Traditional Catholic Teaching - Lesson 6

Lesson 6 - Tradition and the Bible

Tradition — What it means

I once went round an iron foundry in North Wales. It was a fascinating tour. It was an extraordinary thing to see how the iron ore which looked like a heap of brown earth went into the blast furnace and then after some hours was released in the form of a shining stream of metal. All this complicated process was carried out by a group of about twenty workmen. Each man knew exactly what to do and did it with great skill. I said to the foreman:

"How did these men learn to do all this? They didn't read it in a book, did they?"

"No," he said, "it's a matter of tradition, My own family has been in this business for two hundred years. We learn it from our fathers and from the men who have been doing the job before".

In the same way a boy learns the traditions of his school, a young man of his university. A man joins the army and he is instructed in the traditions of the regiment. Certain standards of conduct, certain ways of doing things, certain ideals are learnt most commonly by human beings not by reading about them but by picking them up from the living organisation which preserves them and hands them on. The great majority of mankind can't read and never could. Even those who can read don't in fact read very much. Most of what we learn comes to us by the word or the example of other people.

The Tradition of the Church

That's the human way of doing things and that's the principal way in which God means us to learn our religion. We learn the ways of God and the truths of God by the living organisation which Christ, God-made man, founded —His Church. The Church is a living thing and the teaching of God is handed down in it from generation to generation. The round of celebrations and feasts each year gives us a complete picture of the life and teachings of Christ.

Christmas teaches us about the birth of Christ, Holy Week and Easter re-enacts His sufferings, His death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead.

And so we go on through the year through His Ascension into heaven, His sending of the Holy Spirit, until in November we are reminded (on the day of All Saints and of the Commemoration of the Dead) of the great family to which we belong and of our final end, the purpose for which we are made.

Then there are the letters sent out regularly by the Bishops, the steady preaching week after week in the parish church, the occasional letter on an important point from the Pope.

In our schools and homes we have the Catechism (the simple systematic account of our Faith). We have the example of our parents and fellow-Christians and especially the example of those outstanding men and women who have most clearly imitated in their own lives the life of Christ and whom we call the Saints.

All this is what we call the tradition of the Church, the handing on of the teaching of Christ. And this is the main way in which we learn it. It has gone on for centuries without a break from the time when the Apostles went out to teach all nations as Christ commanded them.

Christians here are following out the command of St.Paul written in one of the very earliest letters which form part of the New Testament:

Stand firm then brethren and bold by the traditions you have learned in word or in writing from us. — (From the second letter to the Thessalonians written about the year A.D. 53.)

It is very important to realise that the main way in which we learn the teaching of Christ is from Christ's Church. As we shall see in a moment the Bible is the word of God. But the New Testament, the Gospels, the letters of the Apostles and the rest, were not yet written when the Church began teaching. The whole thing was not complete until somewhere around the year 90.

The first Christian therefore learned the teaching of Christ only by word of mouth from the Apostles and those commissioned by the Apostles. The first teaching of the Apostles was done almost entirely by word of mouth. And in fact today the main teaching is done in the same way. The first and principal way in which we learn the teaching of Christ is therefore by the tradition of the Church and by the living voice of the Church continuing that tradition today.

The Bible — What It Is

And now what of the Bible? The Bible is not one book, it is a collection, almost a library. And for a Catholic the whole Bible is the word of God.

It is the record of God's dealing with man. It starts with the creation of mankind in happiness, in friendship with God: then the Fall, when man turned his hack on God: then God's promise that He would send a Redeemer.

There follows the history of the people of Israel and the messages brought to them by the prophets.

This makes up what we call the Old Testament, "testament" meaning both a legacy from God and a contract made between God and man. The Old Testament is one long record of how God prepared the world and in particular His chosen people the Hebrews for the coming of the Redeemer. Clearer and clearer through their history we see the light growing like the sky brightening into dawn.

Finally the sun rises, Christ is born and we have the New Testament, the fulfilment of all God's promises, the new contract between God and man.

From start to finish, says the Catholic Church, it is the word of God which we must reverence, read, ponder and defend against attacks. That is why you will find that all the prayer books, the sermons, the spiritual writings of the Catholic Church are full of the Bible.

That is why if you visit any of those great cathedrals which were built when Europe was entirely Catholic you will find them full of carvings, statues, pictures of events and of the great personages, the prophets, patriarchs and kings of the Bible.

All those were the best means of giving people the contents of the Bible before printing was invented and so before the art of reading was widely spread. Once printing was invented there were one hundred and twenty~ four editions of the Bible printed by Catholics within the first fifty years and there were no less than nineteen German editions of the Bible before ever Martin Luther wrote his first Protestant translation.

The Word of God

The Bible was written by men and yet we say it is the word of God. What do we mean? We mean that the writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. That is. God by His divine power:

1. Moved them to write.

2. Brought back to their minds or actually put into their minds what to write.

3. Guarded them from making any mistake in what they wrote.

What Guarantee?

