A comment on my faith and reasoning teaching

I want to point out that nearly everything that I teach in my spiritual direction and my "how to apply faith and reasoning skills" posts uses easy to use concepts taken directly from scripture (from the Bible and also from the Qur'an) and from the two thousand year doctrine of the Catholic Church. In other words, it is mostly concepts that you yourself could deduce; I am not bringing any new information to the table. Far from bringing new doctrine or "revealing secret information," I am trying to improve the discernment of those who work with me so that they can regain the clarity of thought and faith based reasoning that prior pious generations had. Societal and technology changes have hindered rather than helped the average person to actually understand what they are reading when they, for example, read a chapter in the Bible or have a fullness of understanding of the doctrine and its origin of their own faith. It seems like nowadays everyone with a big mouth and media under their control veers on the danger of being a "false prophet." This can be easily identified by noticing that modern false prophets are always claiming to bring new material to the divine books and worse, "decoding secrets" and "channeling the real hidden information." Anyone who is trying to "reveal secrets" or "add prophecy" to the given word of God is by definition a false prophet. So I wanted to point out to you that I do not veer from doctrine, nor do I use techniques that are not fully available to anyone who reads his or her own Bible.

So with that introduction, here is a quick post building on the collection of my teaching about faith and reasoning skills especially for, as always, young readers who are dear to my heart as they seek a revitalization of the faith (and learning) that much of the society of the faithless broken family has shortchanged them. Today I want to mention that when one wants to read the Bible, or study one's faith history and doctrine, there are two opposing forces of extremes that work against your efforts, and you must be aware of them and their motivations. This is not anything sinister, but it is an erroneous and misleading mindset that motivates the producers of material that you might read (or people whom you may interact with).

One extreme is the person who has a faith agenda that they justify through extracted quotations and interpretations from scripture. In its most innocent this is the person who uses several favorite quotes from the Bible as the motivators and leitmotifs of their faith and secular life. We all know people like that and there is nothing wrong with it, though it has the risk of limiting them in their full understanding of God. See, faith, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, was a gift by God that was to be held in unity and community within the faith. Faith was a family and communal trait and responsibility, and it was not a "individual" matter of "conscience." So the mindset of the devout individual that we often encounter today who has up his or her sleeve five or more quotations from the Bible (usually Jesus or Paul) that motivates and fuels their entire faith stance would be unheard of in ancient times and actually considered quite scandalous. So I'm not criticizing the person who truly loves Jesus and who has a few of his sayings to guide them in life, but I am pointing out to you that you must recognize, with charity, that this person often subconsciously uses this device to avoid really exploring the give and take of genuine adult relationship with God within the institutional faith community.

So having said that, there is both the casual and innocent user of this technique but also those who are evangelical, fundamentalist, dispensationalist, and often non-denominational who have a set of Bible quotations that are used as prickly attack devices (which we Catholics feel the most). This is because these types of believers have a genuine love of Jesus, but they also feel they have reduced the entire message of the Bible into a series of "punch lines." This is exactly the opposite of the intention of the Bible and again, this would be unrecognizable to believers of any generation before these last few. Again, it's a free world and they can think what they want, but I want to teach you to recognize that this is a limited and dangerous technique and not to fall for it. By fall for it I mean to be impressed by those who can rattle off quotations to justify their "true" interpretations of the Bible. These types try to make other Christians, especially Catholics, "feel bad and inadequate" when they don't rattle off passages in return. This is faulty thinking at its root. Here is why. The entire Bible is important and valuable in its entirety. No one really knows what God will do in his own time. Here are two examples of how to use discernment.

Look back at yesterday's post about the Luminous Mysteries, where I list each of the 150 psalms of the Book of Psalms by topic. You can see what a diverse and comprehensive list of faith topics is included in the list. It's actually somewhat mind boggling when one looks at it that way, especially when one fully appreciates one person's, David's, authorship of so many of the psalms. Now imagine that you know someone who loves Jesus and thinks that they understand all that is needed of them, based on one, maybe two, sentences of quotation from the entire Book of Psalms. How logical would that be? It makes no sense at all. So you can read the Book of Psalms (as everyone should do) and then imagine meeting someone who has selected two lines from Psalms as not just their favorite passages (which is fine) but the "bottom line" of "all they need to know." Imagine meeting a person who feels that all they need to know from Psalms is "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalms 23:1) and "Thoroughly wash me from my guilt and of my sin cleanse me" (Psalms 51:4). That would be the entire content "of value" that this person takes from the Book of Psalms, passages that emphasize that the Lord will provide all to that individual, and that the Lord will cleanse them of all guilt and sin. Again, these are fine as favorite passages, but can the entire content of King David and others' praise and teaching be reduced to this, out of one hundred and fifty psalms? That is crazy and self justifying thinking! This is why there is a different reading from Psalms each and every day in the Catholic Mass. Psalms cannot be reduced to a couple of "summarized" quotes that "tell you all you need to know." They are a body of knowledge and covenant with God, provided by men who knew God in their personal relationship very, very well, notably King David and King Solomon.

