next »

CatholiChat

Bible

Catechism

Catholic Encyclopedia

Today's Readings

Advanced search

[ec2kadm]

Proving Inspiration


The Reformers said the Bible is the sole source of religious truth,
and its understanding must be found by looking only at the words of the
text. No outside authority may impose an interpretation, and no outside
authority, such as the Church, has been established by Christ as an
arbiter.

As heirs of the Reformers, fundamentalists work on the basis of sola
scriptura, and they advance this notion at every opportunity. One might
think it would be easy for them to explain why they believe this principle.

But there is perhaps no greater frustration, in dealing with
fundamentalists, than in trying to pin them down on why the Bible should be
taken as a rule of faith at all, let alone the sole rule of faith. It all
reduces to the question of why fundamentalists accept the Bible as
inspired, because the Bible can be taken as a rule of faith only if it is
first held to be inspired and, thus, inerrant.

Now this is a problem that doesn't keep most Christians awake at
night. Most have never given it any serious thought. To the extent they
believe in the Bible, they believe in it because they operate in a milieu
that is, if post-Christian in many ways, still steeped in Christian ways of
thought and presuppositions.

A lukewarm Christian who wouldn't give the slightest credence to the
Koran would think twice about casting aspersions on the Bible. It has a
certain official status for him, even if he can't explain it. You might
say he accepts the Bible as inspired (whatever that may mean for him) for
some "cultural" reason, but that, of course, is hardly a sufficient reason,
since on such a basis the Koran rightly would be considered inspired in a
Moslem country.

Similarly, it is hardly enough to say that one's family has always
believed in the Bible, "and that's good enough for me." It may indeed be
good enough for the person disinclined to think, and one should not
disparage a simple faith, even if held for an ultimately weak reason, but
mere custom cannot establish the inspiration of the Bible.

Some fundamentalists say they believe the Bible is inspired because it
is "inspirational," but that is a word with a double meaning. On the one
hand, if used in the strict theological sense, it clearly begs the
question, which is: How do we know the Bible is inspired, that is,
"written" by God, but through human authors? And if "inspirational" means
nothing more than "inspiring" or "moving," then someone with a deficient
poetic sense might think the works of a poetaster are inspired.

Indeed, parts of the Bible, including several whole books of the Old
Testament, cannot be called "inspirational" in this sense in the least,
unless one works on the principle, reported by Ronald Knox, of the elderly
woman who was soothed every time she heard "the blessed word Mesopotamia."
One betrays no disrespect in admitting that some parts of the Bible are as
dry as military statistics--indeed, some parts are nothing but military
statistics--and there is little there that can move the emotions.

So, it is not enough to believe in the inspiration of the Bible merely
out of culture or habit, nor is it enough to believe in its inspiration
because it is a beautifully-written or emotion-stirring book. There are
other religious books, and even some plainly secular ones, that outscore
most of the Bible when it comes to fine prose or poetry.

What about the Bible's own claim to inspiration? There are not many
places where such a claim is made even tangentially, and most books in the
Old and New Testaments make no such claim at all. In fact, no New
Testament writer seemed to be aware that he was writing under the impulse
of the Holy Spirit, with the exception of the author of the Apocalypse.

Besides, even if every biblical book began with the phrase, "The
following is an inspired book," such phrases would prove nothing. The
Koran claims to be inspired, as does the Book of Mormon, as do the holy
books of various Eastern religions. Even the writings of Mary Baker Eddy,
founder of Christian Science, claim inspiration. The mere claim of
inspiration is insufficient to establish a book's bona fides.

These tests failing, most fundamentalists fall back on the notion that
"the Holy Spirit tells me the Bible is inspired," an exercise in
subjectivism that is akin to their claim that the Holy Spirit guides them
in interpreting the text. For example, the anonymous author of How Can I
Understand the Bible?, a booklet distributed by the Radio Bible Class,
lists twelve rules for Bible study. The first is, "Seek the help of the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit has been given to illumine the Scriptures and make
them alive to you as you study them. Yield to his enlightenment."

If one takes this as meaning that anyone asking for a proper
interpretation will be given one by God--and that is exactly how most
fundamentalists understand the assistance of the Holy Spirit to work--then
the multiplicity of interpretations, even among fundamentalists, should
give people a gnawing sense that the Holy Spirit hasn't been doing his job
very effectively.

Most fundamentalists don't say, in so many words, that the Holy Spirit
has spoken to them directly, assuring them of the inspiration of the Bible.
They don't phrase it like that. Rather, in reading the Bible they are
"convicted" that it is the word of God, they get a positive "feeling" that
it is inspired, and that's that--which often reduces their acceptance of
the Bible to culture or habit. No matter how it's looked at, the
fundamentalist's position is not one that is rigorously reasoned to.

It must be the rare fundamentalist who, even for sake of argument,
first approaches the Bible as though it is not inspired and then, upon
reading it, syllogistically concludes it is. In fact, fundamentalists
begin with the fact of inspiration--just as they take the other doctrines
of fundamentalism as givens, not as deductions--and then they find things
in the Bible that seem to support inspiration, claiming, with circular
reasoning, that the Bible confirms its inspiration, which they knew all
along.

The man who wrestles with the fundamentalist approach to inspiration
(or any of these other approaches, for that matter) at length is
unsatisfied because he knows he has no good grounds for his belief. The
Catholic position is the only one that, ultimately, can satisfy
intellectually.

The Catholic method of finding the Bible to be inspired is this. The
Bible is first approached as any other ancient work. It is not, at first,
presumed to be inspired. From textual criticism we are able to conclude
that we have a text the accuracy of which is more certain than the accuracy
of any other ancient work.

