Protestant View. — The Bible alone is the Christian’s rule of faith.
Catholic Teaching. — The Bible, though it is the word of God, is not the Christian’s sole rule of faith. Ultimate guidance in matters of faith must be sought in the authority of a divinely established Church, which, according to the Apostle of lie Gentiles, is the “pillar and ground of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). The Bible and the traditional teachings of the Church — or tradition — may indeed be regarded as the twofold basis of the Christian religion; but the Church, which is the interpreter of divine revelation and to which the promise was given that the Paraclete, “the Spirit of truth,” would abide with it forever (John 14:16-17), furnishes by its teachings the ultimate criterion of a Christian’s faith.
With any of our separated brethren who may happen to light upon these pages we must plead, here as elsewhere, for a little open-mindedness. We must remind them that there has been a tradition of opinion among Protestants on certain subjects; miracles, for instance, private judgment, the Bible, which even the cleverest Protestant minds have found it difficult — nay, impossible — to place upon a basis either of fact or of principle. Ask any Protestant why he thinks, as most Protestants do, that miracles ceased with the deaths of the apostles — he has no answer. Ask him to prove that the Bible is the only rule of faith — he is equally helpless. Can he prove it from the Bible itself f Surely not. There is no statement, explicit or implied, to that effect in the pages of Holy Writ. And yet the Bible is his final criterion of truth. Does it not seem as though the Protestant accepted this principle without inquiring into its validity, or without asking himself whether, after all, it is anything more than a Protestant tradition dating from the stormy period when those who revolted against the authority of the Church were forced to do so under cover of the Bible?
Moreover, there are Protestant prejudices against certain Catholic ideas which have the effect of shutting out all inquiry into their meaning. Catholic tradition as conceived by the Protestant mind hardly rises above the level of the loose, haphazard sort of tradition that weighs so little with the serious historian. Tradition of that description is not of the kind to which Catholics appeal. Tradition as conceived by the Catholic is a divinely guarded continuity of teaching^ raised above the accidents of time by reason of the ever-living teaching authority of the Church, which in virtue of the divine promises can never fail in its mission. The fact of such continuity of teaching we have sufficiently descanted upon in other parts of this volume. Our present task is to show by proofs more or less direct that the Bible cannot be the sole and self-sufficing rule of faith.
A few facts bearing on the origin of one part of the Bible will make this abundantly clear. “The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, is a familiar Protestant formula. Now one considerable part of the Bible is the New Testament. Whence came the books of the New Testament? Did they not emanate from the apostles and their immediate disciples T If so, they were brought into being by the Church, of course, under God’s direction and inspiration. They were an expression of the Church’s mind. Their only guarantee of authority was derived from their connection with the Church.
When the Holy Spirit wished to make use of human instruments for the committing to writing of certain facts and truths belonging to the new revelation, He chose them from among the accredited teachers of the Church. It was because those writers were so accredited that their writings were accepted as oracles of revelation. The whole of the New Testament is, therefore, the immediate production of the Church. Though inspired by God, its inspiration is vouched for through the Church. So far, then, from being independent of the Church, the writings of the New Testament are no less dependent on the Church than any other epistle or book is dependent on its writer; dependent, first, for its existence and afterward for its interpretation. No part of the New Testament can, therefore, be a rule of faith except in so far as the Church guarantees its interpretation.
Now, this being the case, and considering the vital connection between the Old and the New Testament, the same power of interpretation must extend to both parts of Holy Scripture. The New Testament contains the fulfilment of the types and prophecies of the Old. The meaning of the Old is more precisely determined by the meaning of the New. Interpreting the one implies the power to interpret the other. The Church, therefore, which is the immediate author, and consequently interpreter, of the New Testament must be equally the interpreter of the Old. Nor could it be otherwise in the case of a Church which was constituted the ‘‘pillar and ground’’ of truth, a Church which once heard the promise, “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come He will teach you all truth.”
The appointed guardian of all revealed truth, the Church must find it within her competence to decide what is and what is not revealed truth, and in what sense it is revealed truth, be it written or unwritten. Hence every part of the written record of divine revelation must be subject to her interpretation. The Bible as an inspired volume proceeds only from God; as a depository of a rule of faith it must be interpreted by the Church. Therefore, taken by itself, it is not the sole and self-sufficing rule of faith. Besides the Bible and, in the sense just explained, superior to the Bible, is the living and abiding authority of a divinely established Church.
And this brings us to tradition, which, in its active sense, is nothing else than the continuous and uninterrupted exercise of the teaching authority in successive ages. Tradition as thus described differs exceedingly from ordinary forms of tradition, which furnish so small a guarantee of historic truth. In the first place, it is preserved from error by a special providence. The promises given by Christ to His Church have been fulfilled and the Paraclete has in very truth abided with her (John 14:16). In the second place, every human means has been employed to preserve the tradition inviolate. No doctrinal decree is issued without a safe anchorage in the past, and each age bears witness to the faith of the age preceding it. Finally, the continuity of the episcopate, especially as preserved by communion with the See of Peter, has kept intact the identity of the tradition, just as the continuous life of the soul preserves the unity and identity of the human body.
The necessity of such tradition and authority is obvious when we consider that the New Testament, though all true, does not contain all the truth. Things were revealed by God or lawfully established by the Church of which the Scriptures make no mention, one notable example being the tranter of the Sabbath from the last to the first day of the week. Where is the Scripture warrant for this or for other changes, to which even the Protestant calls attention, as for instance, “the permission of ‘blood and things strangled,’ the canon of the sacred books, the abrogation of immersion in Baptism, and the impediments of Matrimony,”— some of which, Protestants themselves securely follow, solely on the authority of the Church, which they despise in other things!”