How do we know this is so? Only because the Church guarantees that the Bible is the word of God. Many Protestants (not all nowadays it must be said) hold that the Bible is the word of God, How do they know? How do I know? God has not told me so directly. It is no use saying, "I know the Bible is the word of God because it helps me to live well". Lots of people have found Shakespeare and all kinds of authors help them to live well. They aren't the word of God though.

We know the Bible is the word of God simply because God's Church has told us that it is the word of God. That is our guarantee.

The Bible Needs Interpreting

We need the Church to interpret the Bible. You or I or any man pick up the Bible. We read it and we find in it much that is not clear. Many things hard to understand.
St. Peter makes the point when he is talking about the letters of St. Paul:

There are passages in them, he wrote, difficult to understand, and these, like the rest of Scripture, are twisted into a wrong sense by ignorant and restless minds, to their own undoing. (2 Peter 3: 16)

There are many things which could be understood in different ways. And quite sincerely. You have only to consider how different bodies of Christians differ on points like the question of divorce: on the meaning of faith: on the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Men may read and do read the Bible and very sincerely come to different conclusions on those matters. Now which is right? Is God giving us His message and making it impossible to get the right meaning? In short we need an interpreter. We need someone who can tell us:

"This is the true meaning and no other."
Unless God has given us that interpreter we are at sea.
And so a man must ask himself:
" How do I know the Bible is the word of God?"
" How do I know what writings are the Bible and what are not?"

"How do I know what is the real meaning of the various difficult obscure passages?"

In every case the questioner must come back to the fact that we need a real living authoritative voice that can tell us the answer. A voice, an authority guaranteed by God. Otherwise the Bible is just an interesting collection of pious books and folk-lore.

That interpreter is the Catholic Church which Christ founded and to which He gave authority to teach in His Name,

A Crucial Point

Notice that when we use the four Gospels to prove that Christ founded the Catholic Church we leave aside for the moment the question as to whether they are the word of God or not. We simply take the four Gospels as ordinary historical works. We agree that they must be proved to be trustworthy, like any other book of history. That is the only fair and reasonable way of proving our case to an unbeliever.

But once we have proved that the Church is God's Church then we reasonably accept the word of the Church when it tells us that the Gospels and the rest of the Bible are more than merely history books, that they are the word of God. Then we come to read them again with a fresh mind.

No Error in the Bible

It is a Catholic teaching that there is no error in the Bible. What are we to say then to the many people who would say:

"No, the Bible is full of mistakes in scientific matters for example. Therefore it cannot be the word of God Who is truth itself,"

The Catholic Church answers:

There are no mistakes in the Bible provided that we know (1) exactly what the author wrote and (2) in what sense he meant his words to be taken.

(1) When we know exactly what the author wrote.
The Bibles we read, unless we are scholars, are translations. It may well be that the translator has made mistakes. Those translators' mistakes will be errors but they will not be the Bible's errors.

(2) We must know in what sense the author meant his words to be taken.

A scientist or a poet or an ordinary man would express the same things in very different ways. For example, a young man in love when he is with the young woman who is the object of his affections feels happy, elevated. He wants to tell her so. What does he say? He might say: "You are my sunshine". It is no use another man tapping him on the shoulder and saying to him: "No, no, she is not sunshine, she is a girl". It's no use a scientist telling him: "What you ought to say is: you are a considerable source of stimulus to my cardiac reactions and my physiological and psychological structure." He says: "She is my sunshine", And he's right.

Now in the same way many things in the Bible are to be understood as written in a poetic style or a popular non-scientific style. But they are true all the same.

We read in the Book of Josue, for example, that when the Israelites were fighting against Gabaon "the sun and the moon stood still". Clearly what the Bible means is that God by some means of His own prolonged the daylight for the Israelites. How He did it we don't know. But the inspired writer of the Bible puts it in a vivid way by saying: "The sun and the moon stood still".

Just like the young man in love might say to his girl: "You gave one look at me and my heart stood still". We won't be so foolish as to say to him: "You're wrong. Your heart didn't stand still or you'd be dead." We know what he means. He's just using vivid language to express it.

Creation In Six Days?

That is just one example. But how often the same kind of misunderstanding leads people to say the Bible is wrong. Take for instance the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In the ordinary English edition they occupy about nine pages. In those nine pages you have an account of the history of the world from the Creation of Abraham. That is nine pages to cover hundreds of millions of years.

From Abraham to the birth of Our Lord there are about 830 pages~ and these cover only two thousand years of the history of one small people the Hebrews. Clearly we must expect to find those first nine pages written in a very condensed or popular or perhaps poetic style. We won't look for scientific statement. But only for a popular, simple, but true account.

What does it mean when it says God created all things in six days? It means quite simply that God made everything. But why six days? Because Moses writing for a simple uneducated nomadic race just out of slavery wanted to put the truth to them that one God made everything in a way they would understand. And so he pictures God as a workman and divides the whole of creation up between six working days. The Bible is conveying a truth in a popular and striking form.

