Bible Heaven/Bible Heaven.iso/misc/answers/answers.004

Text File | 1990-07-09 | 15KB | 237 lines

                       Proving Inspiration

     The Reformers said the Bible is the sole source of religious
truth, and its understanding must be found by looking only at the
words of the text.  No outside authority may impose an
interpretation, and no outside authority, such as the Church, has
been established by Christ as an arbiter.
     As heirs of the Reformers, fundamentalists work on the basis
of sola scriptura, and they advance this notion at every
opportunity.  One might think it would be easy for them to explain
why they believe this principle.
     But there is perhaps no greater frustration, in dealing with
fundamentalists, than in trying to pin them down on why the Bible
should be taken as a rule of faith at all, let alone the sole rule
of faith.  It all reduces to the question of why fundamentalists
accept the Bible as inspired, because the Bible can be taken as a
rule of faith only if it is first held to be inspired and, thus,
inerrant.
     Now this is a problem that doesn't keep most Christians awake
at night.  Most have never given it any serious thought.  To the
extent they believe in the Bible, they believe in it because they
operate in a milieu that is, if post-Christian in many ways, still
steeped in Christian ways of thought and presuppositions.
     A lukewarm Christian who wouldn't give the slightest credence
to the Koran would think twice about casting aspersions on the
Bible.  It has a certain official status for him, even if he can't
explain it.  You might say he accepts the Bible as inspired
(whatever that may mean for him) for some "cultural" reason, but
that, of course, is hardly a sufficient reason, since on such a
basis the Koran rightly would be considered inspired in a Moslem
country.
     Similarly, it is hardly enough to say that one's family has
always believed in the Bible, "and that's good enough for me."  It
may indeed be good enough for the person disinclined to think, and
one should not disparage a simple faith, even if held for an
ultimately weak reason, but mere custom cannot establish the
inspiration of the Bible.
     Some fundamentalists say they believe the Bible is inspired
because it is "inspirational," but that is a word with a double
meaning.  On the one hand, if used in the strict theological sense,
it clearly begs the question, which is:  How do we know the Bible
is inspired, that is, "written" by God, but through human authors?
And if "inspirational" means nothing more than "inspiring" or
"moving," then someone with a deficient poetic sense might think
the works of a poetaster are inspired.
     Indeed, parts of the Bible, including several whole books of
the Old Testament, cannot be called "inspirational" in this sense
in the least, unless one works on the principle, reported by Ronald
Knox, of the elderly woman who was soothed every time she heard
"the blessed word Mesopotamia."  One betrays no disrespect in
admitting that some parts of the Bible are as dry as military
statistics -- indeed, some parts are nothing but military
statistics -- and there is little there that can move the emotions.
     So, it is not enough to believe in the inspiration of the
Bible merely out of culture or habit, nor is it enough to believe
in its inspiration because it is a beautifully-written or
emotion-stirring book.  There are other religious books, and even
some plainly secular ones, that outscore most of the Bible when it
comes to fine prose or poetry.
     What about the Bible's own claim to inspiration?  There are
not many places where such a claim is made even tangentially, and
most books in the Old and New Testaments make no such claim at all.
In fact, no New Testament writer seemed to be aware that he was
writing under the impulse of the Holy Spirit, with the exception of
the author of the Apocalypse.
      Besides, even if every biblical book began with the phrase,
"The following is an inspired book," such phrases would prove
nothing.  The Koran claims to be inspired, as does the Book of
Mormon, as do the holy books of various Eastern religions.  Even
the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science,
claim inspiration.  The mere claim of inspiration is insufficient
to establish a book's bona fides.
     These tests failing, most fundamentalists fall back on the
notion that "the Holy Spirit tells me the Bible is inspired," an
exercise in subjectivism that is akin to their claim that the Holy
Spirit guides them in interpreting the text.  For example, the
anonymous author of How Can I Understand the Bible?, a booklet
distributed by the Radio Bible Class, lists twelve rules for Bible
study.  The first is, "Seek the help of the Holy Spirit.  The
Spirit has been given to illumine the Scriptures and make them
alive to you as you study them.  Yield to his enlightenment."
If one takes this as meaning that anyone asking for a proper
interpretation will be given one by God--and that is exactly how
most fundamentalists understand the assistance of the Holy Spirit
to work--then the multiplicity of interpretations, even among
fundamentalists, should give people a gnawing sense that the Holy
Spirit hasn't been doing his job very effectively.
     Most fundamentalists don't say, in so many words, that the
Holy Spirit has spoken to them directly, assuring them of the
inspiration of the Bible.  They don't phrase it like that.  Rather,
in reading the Bible they are "convicted" that it is the word of
God, they get a positive "feeling" that it is inspired, and that's
that--which often reduces their acceptance of the Bible to culture
or habit.  No matter how it's looked at, the fundamentalist's
position is not one that is rigorously reasoned to.
      It must be the rare fundamentalist who, even for sake of
argument, first approaches the Bible as though it is not inspired
and then, upon reading it, syllogistically concludes it is.  In
fact, fundamentalists begin with the fact of inspiration--just as
they take the other doctrines of fundamentalism as givens, not as
deductions--and then they find things in the Bible that seem to
support inspiration, claiming, with circular reasoning, that the
Bible confirms its inspiration, which they knew all along.
The man who wrestles with the fundamentalist approach to
inspiration (or any of these other approaches, for that matter) at
length is unsatisfied because he knows he has no good grounds for
his belief.  The Catholic position is the only one that,
ultimately, can satisfy intellectually.
     The Catholic method of finding the Bible to be inspired is
this.  The Bible is first approached as any other ancient work.  It
is not, at first, presumed to be inspired.  From textual criticism
we are able to conclude that we have a text the accuracy of which
is more certain than the accuracy of any other ancient work.
Sir Frederic Kenyon, in The Story of the Bible, notes that "For all
the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts
written long after their original composition.  The author who is
the best case in this respect is Virgil, yet the earliest
manuscript of Virgil that we now possess was written some 350 years
