Essay time! I think the answer to the question posed above is an emphatic, "no!" Scripture is certainly important, nay, essential, ("ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ"- Thank you, St Jerome!) but it is not the only thing that is essential. Read on to find out what the other thing is...
Why are dogmatic formulas as well as Scripture necessary for
understanding the person and nature of Jesus Christ?
The mystery of the Incarnation is
not readily grasped by the human intellect, and thus the person and nature of
Christ have been frequently misunderstood through the history of Christianity.
These misunderstandings take place as a result of the fallibility of human
rationality, combined with the difficulties involved in understanding Sacred
Scripture. This paper will attempt to show that not only are both dogmatic
formulas and Scripture essential for understanding the truth regarding Jesus
Christ, but that they complement and mutually nourish each other. First the
importance of Scripture will be established, followed by an examination of the
consequences of relying on Scripture alone. This will lead into an
understanding of the necessity of the Magisterium of the Church, such that any
dogmatic formulas it proclaims can be known to be true with certainty. Finally,
an example of this process in practice from the early Church will be
considered. Sacred Scripture will be taken to mean all the writings that the
Catholic Church has discerned to be the inspired written Word of God, while
dogmatic formulas will be considered to be statements of those truths that the
Magisterium has declared to be divinely revealed.
Understanding
the person and nature of Christ means to know Christ as He really was and to
assent to the reality of the mystery of the Incarnation. This requires an
encounter with Him through Sacred Scripture; “ignorance of Scripture is
ignorance of Christ”, said St Jerome.
This
is possible since it is the written Word of God, which means that the Son,
revelation itself, makes himself present to His Church through written words. This
occurs most explicitly in the Gospels, which are the “principal
source for the life and teaching of the Incarnate Word, our Saviour”.
The records contained in the New Testament, and the manner in which they fulfil
the Old, reveal that Jesus was both truly a man, as he goes through the full
range of human experiences; yet that also, His claims to divinity are
substantial.
Essential and
foundational as the Scriptures are, they are not enough by themselves. There
are a number of practical barriers to reliable interpretation. At the root of
most of them is human fallibility. The Bible is a collection of many types of
writing, from many different contexts, and its meaning is not always plain.
Lack of knowledge of context, original language, history and culture can easily
lead to a person misconstruing the Word of God. Truths that the author intended
to express through metaphorical language may be lost if the text is interpreted
literally, while other times the author may have intended his words to convey their plain
meaning, yet the reader could interpret them metaphorically. This problem is
compounded in that if one is reading a translation, one has to rely on the
translator’s faithfulness to the original sense of the text, which is certainly
not guaranteed to be free from error.
Even
the relative explicitness of the New Testament with regard to Jesus is open to
interpretation. Text that is read or heard is always done so through a person’s
particular worldview lens, and the meaning of what they read or hear is shaped
by that lens. Thus it is impossible to read Scripture without interpreting it,
which means there are as many possible understandings of Jesus as there are
readers of Scripture.
This is evidenced in the plethora of differing opinions about Christ, his
being, his teachings, and his life existing in the world today.
Sacred Scripture
itself testifies to its complexity. St Peter says “There
are some things in them [Paul’s letters] hard to understand, which the
ignorant and unstable
twist to their own destruction, as
they do the other scriptures.”
St Paul attests
to this also in Hebrews,
and St Luke in Acts.
The Word of God has many layers of meaning, in two categories- the literal and
the spiritual senses,
due to its authorship being both divine and human. God being Scripture’s author
means that the depths of the spiritual sense to be unearthed by limited human
readers are immeasurable, and that new insights are always possible. It is
likely that this contributes to the difficulties in understanding the Word of
God. It is this “hard to understand” nature of Scripture, combined with a
principle of private interpretation apart from the Church (a practice condemned
by Peter
),
that leads to misunderstandings or errors in theology, namely, heresies.
Heresies are detrimental to the Church because they
undermine the marks of the Church, which are that it is one, holy, catholic and
apostolic. One aspect of both the unity and apostolicity is that the Church
professes one faith received from the Apostles.
To have people within the Church disagreeing with what the Church has always
believed since the Apostles, damages the unity of the Church. Augustine says
that it also damages the faith itself.
This unity is meant to be one of the characteristics that makes the Church
identifiable as the Church founded by Jesus, and He prays for its unity during
His agony in the garden.
Paul exhorts the Ephesians to maintain unity of faith, so that they may not be
led astray by novel doctrines.
Heresy, being a sin against faith,
weakens the holiness of a particular member of the Church and thus the Body of
Christ as a whole.
The catholic mission to bring all nations to Christ is undermined in that if
heresy in present in some areas of the world, the wrong Gospel may be preached,
and thus it is not the fullness of Christ (who is truth itself) who is being
taught in that region. As Tertullian expresses it, “they and we have not the
same God, nor one- that is, the same- Christ”.
In order to combat the “poison” of heresy when it “infects”
the Church,
dogmatic formulations of what the Church believes (which is equivalent to what
is really true), are essential. However, in order for these to have any weight,
the Church itself must be an institution endowed with the authority of Christ
to teach infallibly. This is just what the Catholic Church claims to be,
and such a claim is consistent with Sacred Scripture, and with reason. Christ
gives the apostles the authority to bind and loose, with this binding and loosing
that is to occur on earth to be mirrored in heaven.