And why should the Scriptures be supposed to contain the whole of revelation? Is not this also a Protestant assumption, accepted blindly and never inquired into? Does the Bible itself tell us that it contains all that Christ taught? Surely not; and yet the Bible is the Protestant’s rule of faith. More than this, it is antecedently improbable that the Bible contains the whole of Christian doctrine. If it did, the New Testament would be the part of the Bible in which that doctrine would be found in its entirety; and yet the circumstances of the origin of the New Testament forbid us to think that it either was or was intended to be the sole depository of all that Christ came to teach.
Consider for a moment how the books of the New Testament came into existence. The apostles, to begin with, taught by word of mouth. This was their normal way of spreading the Gospel. Nevertheless, they found it useful in the course of time to compose, or have others compose, brief histories of Our Lord’s life on earth. These have survived in the books of the four evangelists. Occasionally, after the Faith had been preached in any city — Ephesus, for instance, Corinth, Rome — and the apostle who had preached it had taken his departure, he would address an epistle to his spiritual children of that place; it might be to confirm them in the Faith or to correct an abuse. And after the Faith had spread to the ends of the earth, Luke, a physician, a disciple of St. Paul, wrote the first history of the Church — The Acts of the Apostles. And when John had had his wonderful vision, he told the faithful all he had seen, in his “Book of die Revelation,” or the Apocalypse. At a later period, all these writings were collected into a single volume. The New Testament, then, is composed of documents written as occasion required or according as it seemed opportune. Such was the origin even of the four Gospels, which were written at different times, by different persons, each with its own individual character and relating incidents not related in the others; each, possibly, written for a special object, for certainly St. John’s gospel was written for the special purpose of demonstrating the divinity of Christ.
Now, in all this, is there any suggestion of completeness? Is it not likely that some teachings of the apostles would not find a place in any such mass of occasional documents? The occasion not requiring it, the doctrine would not be committed to writing. Where is there any proof, or suggestion, or intimation, that a number of fragments, appearing at different times, would, if put together, form a complete and independent exhibit of Christian truth, and such as would make it quite unnecessary to have recourse to the teaching of the Church, such indeed as would reduce the Church to a position of utter subordination in respect to the books of the New Testament?
God could, indeed, have intended that the fragments, when put together, should form a mosaic in which nothing was wanting to complete the picture of Christian revelation; but the question at issue is not whether He could have so intended, but whether He did. The burden of proof lies with those who assert that He did.
The Protestant mind is so deeply imbued with the idea of a Book, containing all that is necessary to be known, a Book in which all must read and out of which all must get what meaning they can, and, on the other hand, it has lost so completely the notion of a Church divinely empowered to interpret the sacred books, that writers like ourselves might well despair of success in pleading the cause of plain logic and common sense did we not know that at least by the grace of God, if not solely by human persuasion, many have been led to see the fundamental error of the Protestant position.
A no less forcible argument than the preceding one lies in the fact that the very genuineness of the books composing the Bible needs to be vouched for by the authority of the Church, and therefore by tradition. The writings composing the New Testament are not the only writings of apostolic times which were in circulation among Christians or which laid some claim to authorization. There were other gospels besides the four; as, for instance, the gospel of the Hebrews and the gospel of St. Matthias. They were numerous enough to be counted by the dozen. These are known to-day as the apocryphal gospels. Whatever amount of truth they contain, they have been from the earliest centuries excluded from the list of inspired writings. But by whom or by what were they so excluded? By the only authority competent to deal with them — that of the Church. It was the Church that fixed what is called the Canon of Scripture; that is to say, which separated the inspired books from the uninspired. It is the constant maintenance of the true Canon of Scripture — and this is tradition — that has handed down to the present generation the pure and unadulterated word of God. Consequently, if our Protestant fiends possess today a Bible which is in any degree genuine, they owe it to Catholic tradition.
The need of authority and tradition in determining the rule of faith and worship is forcibly illustrated by the arbitrary way in which Protestants, from the beginning, have applied to the Old Testament in matters of the first moment. Every Christian knows that a vast change was inaugurated by the coming and teaching of Christ. Old ordinances were abrogated and new ones introduced. The details of this great change were announced either by Our Lord Himself or by His Church enjoying plenitude of power. That such high authorization was needed was the conviction of all Christendom before the advent of Protestantism.
Where Scripture was silent or not sufficiently explicit on the subject of the great changes it was understood that either the word of Christ or the word of the Catholic Church was alone decisive. What, then, are we to think of the conduct of sectarians, appearing at a late age in the history of the Church and presuming to settle on the basis of the Old Testament questions which had been settled centuries before; as when Martin Luther, for instance, to justify his official authorization of Philip of Hesse’s taking of a second wife during the lifetime of the first, enunciated the principle that what could be done under the Law of Moses could be done under the law of Christ? What are we to think of the inconsistency, and consequently of the arbitrary and independent conduct, of sectarians in our age who in the case of marriage impediments choose to follow the Church in some matters where Scripture is silent, thus acknowledging the Catholic Church’s authority, whilst in others they appeal to the Law of Deuteronomy? Has God left the determining of these matters to the caprice of individuals? The ultimate rule of faith is, therefore, not the Bible, but the authority of the Catholic Church. The Bible is the word of God, but it needs to be interpreted by the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church.
Adapted from, Rev. M. P. Hill, S.J., The Catholic’s Ready Answer: A Popular Vindication of Christian Beliefs and Practices Against the Attacks of Modern Criticism, (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1915, pp. 48-54.