After a good long period of not having time to formally expound upon the thoughts of my day, at least for the next month or so, I thought I would begin doing so again. Recently I encountered an interesting argument: God is at the top of things, and He created the Bible. Man got their hands on the Bible and set to work trying to understand the thing. This is of course a formidable task, and one that man is incapable of doing wholly correctly, so you get Church A which has 95% of the things write, Church B which has 85% of the things right, etc. Note that Church B is likely to get right some of Church A's incorrect 5%. The logical result seems to be that the rational man's job is to see which Church has 95% right, and hop into that boat.
The fundamental flaw in this line of reasoning stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of divine revelation. The theory does not allow for any solid intent on God's part when He brought about the creation of the Bible, because He let it sit there and have man quarrel over it when He was done. A failure to follow through always indicates a disinterest in the whole process. And the underinvestment the theory supposes is not a small matter, it is crucial to note: these are issues of eternal salvation. Jesus has several “unless” phrases in the Gospels, these are a few:
· For I tell you that unless your justice abound more than that of the scribes and Pharasees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:20)
· Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 18:3)
· No, I say to you: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish (Luke 13:3)
· Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God (John 3:5)
Now, if I went up to a very young child and told them to “be just”, they would have no idea how to act. In fact, ask an American what “justice” is, and you will get wildly varying answers. The point is, not only is justice not an innate faculty of being human, neither does it infallibly come with age (and even a generous degree of education). Even among Christian denominations, what is just is disagreed upon. The Catholic Church teaches that contraception, abortion and euthanasia are all intrinsically unjust, while many other denominations would hold that one, two, or three of these are just acts. It seems petty to make matters of social teaching matters of salvation, but that is what Christ did in His Divine wisdom, and that is what Christians also must do. What exactly being a “little child” means (is it being obedient to Holy Mother Church?), how we ought to do penance (must we follow the mandated days of abstinence and fasting, at a minimum?) and what being born again of water and the Holy Ghost is (are only baptized souls brought to Heaven?) are matters of eternal importance. These are issues that denominations disagree upon, and they are matters of salvation. If God gave us the Bible and let us figure it out, He is no better than a parent who lets his kid play with hand grenades: a certain number will keep the pin in, and a certain number will not.
If we hold that God actively wants us to be in Heaven with Him, He did not leave the interpretation of the Bible in matters of salvation (which is far reaching) up to chance. Rather, He gave the world Holy Scripture inside of and through the mediation of the Roman Church that God’s involvement in the world might be active and continuous. God does this through the Holy Spirit, which was promised by Jesus to the Apostles at the Last Supper: “But when the Paraclete cometh, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who procedeth from the Father, he shall give testimony of me (John 15:26). The Holy Spirit continues to give testimony to Jesus through the Gospel and the continued study of its interpretation.
Further, the Spirit is the “Spirit of truth”. As St John’s First Epistle reminds us, “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness” (1 John 1:5). Here “light” and “darkness” symbolize truth/falsity (as the subsequent verses state explicitly), good/evil, justice/wrong, etc. Thus, in the Spirit of Truth (who is a member of the Trinity), there is no falsity. One of the truly wonderful presuppositions to theology is that “God is light”. Wherever He is, truth is, and a complete truth. The mystery of the Incarnation which we are still celebrating assures us that God did not will to give himself partially to mankind, but He gave Himself fully. Jesus' entire divinity was joined to an entire human nature. Man saw Jesus, the Word Incarnate, in His entirety, though plenty of heresies were propagated to the contrary in the first centuries of Christianity. The marvelous character or our salvation lies in this fact: not only did God promise us truth, but truth in it's entirety. Not only did God promise us truth, but He promised us the Spirit of Truth.
The Spirit is not something that we can commune with infallibly on our own. This is not to deny that the Spirit plays an active role in each individual Christian’s life, but we must also realize that contradictory positions both claim the Spirit as their source. Further, this is not to say that God couldn’t have chosen to save us through this exclusively personal relationship with Him: He can do whatever He wants. But the glorious salvation which our Savior has wrought does not consist in this, and we see this simply by noticing that “the Spirit” is invoked as the source and justification of contradictory opinions. Of course the Spirit cannot contradict itself, so one and only one of the parties (perhaps one among thousands) is right. Knowing that it is a slippery slope to go about interpreting scripture and seeking the Spirit on your own (and we don’t even know when we fall in the mud), we must look to something beyond our self, and truly beyond man. If I, a man, am incapable of interpreting scripture infallibly, where does a bunch of guys dressed in red with one in the center in white derive the authority. It is most certainly not from their humanity.
It is rather from the Spirit itself. God, not willing our salvation to be exclusively personal but rather to have the corporate nature of a community established the Church to be the mediator between Himself and mankind, through the Holy Spirit. When we look to find God in and through the Spirit, we are given the wonderful assurance that the Church is spotless in her teachings. To seek the truth elsewhere yields uncertainty and doubt, which are not the effects of the loving and true God, but of a God who distances Himself from His people. But if "God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son" He surely loves us enough to give us the entirety of truth, which is found in the Spirit through the Church. This for the simple fact that the Spirit has elevated mankind to such a level as to be the means through which He communicates Himself to others for, "Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world" (St. Theresa).
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