Now, it is perfectly possible to avoid the question-begging assumption of defining Christians by examining their tenets, or the Church by its teaching. After all, the Edict of Thessalonica of 380, known as “Cunctos Populos,” which stands in pride of place at the beginning of the Codex of Justinian, did so very neatly, by referring to “that religion which from then to now declares itself to have been delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness.”

Not only does it avoid the vice of circularity, but, suitably updated to refer to living authorities, it is remarkably easy of application; just what one would expect of the criterion of a divine message, intended for all, regardless of learning, capacity or circumstances.

God, looking down upon the theologians in discussion, was somewhat perplexed. He asked Mike and Gabe, his two most dependable arch-angels: “Guys, what are they talking about?”

The arch-angels, clueless, answered as did St. John in Revelations: “You know.”

Except, the Lord did not know.

Folks, it is far easier (a point Luther understood well), to understand Scripture, than it is to understand the Church’s commentary about Scripture, which is often convoluted, if not contradictory.

Sunday next (Advent II, Series B), the text is Isaiah 40:1-11. Verses 5-8 are the heart of matters. No Christian needs the opinion of the whole Church to understand the text, he just needs the faith to take the words at face value and believe.

The tautological reasoning of “The Church believes what I believe, hence I believe what the Church believes” invites zero introspection into matters of the faith. It merely invites the faithful to be faithfully ignorant, which virtually every Church body advocates.

I am a Shepherd of a flock. My ordination does not permit me such latitude. Be it milk or meat, I am to feed the flock and be a Shepherd, not a lackey jerking around with a bunch of personal opinions dictating what I should or shouldn’t say.

One either accepts, as a matter of faith, Isaiah 40:8, or not:

“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of God will stand forever.”

There are no caveats. Tradition and Churchly decrees do not supersede Scripture. Such thinking is ridiculous.

Scripture is the source. Period.

I believe the Church to be infallible because God revealed this; and I believe God revealed it because it is affirmed by the Church.

Obviously, in the second proposition “because” is not to be taken in the same sense as in the first, for it does not signify the formal motive of faith, but only the indispensable condition of faith, that is, the infallible proposition of the object of faith.

And as soon as I get a divine revelation confirming that, I’ll believe it. ;)

Let me know when that happens. ;o)

If there is a God Who is truly interested in humanity, and if there are limits to what human reason all by itself can discover of the truth, then it shouldn’t surprise us that there has been divine revelation.

That there is some intelligence that is responsible for the Universe and the life we find within it is certainly, to say the least, a reasonable conclusion to reach, especially considering the discoveries of modern science: The Universe did indeed have a beginning; it is amazingly fine-tuned in such a way as to make life possible; upon the close inspection modern science has made possible, life is found to be nanotechnology vastly beyond anything modern science knows how to build from scratch. None of that proves in a scientific way that God is there, but it does demonstrate that it is very reasonable to conclude He is there, and does so to an extent that one has to wonder if it is reasonable at all to insist He isn’t there as though one could be certain about that.

If God is there and is interested in humanity then it is not at all unreasonable to conclude that there has been divine revelation due to His wanting us to know the Truth and His taking into consideration the limits of human reason.

The Scriptures are just that — divine revelation.

And as soon as I get a divine revelation confirming that, I’ll believe it. ;)

When Mr. Cornford writes about Thucydides, Oxford historians cheerfully dispose of him in half a lecture, but when he writes about Christianity, Oxford theologians see cause for much searching of hearts and wagging of heads. But is there any reason for this difference, except that we are all in such craven fear of being thought illiberal?”

Today’s entry is a rather smug piece by Jacques Berlinerblau, who thinks that purely rational (and rationalist) standards are the only ones that can be considered truly and professionally academic.

That is precisely the problem with modern Scripture scholarship. If the purely rational was all that was needed to obtain the truth there would be no need for divine revelation in the first place. The Scriptures are just that — divine revelation. A purely scientific, rational approach to its interpretation is doomed to failure before it starts because it has ruled out the existence of one of its essential components – the component that makes it Sacred Scripture and not just another literary work – the genuinely supernatural.

The Scriptures are ultimately authored by the Holy Spirit, and contain an account of the interaction between a supernatural being — God — and natural beings — us. Modern Scripture scholarship wants to explain away its record of supernatural, divine intervention in human history, in biblical books that have been traditionally considered historical, as “myths” and “legends” if a rational and naturalistic explanation cannot be found for the recorded events. That just doesn’t work. The historical books of the Bible are a record of the interaction between God and natural beings. God’s part will be supernatural. It is silly and misses the point completely to undertake an interpretation of this record after having first ruled out the possibility of anything truly supernatural actually having taken place. If it is wrong of the fundamentalists to assume the entire Bible is to be taken literally and as an historical record, it is far more wrongheaded to deny one of its fundamental components, the one that makes it Sacred Scripture and not just another human-authored literary work: the supernatural.

This was, then, an approach predicated on not asking the types of troubling questions that exegetes have been asking for centuries if not millennia: Was the text I am studying written by the person who claims to have written it? Did the events recounted in the text actually happen? Can I trust that the text’s author (or authors) depicts events accurately? To what degree can we assume that the supernatural occurrences in these texts actually occurred?