after his death.  For all other classical writers, the interval
between the date of the author and the earliest extant manuscript
of his works is much greater.  For Livy it is about 500 years, for
Horace 900, for most of Plato 1,300, for Euripides 1,600."  Yet no
one seriously disputes that we have accurate copies of the works of
these writers.
      Not only are the biblical manuscripts we have older than
those for classical authors, we have in absolute numbers far more
manuscripts to work from.  Some are whole books of the Bible,
others fragments of just a few words, but there are thousands of
manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and other
languages.  What this means is that we can be sure we have an
accurate text, and we can work from it in confidence.
      Next we take a look at what the Bible, considered merely as
a history, tells us, particularly the New Testament, and
particularly the Gospels.  We examine the account of Jesus's life
and death and his reported resurrection.
     Using what is in the Gospels themselves, what we find in
extra-biblical writings from the early centuries, and what we know
of human nature (and what we can otherwise, from natural theology,
know of divine nature), we conclude that Jesus either was just what
he claimed to be, God, or was a madman.  (The one thing we know he
could not have been was merely a good man who was not God, because
no merely good man would make the claims he made.)
     We are able to eliminate his being a madman not just from what
he said--no madman ever spoke as he did; for that matter, no sane
man ever did either--but from what his followers did after his
death.  A hoax (the supposedly empty tomb) is one thing, but you do
not find people dying for a hoax, at least not one from which they
have no prospect of advantage.  The result of this line of
reasoning is that we must conclude that Jesus indeed rose from the
dead and that he was therefore God and, being God, meant what he
said and did what he said he would do.
     One thing he said he would do was found a Church, and from
both the Bible (still taken as merely a historical book, not at
this point in the argument as an inspired one) and other ancient
works, we see that Christ established a Church with the rudiments
of all we see in the Catholic Church today--papacy, hierarchy,
priesthood, sacraments, teaching authority, and, as a consequence
of the last, infallibility.  Christ's Church, to do what he said it
would do, had to have the note of infallibility.
     We have thus taken purely historical material and concluded
that there exists a Church, which is the Catholic Church, divinely
protected against teaching error.  Now we're at the last part of
the argument.
     That Church now tells us the Bible is inspired, and we can
take the Church's word for it precisely because it is infallible.
Only after having been told by a properly constituted authority
(that is, one set up by God to assure us of the truth of matters of
faith, such as the status of the Bible) that the Bible is inspired
do we begin to use it as an inspired book.
      Note that this is not a circular argument.  We are not basing
the inspiration of the Bible on the Church's infallibility and the
Church's infallibility on the word of an inspired Bible.  That
indeed would be a circular argument.  What we have is really a
spiral argument.  On the first level we argue to the reliability of
the Bible as history.  From that we conclude an infallible Church
was founded.  And then we take the word of that infallible Church
that the Bible is inspired.  It all reduces to the proposition
that, without the existence of the Church, we could not tell if the
Bible were inspired.
     Now what has just been discussed is not, obviously, the kind
of mental exercise people go through before putting trust in the
Bible, but it is the only truly reasonable way to do so.  Every
other way is inferior--psychologically adequate, perhaps, but
actually inferior.  In mathematics we accept on "faith" that one
and one makes two and that one, when added to any integer, will
produce the next highest integer.  These truths seem elementary to
us and we are satisfied to take such things at face value, but
apprentice mathematicians must go through a semester's course the
whole of which is taken up demonstrating such "obvious" truths.
     The point is that fundamentalists are quite right in believing
the Bible is inspired, but their reasons for so believing are
inadequate because knowledge of the inspiration of the Bible can be
based only on an authority established by God to tell us the Bible
is inspired, and that authority is the Church.
     And this is where a more serious problem comes in.  It seems
to some that it makes little difference why one believes in the
Bible's inspiration, just so one believes in it.  But the basis for
one's belief in its inspiration directly affects how one goes about
interpreting the Bible.  The Catholic believes in inspiration
because the Church tells him so--that's putting it bluntly--and
that same Church has the authority to interpret the inspired text.
Fundamentalists believe in inspiration, though on weak grounds, but
they have no interpreting authority other than themselves.
     Cardinal Newman put it this way in an essay on inspiration
first published in 1884: "Surely then, if the revelations and
lessons in Scripture are addressed to us personally and
practically, the presence among us of a formal judge and standing
expositor of its words is imperative.  It is antecedently
unreasonable to suppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in
parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places,
should be given us from above without the safeguard of some
authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case,
interpret itself.  Its inspiration does but guarantee its truth,
not its interpretation.  How are private readers satisfactorily to
distinguish what is didactic and what is historical, what is fact
and what is vision, what is allegorical and what is literal, what
is idiomatic and what is grammatical, what is enunciated formally
and what occurs obiter, what is only of temporary and what is of
lasting obligation?  Such is our natural anticipation, and it is
only too exactly justified in the events of the last three
centuries, in the many countries where private judgment on the text
of Scripture has prevailed.  The gift of inspiration requires as
its complement the gift of infallibility."
     The advantages of the Catholic approach are two.  First, the
inspiration is really proved, not just "felt."  Second, the main
fact behind the proof--the fact of an infallible, teaching
Church--leads one naturally to an answer to the problem that
troubled the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:31):  How is one to know what
interpretations are right?  The same Church that authenticates the
Bible, that establishes its inspiration, is the authority set up by
Christ to interpret his Word.

                                        --Karl Keating
                                          Catholic Answers
                                          P.O. Box 17181
                                          San Diego, CA 92117