April 29, 2011 – Catechism 830-835

Something I heard somebody explain today which makes a lot of sense to me and I am really surprised this is the first time I have heard it put this way.  Many denominations have the theology of Bible Alone.  These also take the stance that the Catholic Church is not correct on many of its teachings and interpretations of the Bible.  But there is a problem with this that really doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. 

First, the Catholic Church started with the Apostles.  There is a line of authority through the Popes and Bishops throughout the earliest years of Christianity.  When the Christian religion first started to grow, there was no division and they were all Catholics.  This is premise number 1.

Premise number 2 is the Catholic Church has certain teachings that they have believed since their beginnings.  For example, the teaching that the Eucharist is Christ actual Body Blood, Soul and Divinity. 

Premise number 3 is that the Catholic Church, through a number of counsels in the late 300’s, came up with the Canon of Scripture that we have today.  Although there is still disagreement about the Old Testament books (although there wasn’t any for 1000 years after the original Canon was decided) all Christians agree on the New Testament books. 

If you agree with these 3 premises, and I don’t know how you couldn’t, then in order to interpret the Bible in a way that goes against any Catholic teaching is to say that when the Catholic Church decided to develop the Canon of Scripture, they chose books that would go against what they were teaching.  How does that make any sense.  The counsels would never had chosen books that contradicted what the Catholic Church was teaching.  That would be shooting themselves in the foot.  To go with our example of the Eucharist, if the felt that John 6 was describing a symbolic eating of the flesh, but they were teaching that Christ is really present, why on Earth would they have put that in the Canon.  Basically they would not have.  The Counsels picked the books they believed to be divinely inspired and were commonly used in the liturgies that were already happening, but logically, they would have only chosen books that supported what they were already teaching.  To say that is not true is to ignore logic and to say the Catholic Church didn’t provide the world with the Bible we have today is to ignore History.