Is the Bible Valued by Catholics?

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IS THE BIBLE VALUED BYCATHOLICS?

Henry Wansbrough

*A paper read under the auspices of Churches Together in Greater

Manchester on 4 May 2011, the day commemorating in both Anglican-

Methodist and Roman Catholic traditions the martyrs of the Reformation

era.The question set for me is rather insulting. Of course the Bible hasalways been valued in the Ecclesia catholica, that is, the Church spread

throughout the world. And yet the question is not without reason, foruntil comparatively recently there was a certain hesitancy and aconsiderable ignorance in the Roman Catholic Church with regard tothe Bible. It was felt that the scripture was for Protestants, thesacraments for Catholics. To a certain extent Luthers principle ofsolascriptura resulted in a reaction among Catholics ofsola sacramenta. Inmuch of the twentieth century this attitude was intensified in theRoman Catholic tradition by the intensely authoritarian reaction by theChurch leadership to the movement known as Roman CatholicModernism. Catholics were afraid to look too closely at the scriptureslest they be forced to admit that they contain much material whichdoes not accord with modern ideas of acceptable historical truth, andafraid to study the scriptures or explain these incongruities for fear ofincurring the censures imposed by the Church leadership in the early

years of the twentieth century. Such fears were rendered unnecessaryby the encouragement given to biblical study and devotion to the Bibleby the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Nevertheless, such a radical

correction of attitude took a little time to penetrate the Catholic mindand devotion. So the question is not without its justification.

* Dom Henry Wansbrough is a monk of Ampleforth. For some years he taughtat Oxford University, where he was Chairman of the Theology Faculty andMaster of St Benets Hall. He was General Editor ofThe New Jerusalem Bible andhas authored some 20 books, including most recently Use and Abuse of the

Bible. He has lectured widely on most continents, and is a member of ARCICIII. He now teaches Christian Theology at Ampleforth College.


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The Bible has always been valued in the tradition of the Churchuniversal. A survey shows the loving care which has been devoted to it.It has been copied with great care and artistry, resulting in the great

manuscripts, stretching from the Codex Sinaiticus possessed by theoldest continuous monastery in the world, St Catherines on Sinai, tothe Lindisfarne Gospels. It has been studied by great scholars from earlytimes, such as Origen of Caesarea, translated by the feisty andcantankerous St Jerome, commented by St Bede in his amazinglylearned northern monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, prayed over bymedieval monks such as Bernard of Clairvaulx. In the sixteenth centuryit was the tool with which Martin Luther attempted to reform abuses inthe Church. With the invention of printing Bibles became at last the

property of common people, no longer the preserve of the clergy (asJohn Wycliffe complained) but brought by Erasmus to every traveller tobeguile the way, by William Tyndale presented to every ploughboy.Henry VIII ensured that a printed copy of the Great Bible was availablein every parish church, chained to the lectern. Rival English editions ofthe Bible were produced by Puritans in Geneva and Catholics in Rheimsbefore the great King James Bible was crafted in 1611 (or possibly early1612). The Bible was the motive power behind the revivalist preaching of

John Wesley and the wonderful biblical hymns of his brother Charles,still among the most popular hymns of every Christian denomination.How, then, could it ever be thought that any tradition of the ChristianChurch could fail to honour the Bible?

The archaeological, literary and scientific discoveries of the nineteenthcentury rendered certain passages of the Bible difficult to accept intheir literal sense. How could the story of the Tower of Babel beaccepted as history, once it became clear that it was a myth attached to

the great step-tower Temples (ziggurats) of Mesopotamia? How couldthe story of the Capture of Jericho be accepted as historical once it wasestablished that the city was unoccupied at the time of Joshua, and thegreat mud-brick walls dated from nearly a thousand years earlier? Onthe literary plane, how could the story of Adam and Eve in the Gardenof Eden be accepted as true when its close relationship in language andimagery to Mesopotamian myths of creation and of the origin of sin wasdiscovered? Or when it was decided by literary critics that the Sermonon the Mount never happened, but that it was a collection of sayings

put togetherwith infinite skillby the evangelist Matthew, that the


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great discourses of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel were never delivered butwere shaped by the evangelist himself? On the scientific plane, howcould the Bible be considered true when it was established that the very

first chapter of Genesis was shaped by the preoccupations of a Jewishpriestly author to establish that the day of rest on the Sabbath was aconstitutive part of the fabric of the world? The world, exactly as weknow it, created in seven days! What about Darwin? The sun created onthe fourth day! How can days be measured without the rising andsetting of the sun?