Sir Frederic Kenyon, in The Story of the Bible, notes that "For all
the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts written
long after their original composition. The author who is the best case in
this respect is Virgil, yet the earliest manuscript of Virgil that we now
possess was written some 350 years after his death. For all other
classical writers, the interval between the date of the author and the
earliest extant manuscript of his works is much greater. For Livy it is
about 500 years, for Horace 900, for most of Plato 1,300, for Euripides
1,600." Yet no one seriously disputes that we have accurate copies of the
works of these writers.

Not only are the biblical manuscripts we have older than those for
classical authors, we have in absolute numbers far more manuscripts to work
from. Some are whole books of the Bible, others fragments of just a few
words, but there are thousands of manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
Coptic, Syriac, and other languages. What this means is that we can be
sure we have an accurate text, and we can work from it in confidence.

Next we take a look at what the Bible, considered merely as a history,
tells us, particularly the New Testament, and particularly the Gospels. We
examine the account of Jesus's life and death and his reported
resurrection.

Using what is in the Gospels themselves, what we find in extra-
biblical writings from the early centuries, and what we know of human
nature (and what we can otherwise, from natural theology, know of divine
nature), we conclude that Jesus either was just what he claimed to be, God,
or was a madman. (The one thing we know he could not have been was merely
a good man who was not God, because no merely good man would make the
claims he made.)

We are able to eliminate his being a madman not just from what he
said--no madman ever spoke as he did; for that matter, no sane man ever did
either--but from what his followers did after his death. A hoax (the
supposedly empty tomb) is one thing, but you do not find people dying for a
hoax, at least not one from which they have no prospect of advantage. The
result of this line of reasoning is that we must conclude that Jesus indeed
rose from the dead and that he was therefore God and, being God, meant what
he said and did what he said he would do.

One thing he said he would do was found a Church, and from both the
Bible (still taken as merely a historical book, not at this point in the
argument as an inspired one) and other ancient works, we see that Christ
established a Church with the rudiments of all we see in the Catholic
Church today--papacy, hierarchy, priesthood, sacraments, teaching
authority, and, as a consequence of the last, infallibility. Christ's
Church, to do what he said it would do, had to have the note of
infallibility.

We have thus taken purely historical material and concluded that there
exists a Church, which is the Catholic Church, divinely protected against
teaching error. Now we're at the last part of the argument.

That Church now tells us the Bible is inspired, and we can take the
Church's word for it precisely because it is infallible. Only after having
been told by a properly constituted authority (that is, one set up by God
to assure us of the truth of matters of faith, such as the status of the
Bible) that the Bible is inspired do we begin to use it as an inspired
book.

Note that this is not a circular argument. We are not basing the
inspiration of the Bible on the Church's infallibility and the Church's
infallibility on the word of an inspired Bible. That indeed would be a
circular argument. What we have is really a spiral argument. On the first
level we argue to the reliability of the Bible as history. From that we
conclude an infallible Church was founded. And then we take the word of
that infallible Church that the Bible is inspired. It all reduces to the
proposition that, without the existence of the Church, we could not tell if
the Bible were inspired.

Now what has just been discussed is not, obviously, the kind of mental
exercise people go through before putting trust in the Bible, but it is the
only truly reasonable way to do so. Every other way is inferior--
psychologically adequate, perhaps, but actually inferior. In mathematics
we accept on "faith" that one and one makes two and that one, when added to
any integer, will produce the next highest integer. These truths seem
elementary to us and we are satisfied to take such things at face value,
but apprentice mathematicians must go through a semester's course the whole
of which is taken up demonstrating such "obvious" truths.

The point is that fundamentalists are quite right in believing the
Bible is inspired, but their reasons for so believing are inadequate
because knowledge of the inspiration of the Bible can be based only on an
authority established by God to tell us the Bible is inspired, and that
authority is the Church.

And this is where a more serious problem comes in. It seems to some
that it makes little difference why one believes in the Bible's
inspiration, just so one believes in it. But the basis for one's belief in
its inspiration directly affects how one goes about interpreting the Bible.
The Catholic believes in inspiration because the Church tells him so--
that's putting it bluntly--and that same Church has the authority to
interpret the inspired text. Fundamentalists believe in inspiration,
though on weak grounds, but they have no interpreting authority other than
themselves.

Cardinal Newman put it this way in an essay on inspiration first
published in 1884: "Surely then, if the revelations and lessons in
Scripture are addressed to us personally and practically, the presence
among us of a formal judge and standing expositor of its words is
imperative. It is antecedently unreasonable to suppose that a book so
complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many
minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the
safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of
the case, interpret itself. Its inspiration does but guarantee its truth,
not its interpretation. How are private readers satisfactorily to
distinguish what is didactic and what is historical, what is fact and what
is vision, what is allegorical and what is literal, what is idiomatic and
what is grammatical, what is enunciated formally and what occurs obiter,
what is only of temporary and what is of lasting obligation? Such is our
natural anticipation, and it is only too exactly justified in the events of
the last three centuries, in the many countries where private judgment on
the text of Scripture has prevailed. The gift of inspiration requires as
its complement the gift of infallibility."

The advantages of the Catholic approach are two. First, the
inspiration is really proved, not just "felt." Second, the main fact
behind the proof--the fact of an infallible, teaching Church--leads one
naturally to an answer to the problem that troubled the Ethiopian eunuch
(Acts 8:31): How is one to know what interpretations are right? The same
Church that authenticates the Bible, that establishes its inspiration, is
the authority set up by Christ to interpret his Word.

--Karl Keating

Catholic Answers
P.O. Box 17181
San Diego, CA 92117