A second example is the use of the measure of a "day" when it applies to God's prophecies. So there are many people who know darn well that when God created the heavens and earth in six days that God was using God's own definition of the length of a "day," (even if they don't admit that God's "day" could be millions of years), but then they claim to be able to decode timing of Apocalyptic events, for example, based on the measure of the human calendar of twenty four hour days. This is an example of this selective quotation "bottom line" reduction of the Bible by those who have agendas of their own preconceived notions. Thus they ignore not only many Biblical events and teachings that demonstrate the challenges of understanding God's timetables, but they ignore contradictions in their own minds. For example, many of these "thinkers" know fully well that the universe, including the earth, was created over a period of billions of years, yet they insist that they can calculate future events of God's based on the use of the "number of days" for these events prophesied in the Bible.

So in conclusion for that one extreme in thinking, recognize, dear friends, that much of it is innocent (people reduce scriptures to favorite sayings that bolster their chosen devout lifestyle), but much of it is a tool of those who, frankly, discard most of the Bible in favor of "interpreting" "punch line events" that are consistent with their hidden or open agendas, and that often leads them into grave error and sin of hubris. Lots of these people write books by the way. So this is why I want to point out to you that there is a difference between citing scripture and reducing the entire book of the Bible into several punch lines, jumping over the body of what God has taught about how humans should have a relationship with him.

Speaking of citing scripture, now I can explain to you the other extreme to guard against, and that is the "Bible history scholar." So on the one hand you have the believer who reduces the Bible to a handful of passages that they feel justifies their stance. On the other hand you have scholars who attempt to "prove" (or "disprove") the Bible. They extract scripture not for its faith meaning but for clues that they can apply to archaeology, historical writings or other corollary "supportive data" to tell you whether "it is probable or not that this or that passage in the Bible is based on any truth or not."

Now obviously I am not criticizing Biblical scholars as a whole! We would not have the body of doctrine and tradition that we do have in the Catholic Church if we did not have two thousand years of Biblical scholars. In a way, you must think of the early collectors of relics as being "faith archaeologists," and be more charitable in your opinion of them than many secular cynics are nowadays in modern times. They understood the value to the faith and to understanding their faith history timing by documenting the martyrs and discovering relics of Jesus (such as the stairs of King Herod's palace, or the True Cross), or of the saints. They may have been wrong and unscientific in many cases, but often they were quite accurate in gaining information from local residents who were descendants of the native people of the time, who could point them in the right directions (for example St. Helen's scouring of the Holy Land for relics and identification of landmarks). And obviously Bible scholars are crucial to understanding documents, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, and to mapping Biblical events to historic times and places. I am all for Bible scholars.

However, there has been a very unattractive modern trend among some "Bible scholars" and this you must use discernment very sharply in order to identify them and understand their error and agenda. There is a modern mindset that ancient people were ignorant and superstitious, and made up stuff right and left because they didn't know better. So these types of "Bible scholars" think that the entire Bible is subject to "proving" or "disproving." They take the principle of the scientific method and misapply it to the Bible in whole pieces. Here are several examples that I can use to help you to understand their mindset. First let's start with an analogy.

Suppose a Bible scholar of this type visited you in your home for coffee. In the course of the evening you bring out your family photograph album and show it to her. You flip through the pages and point out pictures of your great grandparents, your grandparents, parents, your siblings, and you as a child, and you growing up. Photos are taken in various locations, such as your childhood home, on vacations, college campus, and where you married and raised children of your own. You wonder why your visitor looks at you so skeptically, so you ask her what she is thinking. The Bible scholar tells you that because she is a "scientist" she cannot believe anything just based on its "appearances" and what you in your misguided affection (and simple mind) may believe, and hence she cannot authenticate that you did in fact have a family and that those pictures were of real people, and certainly without a DNA test, there is no proof they are actually your relatives, or ever actually existed at all. You might be an egomaniac with Photoshop, she tells you.

That is the problem with this type of "Bible scholar." They ignore that the Bible is not a single book written by someone with an agenda to push, but is instead both a historical and faith document that is fact based and added to in constancy over hundreds of years. They think they look cool and chic by being "skeptical" of everything, and "dig" for the "facts" with a bias toward showing at the very least a "lack of proof of Biblical events" or, they secretly hope, to have the "exclusive" on "disproving" parts (or all) of the Bible. While this is understandable among atheists with empty lives and axes to grind, it actually is very poor "scholarship" and, shockingly, even some "believing Christians" (on campuses no less) fall into this mindset. I'm only being slightly exaggerating and snarky when I say that it bugs them to no end that they have to believe at least that Jews are real and exist because they are still walking and talking in the millions here today! So gosh, they have to at least believe the part of the Bible that "mentions the existence of Israel." Duh! But these extremists literally believe that everything else in the Bible is fair game to be disproved, or at least reduced to "well, this can't be proven so ....." and then they let you feel that it might have been all made up fantasy, like your family photo album doesn't "prove" that you actually had relatives or had been to or lived in the places photographed.

So these are the two extremes of people who you meet either casually as friends or acquaintances, or who you might hear the opinions of in the media, perhaps even purchasing their books in good faith, where you must be cautious. Their techniques and tools, and their arguments seem so reasonable, and easily put you on the defensive. Do not go on the defensive, and use your discernment to recognize the two errors that infest their methodologies. One group errs because they believe in God, but think that his works can be reduced to "bottom lines" and the rest is really moot. The opposite group is biased by disbelief (even if they state otherwise) and a lack of respect for the good intentions of the faithful who lived during or documented subsequently Biblical times. I hope you found this helpful!