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.