A few weeks ago our pastor said that Catholics have a moral responsibility to study the Bible. We thought we were supposed to leave the Bible to the experts. Isn’t that what the whole Reformation was about? Still worse, he dismisses modern scholarship by saying that the whole Bible is true. It has been proven by modern science that much of the Bible is a myth. Good grief, but the man’s a fossil!

Please advise,

Don & Juana Noe 

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Noe,

Well your pastor is right. Both the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 2653 and 133) and the second Vatican Council ( Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation ) insist that “... the Church forcefully and specially exhorts all the Christian faithful... to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ by frequent reading of the Divine Scriptures...Let them remember, however, that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture so that a dialogue takes place between God and Man. For we speak to Him when we pray; we listen to Him when we read the divine oracles.”  And again (quoting St. Jerome)  “…ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

No one has ever come to me in confession and said, “Bless me father, I’m not reading the Bible enough.” The study of Scripture hasn’t ever been forbidden by the Catholic Church, but I’ll admit that it hasn’t been encouraged sufficiently in certain times and places. We are however living in a new world in which the essential story of the Bible is hated. When I was young, the Bible and its story were everywhere; in movies, on the street corner, in the very stained glass windows of the churches (though these are now replace by abstract art that is as boring as it is incoherent). Nowadays, just try to put up a Christmas display on public land. Instead of the Biblical epics that always aired on TV during the Holy Days, you have PBS and the Discovery Channel telling you that it never happened in the first place.

Let me deal with the assertion that the Bible is true. I once heard a brilliant preacher explain the first nine chapters of the Bible by telling the story of the five blind men who went to see an elephant. The first grabbed the elephant’s trunk and said, “Clearly, the elephant is like a fire hose.” The second grabbed the tail and said “No, it is like a rope. The third said, “The elephant is like a tree,” as he embraced a leg. The fourth fingered the ear and said, “It is like a large leaf.” The fifth blind man said, “You are all wrong; the elephant is like a great wall!” as he ran into the elephant’s side.  And you, standing at distance with the great gift of sight, say, “No, an elephant is like an elephant.”  The first nine chapters of the Bible, as well as the rest of the Bible, are absolutely literally true.... from God’s point of view. We little men with our short sight look for facts. God sees, speaks and is unchanging truth. That truth is conveyed in the library that is the Bible. In history, in poetry, in proverbs, songs, and books of law, God speaks the truth, but it is all true. There was an Eve as well as an Adam. There was a Noah, an Abraham, a David, a Solomon, a Paul of Tarsus and a Peter of Capernaum and, above all, there is a Jesus who is the center point of human history.

Much modern scholarship struggles to demythologize the truth of the Bible and to replace it with the myth of science. Religion is often attacked by anti Christians as the source of the world’s violence. Who attacks the pseudo-religion of science that has killed untold billions with the ever improving technology of war?  The religion of Science  has finally even provided its own messianic vision of total annihilation.

I have never heard anyone try to close down the science labs of the University of Chicago where the atom bomb was invented, but Jesus,  the Prince of Peace, is excluded from the public square. The University of Chicago is responsible for 240,000 deaths, by virtue of its complicity in the invention of the bomb. Shamefully the Spanish Inquisition may have killed a few thousand in its four-hundred year history. The University of Chicago made possible hundreds of thousands more deaths in a matter of minutes. Yet, there are no howling mobs in the Midway Plaisance demanding the closing of the university, and the sophisticated of our age would all agree that science is true and the bible false.

The Bible is true and relates true history in the form of “the oracles of God.” Without the Bible we cannot be fully Catholic. Life is meant to be a conversation with God. If we do all the talking and never listen, our faith is reduced to a kind of superstition in which we try to coerce God into doing our will. The point of prayer is to hear God speaking (which He usually does through the Bible) and to ask Him for the strength to obey. So if you are not involved in some kind of prayerful Bible Study, you are not fully Catholic. Perhaps your pastor isn’t as dumb as you think.