their influence.
If we leave scriptural interpretation in the hands of contemporary intellectuals, we will all become atheists or, worse yet, skeptics. I am not condemning intellectual scholarship or the historical method. I condemn placing the scientific method above the Spirit of God as reflected through the doctrines of the Church and the teachings of the Holy Father with the Magisterium.
In discussing this topic, Pope Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth, uses, in turn, the inspiration of Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev's book The Antichrist to explain the dangers of misguided scholarly biblical exegesis:
“The fact is that scriptural exegesis can become a tool of the Antichrist. Soloviev is not the first person to tell us that; it is the deeper point of the temptation story itself (author’s note: this refers to Mathew 4: 1-11). The alleged findings of scholarly exegesis have been used to put together the most dreadful books that destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle the faith.
The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern world view, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history-that everything to do with God is to be relegated to the domain of subjectivity. And so, the Bible no longer speaks of God, the living God; no, now we alone speak and decide what God can do and what we will and should do. And the Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times.”[2]
What a relevant warning from the Holy Father. If the scholars do not heed that warning, then at the very least, let the faithful do so to save their souls. This blasphemous elevation of the scientific method in scriptural study, not wrong in itself but distorted beyond acceptability by the modern mind, led me to a dead end in my scriptural study and meditations.
I reached a point many years ago, following the intellectual elite, where I actually could not see any reason that one should even read the scriptures themselves. I am not kidding you. I have always had a preference for logic. And, as I read the mighty scientific exegeses of these modern scholars, I decided that the only genuinely logical thing to do was to forget about the Bible itself and to read only the scholarly explanations. Since one cannot understand the Bible, in the modern framework, without keen intellectual insight into the historical, scientific method combined with years of Doctoral scholarship, why even venture into scripture? Would it not be wiser to let the erudite and learned academics explain it all to us as it “really happened” rather than trying to interpret it ourselves?
I really did reach this point. And, as I mentioned above, it was pretty logical, given the cracked foundation on which the logic stood. And herein lays the problem. The problem with logic is that it can lead you not to enlightenment but to insanity if it is divorced from genuine reason. This point is what the modern materialists and rationalists, so impressed with their own intellectual acumen, really do not understand. They misuse their methodology by ignoring the voice of God in favor of a first philosophy of “natural reason only” (i.e., there was no resurrection, miracles…etc.). This foundation leads not to a better understanding of the world and the teachings of Christ but to pure insanity. It is not at all reasonable. G.K Chesterton poignantly explains this matter in a way that could be applied to many modern Bible scholars:
“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and, often in a purely rational sense, satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed especially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all men deny that they are conspirators, which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.
Now speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.”[3]
I will give an example of how I became intertwined in this lunacy by putting my faith in the intellectual class of rationalist Biblical scholars. This is an elementary demonstration, but it will serve my purpose.
I am using a New American Catholic Study Bible. This is the newest version of scripture in the English-speaking world and is supposed to be the height and summit of biblical scholarship. Bear in mind that I cannot say it is not. I am not a scholar, so I will never challenge academics in their own field, for I am not qualified to do that. Nothing I am saying here is an attack on their scholasticism; it is only an attack on their elevation of the historical method over that of the Spirit of the Bible. It attacks those whose first philosophy of materialism leads them to conclude that miracles and prophecies did not really happen because the material, natural solution must be considered primary.
For example, Jesus, in this view, did not rise from the dead; he merely rose “in the hearts” of his disciples. Jesus did not multiply the loaves and fish to feed thousands; he opened up the hearts of those present to each share what they might have with their neighbor, and so on and so forth. This is the kind of rubbish the skeptical scholars will serve for you. They have no scientific reason or evidence to doubt that Jesus rose from the dead or multiplied the food items. Yet challenging their academic atheism makes us appear as mere fundamentalists.