It is obvious that if we are to use the Bible and read the Bible as it is meant to he read we must do so with guidance. That guidance will need to be given by a guide we are sure of. The guidance has been given by God — it is the Catholic Church. The only Church that today even claims to speak with authority on the Bible,

Note on evolution, — As regards the human body we have a large liberty of discussion in the matter of Evolution.
The crucial words in the Bible are in Genesis 2: 7:
And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth and breathed into his face the breath of life and man became a living soul.

This leaves us free to accept or reject the theory of Evolution as regards the body. God may have formed the human body by a gradual development from lower forms of life.

God still remains creator of all, because unless God had created the lower form of life there would have been nothing to evolve.

The human soul is not a material thing and therefore could not have developed from matter. The human soul is directly created by God.

It seems certain also that the human body even if it developed from a lower form of life would need a direct act of God to fit it for the soul when the moment came at which God decided to create the soul.

How To Pray (i)

By this time you have received a fair amount of information about the fundamentals of religion and the Catholic Faith. But information by itself will not lead to a deep understanding. Only prayer will give that.

In the following pages and at the end of further leaflets in this course you will find some instruction on how to pray. If you do not yet pray, try it. If you already pray then maybe these pages will help you to pray better.

Prayer is natural to man. It is natural to man to acknowledge that he depends entirely on God, We are here only because God made us: and He made us because He loved us. If we form the habit of prayer, we are laying a foundation of right thinking and right conduct.

Fundamentally prayer is a very simple thing, It is the raising of the mind and heart to God. That is, we turn our mind, our attention to God, we think about Him; and then our heart goes out to Him in adoration, love, praise, thanksgiving, sorrow for sin, requests for what we need. Prayer isn't just thinking about God. There has to be the movement of the heart towards Him, too. And yet this simple thing can sometimes seem complicated and can be difficult because of the distractions which inevitably come to us.

Let us see some of the straightforward ways in which we can pray and then we will consider some of the difficulties and how to deal with them.

The Practice Of The Presence Of God

The best way to pray always is to realise that we are always in the presence of God. He is with us all the time. God in fact is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. That sounds an extraordinary thing to say but it is strictly true. I only exist because God holds me in existence. If He once turned His mind away from me I should drop out of existence as if 1 had never been. I can't put myself out of existence. I can commit suicide but my soul lives on. I can never be near enough to myself to destroy myself. But God is so near to me that I depend upon Him utterly for my very being.

Again God is near to me in an even more intimate manner by the divine life of grace which is given to us when we are baptised. By that gift Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in an entirely new way in the soul. "If any man love me my Father will love him and we shall come and make our abode with him." John 14. Every conscious act that we do (apart from sin) is the result of God prompting us to do it. He moves us to begin, carries us on while we are doing it and finishes off the act with us. It is rather like a mother helping a baby to walk. The child walks but the mother's hands are guiding and helping all the time. That is why we pray "Prompt we beseech Thee O Lord our actions by Thy holy inspiration and carry them on by Thy gracious assistance that every word and work of ours may from Thee be begun and by Thee be happily ended".

Now once we have understood this and realised it, that is, made it real to ourselves, constant prayer becomes a very simple thing. It does not need many words, indeed it doesn't need any. The better you know a person the less need you have of words in talking to them. If you are introduced to somebody for the first time and left alone you feel you must he saying something, you must make conversation otherwise you would seem churlish and cold. But when you are with somebody you know and love you don't need many words at all. There is a wordless intimacy between you, a sort of happy awareness of each other's presence.

You are sitting with a friend listening to somebody speaking or watching some event taking place. Something strikes you as amusing, significant. You turn to your friend and simply raise an eyebrow. Very often you find the friend has already turned to you. You know each other well by now that you don't need words. Each understands exactly what the other is thinking. The sympathy between you, the affection, the constantly being in each other's company has given you a quick insight into one another's reaction.

Exactly the same result can be achieved by what we call the practice of the presence of God. It means realising that God is with us all the time; it means sharing our life, our interests, our activities, our thoughts with God; every now and then giving Him the quick look in our heart, the movement of affection, thanks, etc. That is the state of prayer. It is a state which can last all our waking hours. Moreover, in this way we little by little learn to look at things in God's way, to judge things from His point of view. Prayer becomes the very air we breath. And yet perhaps we never say a word with our lips.

Try this from now on every day. When you are reading this course, for example, occasionally lift up your mind and heart to God.

In later lessons there will be more about how to pray and also about the difficulties in it and how to deal with them.

End of Lesson 6

Supplement A

Appendix: "Catholic Veneration Of The Bible"

Appendix: "The Formation Of The New Testament"

Appendix: "Apocryphal Books"

Appendix: "Sole Rule Of Faith"

Supplement B: " The Great Commission"

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