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IS THE BIBLE VALUED BY CATHOLICS? 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 has always been valued in the Ecclesia catholica, that is, the Church spread throughout the world. And yet the question is not without reason, for until comparatively recently there was a certain hesitancy and a considerable ignorance in the Roman Catholic Church with regard to the Bible. It was felt that the scripture was for Protestants, the sacraments for Catholics. To a certain extent Luthers principle of sola scriptura resulted in a reaction among Catholics of sola sacramenta. In much of the twentieth century this attitude was intensified in the Roman Catholic tradition by the intensely authoritarian reaction by the Church leadership to the movement known as Roman Catholic Modernism. Catholics were afraid to look too closely at the scriptures lest they be forced to admit that they contain much material which does not accord with modern ideas of acceptable historical truth, and afraid to study the scriptures or explain these incongruities for fear of incurring the censures imposed by the Church leadership in the early years of the twentieth century. Such fears were rendered unnecessary by the encouragement given to biblical study and devotion to the Bible by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Nevertheless, such a radical correction of attitude took a little time to penetrate the Catholic mind and devotion. So the question is not without its justification.
*

Dom Henry Wansbrough is a monk of Ampleforth. For some years he taught at Oxford University, where he was Chairman of the Theology Faculty and Master of St Benets Hall. He was General Editor of The New Jerusalem Bible and has 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 ARCIC III. He now teaches Christian Theology at Ampleforth College.

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The Bible has always been valued in the tradition of the Church universal. 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 the oldest continuous monastery in the world, St Catherines on Sinai, to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It has been studied by great scholars from early times, such as Origen of Caesarea, translated by the feisty and cantankerous St Jerome, commented by St Bede in his amazingly learned northern monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, prayed over by medieval monks such as Bernard of Clairvaulx. In the sixteenth century it was the tool with which Martin Luther attempted to reform abuses in the Church. With the invention of printing Bibles became at last the property of common people, no longer the preserve of the clergy (as John Wycliffe complained) but brought by Erasmus to every traveller to beguile the way, by William Tyndale presented to every ploughboy. Henry VIII ensured that a printed copy of the Great Bible was available in every parish church, chained to the lectern. Rival English editions of the Bible were produced by Puritans in Geneva and Catholics in Rheims before the great King James Bible was crafted in 1611 (or possibly early 1612). 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 Christian Church could fail to honour the Bible? The archaeological, literary and scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century rendered certain passages of the Bible difficult to accept in their literal sense. How could the story of the Tower of Babel be accepted as history, once it became clear that it was a myth attached to the great step-tower Temples (ziggurats) of Mesopotamia? How could the story of the Capture of Jericho be accepted as historical once it was established that the city was unoccupied at the time of Joshua, and the great mud-brick walls dated from nearly a thousand years earlier? On the literary plane, how could the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden be accepted as true when its close relationship in language and imagery to Mesopotamian myths of creation and of the origin of sin was discovered? Or when it was decided by literary critics that the Sermon on 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 but were shaped by the evangelist himself? On the scientific plane, how could the Bible be considered true when it was established that the very first chapter of Genesis was shaped by the preoccupations of a Jewish priestly author to establish that the day of rest on the Sabbath was a constitutive part of the fabric of the world? The world, exactly as we know it, created in seven days! What about Darwin? The sun created on the fourth day! How can days be measured without the rising and setting of the sun? Such questions had provoked outrage and confusion among believers of both Anglican and Roman Catholic tradition at the end of the nineteenth century. Careful scholars and thinkers in both traditions had, by the end of that century, begun to work out the answers. The crisis was all the more urgent in the Protestant tradition with its reliance on sola scriptura and on preaching the Word, and perhaps this made the need to find answers all the more pressing. Roman Catholics could take refuge in sacramentalism and the firm belief in the encounter with Christ in the sacraments, turning a blind eye to the scriptural problems. Roman Catholic noses were rubbed in the problems only at the beginning of the twentieth century when a series of scientific studies, leading to popular publications, burst upon the world in the first decade of the century. In France the movement was led by Alfred Loisy, in England by such figures as Tyrrell and Baron von Hgel. The Roman reaction was swift and violent: a Papal encyclical letter to the bishops of the world, and a series of condemnations by the authoritative Vatican officials: You may not teach this, you may not teach that. This freeze began to thaw with a cautious encouragement of biblical studies by the 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (By the breathing of the divine Spirit) and the papal letter to Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, in 1946, granting that it was not necessary to regard Adam and Eve as historical figures. But by then a whole generation of Catholics had been deep-frozen by loyalty to the Church into a defensive attitude to the scriptures, insisting at any price on the literal historicity of its narratives. It takes time for deep-frozen food to return 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 liberty of investigation, and the expression of the Churchs love for the gift of scripture became the norm. They were reinforced by magnificent documents of the papal Biblical Commission on the historicity of the gospels (1964) and on methods of biblical interpretation. These have been influential, honoured and used by teachers far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church. The message of the newor rather restoredteaching on the Bible is that the Bible is Gods gift to the world, revealing himself to the world, teaching about the relationship of God to human beings and of human beings 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 prayer it must be a means of encounter with the living God. The story of the loyalty and rebellions of Israel over the centuries, and the loving forgiveness and care of God for his Chosen People is told, not as a modern historian would tell it, but by the means available at the time, stories, myths, folk-history. The account of the climax (in Christian eyes) of this process in the Good News of the Sovereignty of God preached by Jesus, and, under the influence of the Spirit given to the Church at Pentecost, of the gradual deepening of understanding of the person of Jesus is again conveyed in the language and literary conventions current at the time. We cannot understand the mysteries without a certain study of the methods. Most of all, we cannot respond to the love of God without a loving and prayerful reading of his message. Since the Vatican Council, therefore, a new attitude to the Word of God in the scriptures has been gradually intensifying in the Catholic Church. There has been a return to the medieval practice of lectio divina, the private or shared prayerful and studious reading of the scriptures. The passages of scripture prescribed to be read in the liturgy has been vastly expanded to impart a far wider and fuller view of biblical writing than was previously the case: over a cycle of three years, instead of a restricted diet of the Gospel of Matthew and the Letters of Paul, a wide and carefully-crafted selection of passages from both Old and New Testaments makes possible a fuller view of Gods revelation. Every encouragement 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 frame and inspire that activity or meeting with the message of God to his People. The awareness that the Bible does not belong uniquely to Protestantsor to Catholicsalone but is the shared property of all Christians has played a significant part in bringing together the traditions of the Christian Church. Benedict XVIs new book on Jesus of Nazareth has confirmed yet again that Catholics and Protestants, and indeed Jews, can learn from the scholarship of each of these traditions. The Bible is a treasure to be handled with the affection and the delicacy due to a divine gift and to be shared among all believers who wish to understand more fully the ways of God with human beings and of human beings with God.

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