This implies that what the Church teaches is to be preserved from error, as
false or evil things cannot be bound or loosed in Heaven. Furthermore, Jesus is
to send the Spirit of Truth to guide the Church into all truth.
In the Great Commission, Christ gives the Church its mission, to bring the Good
News to all nations, and he charges the apostles and their successors with the
task of teaching them to observe all that he commanded them.
Moreover, the Church is said to be the Body of Christ,
and to speak with the voice of Christ when she teaches.
This Church defends the deposit of faith she has been
charged with preserving against error when it arises, in the form of dogmatic
formulations. These are discerned and distilled from surveying revelation
through Scripture and Tradition as an organic unity, and reformulating the
truths contained therein more clearly. They go on to become part of Tradition and
provide unchanging boundaries outside of Scripture, such that interpretation of
Scripture may be guided by them, and so be protected from falling into error,
while also refuting false doctrines. Once certain truths are firmly
established, this allows the Church to delve ever deeper into the mysteries of
faith through exegesis of Scripture that is enlightened by these truths,
building upon the foundations laid before. These formulations are not solemnly
proclaimed as binding on all the faithful, until a particular belief of the
Church is attacked in a serious way.
Then the bishops are forced to come together, and to examine the beliefs of the
Church in the light of false doctrine, and to robustly proclaim its teachings
with clarity.
In the early Church, the person and nature of Christ were
vigorously disputed. Various questions arose during the first centuries, such
as whether Christ was God, whether he was human, how human or divine he was,
and whether he was one or two persons. In order to answer these questions,
theologians had to clarify what it meant to say that a being was a person, and
whether that person was divine, or human (or angelic). Thus, the Church drew on
the Greek philosophical tradition, employing the philosophical concepts of
person and nature. These extra-biblical terms were essential for maintaining
orthodox belief concerning the Incarnation of God the Son. This orthodox belief
was summarised in the axioms of orthodoxy,
namely, “only God can save”, and “all that is assumed is not saved”. This is a
distillation of the three central Christological truths- Christ is fully
divine; Christ is fully human; Christ is one Divine Person, God the Son.
Finally, let us consider an example of why dogmas are
important, and how they come about. A particularly dangerous heresy emerged in
the fourth century called Arianism. Arius denied both Christ’s complete
divinity and his complete humanity, saying rather that he was created by the
Father, yet with a dignity greater than that of normal human beings.
Hence he was not quite God, and not quite man. Arius supported his claims with
scripture,
as St Vincent said that heretics do, in imitation of the devil, in order that
they may deceive more easily.
To remove the disturbance in his empire that this was causing, Constantine
called for the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. At this council, the assembled
bishops, through the charism of infallibility granted to the Magisterium by the
work of the Holy Spirit, declared with certainty that Arianism was a heresy,
and that Jesus Christ is “the Son of God, born of the Father, the
sole-begotten; that is to say, of the substance of the Father, God from God,
Light from Light, true God from true God; born, not made, consubstantial with
the Father”.
There
was debate among the bishops regarding the inclusion of the word for consubstantial,
homo-oúsion. Some bishops were
reluctant to use any terms not found in Scripture. However, the view that
prevailed was that the Scriptures had not been written for refuting heretics
with a philosophical approach, and that it was necessary to declare in some
cases what Scripture meant.
This situation and succeeding events shows why dogmatic formulations by a
living teaching authority are necessary, along with Scripture, since the
mystery of Christ’s Incarnation can easily be misunderstood and such
misunderstandings spread through the Church, leading the faithful astray.
In conclusion, attempting to interpret Scripture using only
Scripture and relying on oneself as the ultimate arbiter of correct and
incorrect interpretation, ultimately and inevitably leads to problems. This is
true of all doctrine, and so includes those pertaining to the nature and person
of Jesus Christ. Scripture is not perspicuous, and human beings are not
infallible as individuals; such a gift is given specifically to the Church in
her teaching office precisely in order to combat false interpretations with
clarity and conviction. The Church carves out the guidelines within which
authentic understanding of the truths conveyed by Scripture may take place, and
condemns incorrect ideas when they arise. This is for the good of the Church
and all her members, both in the present age and in the future, as part of her
mission is to preserve the one faith deposited to her by the Apostles.
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REFERENCE LIST:
(Accessed 26 October 2012)
Haddad, Robert., Defend
the Faith! (Sydney: Lumen Verum Apologetics, 2003)
Hughes, Philip, The
Church in Crisis- The Twenty Great Councils (London: Burns & Oates,
1961)
Kevane, Eugene., Creed
and Catechetics- a Catechetical Commentary on the Creed of the People of God
(Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1978)
Latourelle, Rene, S.J., Theology
of Revelation (New York: Alba House, 1966)
McBrien, Richard. (Ed.), The
Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (San Francisco: Harper San
Francisco, 1995)
New Catholic
Encyclopedia, Volume 7, 2nd Edition, Berard
Marthaler (ed.) (Washington, D.C.: Thomson Gale, 2003)
Second Vatican Council.
Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei
Verbum (18 November 1965).
Sheehan, Archbishop Michael., Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine (London: Saint Austin Press,
2001)
The Holy Bible Revised
Standard Version Catholic Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory,
Translated by C.A. Heurtley. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second
Series, Vol. 11. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY:
Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894.) Revised and edited for New Advent
by Kevin Knight.
Willis, John., S.J. (Ed.), The Teachings of the Church Fathers (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1966)
