Jun
16
Column – Bad News Bears Christianity – The Bible Alone
June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Anyone who has coached little league sports before knows there are effective strategies and … not so effective strategies.
See if you can figure out which this is:
A new coach, determined not to pollute the game of T-ball with his opinions on how the game should be played, gives each of his five-year-old aspiring sluggers a copy of the book of rules for the sport and tells them to be ready for the big game in a couple weeks.
A good team needs a good coach. While the book of rules may explain that one hits the ball with the bat, a good coach demonstrates how to choke up, follow through, and slide into second without a mouthful of dirt. With each child left to make sense of the book on his own, the team would be a mess by the first game.
With that in mind, should Christians go by the Bible alone?
This question is the question that Catholics should ask when discussing our teachings with other Christians when challenged on Catholic doctrine, such as Purgatory or confession.
What is our authority in matters of faith?
All Christians, Catholic and Protestant, believe that the Bible is the inerrant, inspired word of God. It is an authority for any true disciple. As attributed to St. Jerome, ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.
Yet there is a huge problem with assuming the Bible is our only authority.
The Bible never tells us to go by the Bible alone. It is, ironically, an unscriptural concept.
Often Protestants will point to verses such as 2 Tim. 3:16. But Paul’s only claim there is that Scripture is useful, or purposeful. Gas is useful to get my truck around, but without tires and engine oil, I wouldn’t get very far.
Another practical problem with going by the Bible alone is that, until the sixteenth century, there was no printing press. Most men and women were illiterate and also could not have afforded a personal Bible, as they were copied by hand (by Catholic monks, by the way). One of these rare books would have cost, in modern terms, well over a hundred thousand dollars.
If Christ meant for his disciples to go by the Bible alone during these centuries, it would mean that he had designed a religion for the rich and well-educated, which certainly isn’t the message of the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3-12).
To our knowledge, Christ never wrote any of his teachings down. Nor did he instruct his apostles to do so. In fact, that rebel John even insists he would rather communicate face-to-face than with pen and ink (2 John 12; 3 John 13). There is, after all, not enough room in the whole world for the books that would need to have been written to contain all that Christ did (John 21:25).
As Peter understood, Scripture is hard to understand (2 Pet. 3:16), so much so that it befuddled the poor Eunuch who was trying to make heads and tails of the book of Isaiah (Acts 8:30-31).
Returning to the baseball analogy, our coaches, the Pope and bishops, have had their wisdom passed down through two-thousand years of Sacred Tradition and protected from error by the Holy Spirit (John 16:13).
After all, one place the Bible isn’t silent is in claiming that the oral teachings of Christ were on an equal level with the written teachings (2 Th. 2:15; 2 Tim 1:13-14) and that they weren’t all meant to be written down but taught to others (2 Tim. 2:2). Paul even goes so far as to say to “shun those not acting according to Tradition” (2 Th. 3:6).
The Catholic Church goes by the Word of God. In fact we go by all of it, not just the part that was written down, which is why many of our teachings seem different from those of Bible-only groups.
Without Tradition, as with that team of little-leaguers, the faithful are left to scramble around in a game of Bad News Bears Christianity.
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.