Such questions had provoked outrage and confusion among believers ofboth Anglican and Roman Catholic tradition at the end of the

nineteenth century. Careful scholars and thinkers in both traditionshad, by the end of that century, begun to work out the answers. Thecrisis was all the more urgent in the Protestant tradition with itsreliance on sola scriptura and on preaching the Word, and perhaps thismade the need to find answers all the more pressing. Roman Catholicscould take refuge in sacramentalism and the firm belief in theencounter with Christ in the sacraments, turning a blind eye to thescriptural problems. Roman Catholic noses were rubbed in theproblems only at the beginning of the twentieth century when a seriesof scientific studies, leading to popular publications, burst upon the

world in the first decade of the century. In France the movement wasled by Alfred Loisy, in England by such figures as Tyrrell and Baron vonHgel. The Roman reaction was swift and violent: a Papal encyclicalletter to the bishops of the world, and a series of condemnations by theauthoritative Vatican officials: You may not teach this, you may notteach that.

This freeze began to thaw with a cautious encouragement of biblicalstudies by the 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (By the breathingof the divine Spirit) and the papal letter to Cardinal Suhard,

Archbishop of Paris, in 1946, granting that it was not necessary toregard Adam and Eve as historical figures. But by then a wholegeneration of Catholics had been deep-frozen by loyalty to the Churchinto a defensive attitude to the scriptures, insisting at any price on theliteral historicity of its narratives. It takes time for deep-frozen food toreturn to its natural state. Dont expect a nourishing meal if you cook

too quickly! It was only in the early 1960s by the great Constitution on


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Revelation at the Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, that full libertyof investigation, and the expression of the Churchs love for the gift ofscripture became the norm. They were reinforced by magnificent

documents of the papal Biblical Commission on the historicity of thegospels (1964) and on methods of biblical interpretation. These havebeen influential, honoured and used by teachers far beyond theboundaries of the Catholic Church.

The message of the newor rather restoredteaching on the Bible isthat the Bible is Gods gift to the world, revealing himself to the world,teaching about the relationship of God to human beings and of humanbeings to God. This gift is a gift in friendship and love, and demands a

response in faith and love. If we read the Bible with faith and in prayerit must be a means of encounter with the living God. The story of theloyalty and rebellions of Israel over the centuries, and the lovingforgiveness and care of God for his Chosen People is told, not as amodern historian would tell it, but by the means available at the time,stories, myths, folk-history. The account of the climax (in Christianeyes) of this process in the Good News of the Sovereignty of Godpreached by Jesus, and, under the influence of the Spirit given to theChurch at Pentecost, of the gradual deepening of understanding of theperson of Jesus is again conveyed in the language and literaryconventions current at the time. We cannot understand the mysteries

without a certain study of the methods. Most of all, we cannot respondto the love of God without a loving and prayerful reading of hismessage.

Since the Vatican Council, therefore, a new attitude to the Word of Godin the scriptures has been gradually intensifying in the Catholic Church.

There has been a return to the medieval practice of lectio divina, theprivate or shared prayerful and studious reading of the scriptures. Thepassages of scripture prescribed to be read in the liturgy has been vastlyexpanded to impart a far wider and fuller view of biblical writing than

was previously the case: over a cycle of three years, instead of arestricted diet of the Gospel of Matthew and the Letters of Paul, a wideand carefully-crafted selection of passages from both Old and NewTestaments makes possible a fuller view of Gods revelation. Everyencouragement has been given to individual and group study of the

Bible, to the practice that every Christian meeting and activity should


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begin with a prayerful reading and meditation on Gods Word to frameand inspire that activity or meeting with the message of God to hisPeople. The awareness that the Bible does not belong uniquely to

Protestantsor to Catholicsalone but is the shared property of allChristians has played a significant part in bringing together thetraditions of the Christian Church. Benedict XVIs new book on Jesus of

Nazareth has confirmed yet again that Catholics and Protestants, andindeed Jews, can learn from the scholarship of each of these traditions.The Bible is a treasure to be handled with the affection and the delicacydue to a divine gift and to be shared among all believers who wish tounderstand more fully the ways of God with human beings and ofhuman beings with God.


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Is the Bible Valued by Catholics?