As the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Christ and then nurtured and
protected Him as her child and Lord, so the Church gave birth to the New
Testament Scriptures and now preserves and adheres to them faithfully.
Fourth objection: “But I can understand the Bible through the Holy
Spirit without the need for a church or ‘tradition’!”
St. Peter himself warned that the “ignorant and unstable” would “twist” the
Scriptures “to their own destruction” (2 Pet. 3:16). One fruit of private
interpretation of the Bible has been the spawning of over 35,000 different
Protestant denominations all claiming to be “Bible-believing”, yet agreeing
on little more than their anti-Catholic tenets. A person who builds his faith
on private interpretation is akin to the fool in St. Matthew 7:24-27 who
built his house on the grains of sand. As grains of sand tend to shift to the
downfall of the house, so too do individual minds continually change the
interpretation of Scripture to the downfall of faith. On the contrary, the
wise man built his house on rock (kepha); likewise does the faithful
Catholic build his faith on St. Peter (Kepha) and his successors.
The Bible is a compilation of books all written in the ancient past and in
languages for the most part dead to the average layman. Scripture itself
mentions the difficulty of interpretation: 2 Pet. 3:16; Heb. 5:11-12. If the
Holy Spirit gives an infallible explanation of the Bible to every individual
reader, why did He not explain it to the Ethiopian minister in Acts 8:30-31:
“So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked,
Do you understand what you are reading? He replied, How can I, unless
some one guides me?” It is the Catholic Church that has the true
understanding of Scripture, aided by the Holy Spirit who will guide it in all
truth until the end of the world (St. Matt. 28:20). It is entirely unreasonable
to assert that Christ would leave behind a written book without a divinely
protected living authority to safeguard and interpret it.
The Fathers
Papias
(inter
125-160
AD)
[fragments in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical
History 3, 39, 4 (c. 303 AD)]
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