Catholic Replies

2 years ago

Editor’s Note: This series on Apologetics is based on the book Catholicism & Reason. Please feel free to use the series for high schoolers or adults. We will continue to welcome your questions for the column as well. You can send them either to the postal mailing address or to the email address below, and we will interrupt this series to answer them.

Special Course On Catholicism And Reason (Chapter 13)

The Bible is a collection of seventy-three books — forty-six in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament — that was written over a period of more than a thousand years. It was the Catholic Church that gathered all these books into one volume and gave the world the Bible. If it weren’t for the Catholic Church, there would be no Bible. Jesus never told His followers to write anything; He told them to go forth and teach all nations, but eight of His disciples did write the books of the New Testament, particularly the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These books were written in the last half of the first century and were affirmed as the inspired Word of God in the fourth century.

For most of the Church’s early history, people were guided by the preaching of holy persons, not by the Bible. This was because there were very few copies of the Bible available until printing was invented in the fifteenth century, because many people could not read and depended on others to explain the teachings of Jesus to them, and because some of the writings in the Bible are hard to understand and need to be explained by knowledgeable persons. How many millions of people have lived and died without ever seeing a Bible? Yet, many of them learned about Jesus and His Church from the spoken words of teachers and preachers, not from the written word of Holy Scripture.

Some non-Catholic Christians believe that the Bible is the only guide to salvation. But how can that be when Jesus never said so? Nor did Jesus write any books Himself or tell His disciples to write down what He said and did. Rather, He told them to go out and teach.

Then there is the problem of private interpretation, where everyone can decide for themselves what a Bible passage means. For example, there are dozens of interpretations of the simple words of Jesus, “This is my body.” Some say that Jesus’ words are only symbolic, that He really didn’t mean that bread could become His body, or that wine could become His blood. But the Catholic Church, to which Jesus gave the power to teach the truth, says that those words mean exactly what Jesus intended them to mean when He said that “my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” Private interpretation is dangerous and unreliable.

The Bible is very important to Catholics. Pope St. John Paul II called the Bible “one of the greatest treasures we share.” Many Catholic doctrines are based on what’s contained in the Bible. Scripture is such an important part of Holy Mass that a Catholic who faithfully attends Mass every Sunday for three years will hear 7,000 verses from the Bible. Catholic prayers, such as the Our Father and the Hail Mary, can be found in the Bible, and many Catholic customs, such as fasting and sacrifice, can be found in its pages.

Catholics believe in the words of St. Jerome, who translated the whole Bible into Latin, when he said that “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

But the Bible is not the only source of divine truth available to Catholics. Catholics also believe in divine Tradition. This does not refer to the human traditions that were condemned by Jesus (cf. Matt. 15:3) and St. Paul (Col. 2:8), but rather to the divine Tradition mentioned by Paul in 2 Thess, 2:15, where he urged Christians to “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.” Paul converted pagans and Jews to Christianity by speaking and writing to them, not by handing them a Bible to read.

So divine Tradition is the unwritten word of God, that is, truths revealed by God, though not written down in the Bible, and handed down over the centuries by the Church through saints, Popes, and councils under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Both the Bible and Tradition are reliable sources of revelation because they come from the same source — God.

In other words, Catholics do not rely on the Bible alone, but rather on the three-legged stool of the Bible, sacred Tradition, and the teaching office of the Church, which means the Pope and those bishops united with him. If one leg of a stool is missing, the stool tips over. If one leg of the Bible, Tradition, or the teaching office of the Church is missing, then a person does not have all the help needed to get to Heaven.

List of Answers:

BIBLE

CATHOLIC

CHURCH

DISCIPLES

FATHER

GOD

JEROME

JESUS

MARY

PAUL

PRIVATE

TRADITION

TREASURE

Quiz:

The _____ is a collection of 73 books written over more than a thousand years.
Without the ____________Church, there would be no Bible.
__ told His followers to go forth and teach all nations.
But eight of Jesus’ _ wrote books in the New Testament.
_ interpretation is dangerous and unreliable.
Pope St. John Paul II called the Bible a great _.
The complete Our ___________ prayer can be found in the Bible.
Portions of the Hail ___________ prayer can be found in the Bible.
St. ____________ said that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.
Another source of God’s revelation is divine __________________.
St. _________ told people to hold fast to what he spoke or wrote to them.
Both the Bible and Tradition come from the same source: _________
Catholics rely on the three-legged stool of Bible, Tradition, and the teaching office of the Catholic ___.