Does this strike a familiar note for you as you reflect on the Holy Father’s comments above? This is a subtle but important point of clarity. And this is very key for the average lay Catholic that one does not need to be a scholar to judge the authenticity of a scholar’s work as it relates to the official doctrine of the Church. Do not be intimidated, dear non-scholar. When the academic tells you that angels do not exist, except as literary devices for the unsophisticated ancients, or that hell does not exist, you may take your sword and run that heretic out of the room with all the enthusiasm of an eleventh-century Crusader. You might feel progressive and erudite with that teaching, but you will never get to heaven following it. “The existence of the spiritual, non-corporal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls ‘angels’ is a truth of the faith. The witness of scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition.”[4] “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity.”[5] These two quotations from the catechism of the Catholic Church, outlining the two-thousand-year Tradition of the Church on those matters, are all you need to open your sheathe. In the authentic order of truth, Church doctrine and dogma always trumps the “progressive” intellectual.
The intellectual pursuit of truth is obviously a good thing. It was the Catholic Church that founded the university system in Europe. It was the Catholic clergy who developed the early intellectual disciplines in the field of economics. The Catholic Church held fast to whatever arts, letters, and ancient learning it could during the Dark Ages. At the same time, the rest of society fought endless wars in the aftermath of a decline in central authority from the aging Roman Empire.[6] A Catholic Jesuit priest convinced Einstein to throw out his “cosmological constant” and accept the Big Bang as the natural conclusion to his own theory.[7] Modern atheists think that the Big Bang refuted the claims of religion when that theory itself was influenced by a Catholic thinker. The Vatican has the oldest functioning scientific institute in the Western world. So let us come now and waste no more time creating myths of a Church that opposes intellectual progress. This will only delay the March of Hope.
Notwithstanding that discussion above, however, I warn that elevating that intellect to the point of curiosity over already divinely revealed truths of dogma is diabolical. Send the modern rationalist packing who does so. This is one of the great values of having an institutional Church, for she can hold firm like a rock as the world spins into lunacy with its insane "progress"!
Despite their claims to progress through academic erudition and ever more clever alternative interpretations of Scripture to that of the Church through her Sacred Tradition, Skeptics cannot make genuine progress. They are forever debating and intellectualizing; they are rarely bold enough to actually believe something and to act on that belief. This is the prison of spiritual communism to which I refer in Journey. The surety of the truth handed to us on the trail of the Dogmatic Creed makes us bold and proactive.
The example of Joan of Arc is remarkably applicable to the problem of skepticism about revealed truths. Joan of Arc would have never saved France and Western Civilization with it if she had succumbed to the skeptical indecision and tepidity of her captains. Joan of Arc had been told what to do and was guaranteed success by her Voices from heaven. This was no time for intellectual theorizing over hypothetical battle strategies. With the certainty of heaven's guidance, it was time to storm the walls of Les Tourelles. Her disdain for her weak and skeptical leadership circle should be our own disdain for the academic skeptic who insists that nothing can be believed, implying that no religious truth may be defended. The solid doctrine and Sacred Tradition of the Church on the trail of the Dogmatic Creed gives us the courage to storm against evil and frame as a lunatic these intellectual skeptics who wish to be admired as "thought leaders." In summary, the academic pursuit of the truth is a good and necessary thing; the prideful elevation of that pursuit to intellectual skepticism about revelation is playing with the devil himself.
Now, finally, I am getting on to the simple example I mentioned. This New American Catholic Study Bible has a preface to each gospel. In the foreword to St. Mathew, it “proves” that the book was written after A.D. 70.
“The post-A.D. 70 date is confirmed within the text by 22, 7, which refers to the destruction of Jerusalem.”[8]
The immediate conclusion here is that only a writer who already knew about the destruction of Jerusalem could have written that verse. You cannot write something you have no prior knowledge about, correct? We have logic on a rampage here. This “confirmation” is mystifying to anyone who accepts the supernatural nature of the scriptures. But let us pursue our commentator’s logic. Now, the verse to which this quotation refers, Matthew 22:7, is spoken by Our Lord and reads as follows:
“The king was enraged and sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.”[9]
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, like the description given by Jesus. But why this verse "confirms" the dating of the text as being after A.D. 70 is beyond me. Please understand; I know what is being proposed here that only one who already knew of the destruction could write about it. But why not accept that Jesus could have said this years before it occurred? To do that, he would have had to have supernatural powers of prophecy, which we Catholics know he did have. But the commentator assumes this not to be the case. If you are a person of reason, you must take this commentary to its logical conclusion. We shall then determine whether we find truth or end up in lunacy.
