Many of the readers of these Daily Reflections come from different faith traditions than do we Catholics. We have Orthodox followers, Protestants, Muslims, Sikhs, and even a few atheists. Occasionally, I receive thoughtful questions from one of them that make me think through my own beliefs about God. One such question came in that I thought might make an interesting Daily Reflection: Why do Catholics engage the Bible differently than Protestants?
To answer that question, we must trace the historical development of the Bible, from hearing the bible being told to us, to seeing, singing, reading, praying and, most importantly, living the word of God for ourselves.
In the beginning of Christianity, we must remember that the Good News was spread primarily by word-of-mouth. The four gospels had not yet been written, and the famous letters attributed to Paul, Peter, James, and John only came after the oral traditions were already deeply engrained in the early Christians. Like their Jewish predecessors, the first Christians told their stories around a meal. The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus changed the ancient Jewish storyline. As the familiar story of Israel began to be told from an Easter perspective, the early church began to write it down, allowing the story to be shared more broadly and consistently from one end of the earth to the other. By the end of the second century, the core books were fixed in the canon of what we now call the New Testament. By 400 A.D., there was consensus among Christians to include 27 books in the New Testament.
Even after these books were written, before the invention of the printing press, the books of the Jewish and Christian scriptures had to be painstakingly copied by hand. Bibles were rare and expensive. Deacons, priests, and bishops were entrusted with proclaiming the scriptures, in Latin throughout the Roman or Western Church, and then preaching about them, sometimes in the local language (vernacular). These clerics carried the good news to ordinary Christians, most of whom could not read. So did parents, who told familiar Bible stories to their children. Tales of saints, exemplars of Christian living, became popular. Embellishment added to their allure. Gregorian chant developed as a helpful way to help remember scripture through hearing.
During the Middle Ages, the Bible could be watched. Pageants and processions brought to life familiar biblical stories. St. Francis of Assisi, in the 13th century, introduced the now-familiar nativity scene to visually demonstrate the Christmas story. Stained glass windows and statues adorned churches and cathedrals to capture the senses and inspire the hearts and minds of worshippers.
With this history in mind, it is easy to understand that, for Catholics, the sacraments are a path to holiness that are distinct, but not removed, from the reading of scripture. The mystical interplay between hearing and seeing explains the attraction of the Catholic sacraments, rituals wherein familiar words, actions, and the ordinary stuff of this world — water, oil, fire, incense — take on deeper beauty and meaning. In the sacraments, the Divine is revealed without exhausting the Divine presence. With a sacramental imagination, for example, the believer witnesses water washing away sins, and ordinary bread and wine becoming the real presence of Christ in the Eucharistic meal. For Catholics, the sacraments, which are biblically rooted, are a path to holiness distinct, but not removed, from the reading of scripture.
The cry of the Protestant reformation of the 16th century was sola scriptura (“by scripture alone”)! Luther worried that the ecclesiastical traditions that developed over the centuries — including sacramental rituals and teachings of church authorities — were obscuring the centrality of scripture as the revealed word of God. The cry was more easily heeded because just decades before the reformers, Gutenberg invented his printing press. With more readily available Bibles in hand, and growing literacy among Christians, Protestant clergy kept scripture central to worship and encouraged private devotion to the Bible.
Catholic authorities reacted with caution, insisting that the Bible must be authoritatively translated, taught, and interpreted lest the ordinary Christian be led astray by ignorance or fancy. Catholics, too, had Bibles more readily available, but they, in a sense, already had the Bible, rooted in the vast traditions of the faith: they had priests to tell them about the Bible, and rituals to enact the meaning of scripture, plus a wealth of art and architecture and pious devotions to inspire the Catholic imagination.
Many Catholics do not understand why the church still reads the Old Testament at Mass. In fact, the liturgical reforms of Vatican II have assigned an Old Testament passage for the first reading of the Mass for almost every Sunday liturgy, for all solemnities, most major feasts, as well as on many weekdays. Why? The second century heretic Marcion claimed that the Old Testament reveals not the God of Jesus Christ but another cruel, vindictive god. Many today even rationalize our discarding of the Old Testament – keeping perhaps our favorite Psalms and wisdom sayings — by repeating the arguments of Marcion: “What can we learn from a God who commands the conquest of a land and the destruction of cities including all their inhabitants?”
The Church, however, has always resisted the Marcionite heresy and considers the books of the Old Testament part of the inspired Word of God. She has always retained the integrity of both Testaments: The old is a course of divine education preparing us for Jesus and promising us salvation in him; while the new attests the fulfillment of these promises.
As to the cruelty of Israel’s Biblical wars, we should remember that God has formed the morality of his people gradually, as by ever more demanding courses. At the beginning, He could not teach a group of savage nomads to love their enemies. But He did teach them from the beginning to love their neighbors, even if they are aliens who live among them. He also taught them to fight those whose idolatry is contagious. Even now we can learn from these texts to fight Satan and to hate and reject all his wiles and machinations.
By comparing the two Testaments, we see how God has fulfilled each promise He made to his people. He has done so, however, in such an unexpected way that the fulfillment has transcended all expectations. So shocking was the fulfillment, that the majority of Israel still has not accepted it. God promised a new exodus, a new, more powerful David, a new, more powerful prophet, a people whose hearts would be renewed, an Israel turned into a faithful spouse of God from her former ways of faithless promiscuity. In Jesus, He gave us infinitely more than what He had promised. God himself became the new David, the new prophet, the new king not only of Israel but of the entire world, enthroned on the cross. God himself became the good shepherd who took upon himself all the burdens of his people and led a new Exodus, a definitive liberation from sin and death by dying in our place and for our sake. The Old Testament images help us imagine and understand both the similarities and the incomparable greatness of the New Testament realities.
Through the Old Testament we learn about God’s fidelity in fulfilling his promises in both history and our personal life. If we read the Old Testament with the Church, we must be ready for surprises and adventures that may leave us at first confused and dismayed.
When we look back at the surprising and daunting events with the eyes of faith, we will be amazed at how much better the gift turns out to be than what we had asked for. At the end of our lives, all those who tried to carry out his plan will see that he has given us infinitely more than what we could have ever dared to hope for.
The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s both validated and inspired movements to better integrate the Bible into the devotional life of Catholics. Protestant and Catholic scholars delved more deeply into the historical contexts and literary forms of scripture. In its revision of the liturgy, the Catholic Church significantly expanded the parts of the Bible heard at Mass, and popular hymns were tied more explicitly to the scripture readings of the day. Better educated in the basics of their faith, and learning from their Protestant brothers and sisters, Catholics now read the Bible more.
They also learned to pray with scripture. Inspired by the Council, religious orders shared their animating spiritualties more broadly. For example, the Benedictine devotion of lectio divina, a meditative reading of scripture, became more popular, as did the Jesuit approach of contemplation: using one’s imagination to enter the sights, sounds, and smells of a biblical scene.
So much of a Catholic’s experience of the Bible depends on the deacon or priest who proclaims and preaches on the biblical text. The preacher can enliven, or deaden, the inspired word of God. In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), published in 2013, Pope Francis offered extensive and frank advice to preachers. The homilist fosters a conversation between God and God’s people, he writes. The preacher must not only know scripture, but “must know the heart of his community,” offering them an account of hope and a gospel of joy.
Catholics today hear, read, see, smell, sing, and pray the Bible. Technology and social media have facilitated this multifaceted immersion into scripture. But all of this — even the most eloquent preaching or expertly performed ritual, even the fanciest apps or the most brilliant stained glass — means little unless the Bible is lived in our ordinary lives of faith, hope, and love.