It terms of the books of Scripture that have been traditionally considered to be historical those questions have been given a high priority — almost to the exclusion of everything else it seems — by Scripture scholars for about a hundred and fifty years, and are considered of high importance by scholars, it seems, who do not believe Christ kept His promises to the Church that it would forever have the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The fulfillment of that promise can be found where the Church Fathers were unanimous in their interpretation of Scripture. Consider the following excerpt from Augustine’s Commentary on the Book of Genesis for a striking example of where there was not consensus among the Fathers:

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

There was no consensus among the Church Fathers on the interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis in terms of their being a scientific or a historical record of creation, at least not history as modern man thinks of it. The general resurrection of the dead is actually much more far-fetched than the creation accounts of Genesis (the discoveries of modern science indicate that the belief that the Universe and the life we find in it is all a mindless accident is much more far-fetched than the resurrection and the creation accounts), yet belief in the resurrection is so fundamental to Christianity, according to Augustine, that to make that belief credible is why we must present the Scriptures credibly to non-believers. This is why Augustine, even though he said what he did in his Commentary on Genesis, vehemently defended the historicity of the Book of Jonas – Jonas, whose return from where no man ever returns was a type of the resurrection of Christ.

For a modern defense of the historicity of the book of Jonas and a summary of the Patristic witness to its historicity, see On the Prophet Jonah here:
http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt101.html

See also:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08497b.htm

Which is from the Catholic Encyclopedia and was written in 1910, before the modern corruption of Scripture scholarship was as wide spread as it is now. Here is an excerpt:

Catholics have always looked upon the Book of Jonah as a fact-narrative. In the works of some recent Catholic writers there is a leaning to regard the book as fiction. Only Simon and Jahn, among prominent Catholic scholars, have clearly denied the historicity of Jonah; and the orthodoxy of these two critics may no longer be defended: “Providentissimus Deus” implicitly condemned the ideas of both in the matter of inspiration, and the Congregation of the Index expressly condemned the “Introduction” of the latter.

God, by His perfect providence, authors history itself. He used humans as instruments to record that history in what we refer to as salvation history, or the historical books of the Bible. He also called the Universe into existence out of nothing. He became a man – one of us – Who died and rose from the dead. We must believe these things to be Christian at all. And if we do believe those things, it should be easy to believe that God parted the Red Sea for Moses and kept somebody alive in a big fish for a few days. As St. Jerome put it:

I am aware that some will be incredulous that a man should be preserved three days and three nights in the belly of a whale, to which the shipwreck had led him; these people are either believers or non-believers: if they are believers, they are obliged to believe much greater things.

Or as St. Augustine put it in his defense of the historicity of the book of Jonas:

Either all the divine miracles are to be disbelieved, or else there is no reason why this should not be believed. We should not believe in Christ Himself, and that He rose on the third day, if the faith of Christians feared the laughter of the pagans.

God authors history itself – His omnipotence has no need of “inspiring” human authors to make up myths and legends for Him. What He wills happens. As He authors that history He is not limited to only bringing about events which appear natural to us. In fact, He does not limit Himself to that precisely to make the point that it was indeed Him – the One True God – and not a false god, Who brought supernatural events about:

Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?
–Deut 4:34

That same God became a man, and unsurprisingly displayed the truth of His divinity and His message in the same way:

Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.
–John 14:11

If I had not done among them the works that no other man hath done, they would not have sin …
–John 15:24

… The works I do in my Father’s name are my witness.
–John 10:25

And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works which have been done in thee had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.
–Matthew 11:23

Modern Scripture scholarship has made a false god of the abilities of human reason, and has forgotten the remark of St. Augustine:

We should not believe in Christ Himself, and that He rose on the third day, if the faith of Christians feared the laughter of the pagans.

And eventually we won’t believe in Christ Himself and that He rose on the third day if we don’t return to what was unanimously believed by the Church Fathers, which was the result of the promised work of the Holy Spirit, and leaves us free to not insist upon the historicity of the Scriptures where the Fathers didn’t do so unanimously, and to proclaim its historicity where they did with the humility of Jerome and Augustine, having no fear of the laughter of contemporary pagans who have made a false and rather silly god of limited, faithless human reason.

• Consider that the most popular and widely discussed books about the Bible are almost never written by biblicists. . . .
• Consider that “biblical studies” as a college major is not exactly a booming industry. . . .
• Consider that many secular universities don’t even have a full-time position in biblical studies. . . .
• Consider that in nearly half a century, maybe since the time of the biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright, not a single biblical scholar has emerged as a public intellectual either nationally or internationally. . . .

There are a few authentic Biblical scholars who write popular books—N. T. Wright being the most distinguished that I can think of—but it is difficult to imagine any of them (or any other Biblical scholar) writing a book that becomes a “must read” for the educated lay person. With all due respect, it’s virtually impossible to imagine a book about the Bible written by a fundamentalist that would be widely read by “serious,” well educated people who might be perfectly willing to read something intellectually stimulating even if they knew they weren’t going to agree with it.

It seems to me there is no good reason why solid works by Biblical scholars should not be as popular as books for the nonscientist written by top scientists by Stephen Hawking. I think Jacques Berlinerblau is correct that there is something wrong.

If all Berlinerblau is saying is that biblical scholars cannot prove their points by weaving together “proof texts,” isn’t he basically correct?