In reality, the commentator is subtly making the case that Jesus could not have prophesized such a thing. If you believe he could have, you would not be able to "confirm" the dating post-A.D. 70. Theoretically, it could have been written the day after Jesus spoke these words. If, on the other hand, you believe that this verse does confirm the dating, as the commentator states, then you are saying that Jesus could not have really said it. It is then merely a story made up by someone later who already has knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem to make a point about Jesus' teaching. The Spirit lurking underneath all this is that there is no supernatural explanation for the Bible. Everything can be explained using natural scientific reasoning.
Even with much outstanding scholarship in the commentaries, which contributes significantly to our proper understanding of scripture, this influence of materialism and skepticism described above can be found in more than one commentary throughout the text. When I run into these disconnects in reasoning caused by the dark smoke of materialism and skepticism, I must hide in the bosom of the Church's doctrine from the lunatics, even lunatics with Catholic credentials.
Now, please understand the critical point. For all I know, the text was written after A.D. 70. I have no idea when it was written. What I am protesting here, and have every right to protest as a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church, is the usurpation by the scholar of that Church doctrine that clearly holds to the supernatural character and capabilities of Jesus. Jesus could have referred to the fall of Jerusalem decades before it happened because he could do it. And there is no scientific evidence to suggest that he could not. The only thing the skeptic has to offer is his misguided "first philosophy," the unproven proposition from which one must build a paradigm, that neither Jesus nor anyone else can produce supernatural outcomes. Therefore, the referenced verse must "confirm" the dating in that darkened mind. We have indeed run our course, and we have found lunacy.
This is where I ended up many years ago concerning studying the Bible, this place that was part of the Dark Forest I described in Journey to Christendom. The erudite arguments of the skeptics were alluring to me, for they appealed to my intellectual pride. I loved conversing with poor fundamentalists and enlightening them with my knowledge of scripture from the academic, historical framework. But afterward, in the quiet of my heart and the recesses of my rational intellect, I could not accept the logic of what was being proposed as sane. I was troubled by the irrationality of the scholars, not necessarily their conclusions. The argument that Jesus was not supernatural bothered me, not necessarily whether or not the Gospel of Mathew was written after A.D. 70. Thank God that the Virgin Mary used my search for rationality and logic to bring me back into the fold of the Church.
It is like this: the Bible is a book written by God in a language that cannot be interpreted in its fullness and with genuine authenticity other than by using the language of the Spirit Christ gave to us in the Traditions and teachings of the Church as we find in the Dogmas, Creeds, Magisterial teachings, and the writings of the saints. Once that language begins to be understood, the Bible opens up in its rationality and spiritual strength. This is the crucial point here. One might be personally inspired by the Bible in any context, but I discovered only in my newfound living Spirit of the Church the key to being both inspired and rational simultaneously. In other words, entry into the Spirit of the great land of Catholicism was the key by which I became a total person in Christ and not just a spiritual nomad without a rational point of reference.
This that I have described above is one of the immediate changes that came over me after I began to visit Jesus Christ in the Eucharist under the consecrated guidance of the Virgin Mary. I recovered my enthusiasm for the sacred scriptures and saw them in a new light. One of the first things I did on my new journey was to read the entire New Testament and the Pentateuch with a fresh set of spiritual eyes.
Before moving to the next important section on the March of Hope, I must conclude by telling you how this new scriptural understanding built the foundation for where my saintly friends Joan of Arc and Thérèse were leading me next.
[1] John 8:12 (New Jerusalem)
[2] Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). (2007). Jesus of Nazareth New York: Doubleday. pp. 35-36.
[3] Chesterton, G.K. (This edition:2002). Orthodoxy, North Carolina: Reformation Press. pp. 39-40.
[4] The Catechism of the Catholic Church. (1995). Doubleday: New York. Paragraph 328.
[5] The Catechism of the Catholic Church. (1995). Doubleday: New York. Paragraph 1035.
[6] Belloc, Hilaire. (1920). Europe and the Faith, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers. pp. 130-142.
[7] The author refers specifically to a Discovery Channel video presentation on the work of Physicist Stephen Hawking.
[8] The Catholic Study Bible (1990), New York: Oxford University Press p. 6 (New Testament).
[9] Mathew 22:7 (New American Bible)