One of the things that undoubtedly draws people like me to science is its no-nonsense approach to knowing things. If there isn’t an experiment that will answer a question, put aside the question until you know more. My friend Erik has even gone so far as to suggest armed takeover of the soft sciences to introduce some falsifiability to the fundamentalist backwaters of academia (whether this will wipe out factual terrorism or actually encourage it is another question).

Put enough beer in me, though, and I’ll talk about epistemology all day. I don’t think science is the whole story: we wouldn’t survive an instant if we only acted on things that could be proven scientifically. Metaphysics – the body of questions that can’t be answered empirically – has a way of getting into everything, including science.

I say all this as an introduction to the problem of Scripture. Here you have a book that is claimed – indeed, claims for itself – to be supernaturally true, divinely inspired, and without error. The empirical solution is to take these obviously unverifiable claims and dump them in the wastebasket; what’s left is a rather heterogeneous collection of documents from which one is free to take comfort and ethical guidance. The other option is to take the claims on faith, or rather, to engage with the Bible as it claims to be: God’s Word to humanity. You are then free to accept or reject that message.

Both Catholics and Protestants accept the Bible as God’s Word. The important difference is that Protestants hold to the concept of sola Scriptura, which is a sort of Biblical empiricism, in which Scripture is considered the only source of divine truth. Good things come from this position, as I’ve noted before: it emphasizes the personal relationship between individuals and God, because each Christian is responsible for reading and interpreting the Bible.

The problem is that the Bible is hard to understand. It’s written in two languages that are essentially dead (modern Hebrew and Greek have diverged significantly from their ancient forms) and very strange at that. Greek has tenses (like the aorist) that have no precise equivalent in English and the texts are often written allinlowercaseletterswithoutanyspacesbetweenthem; ancient Hebrew texts often omit vowel markings. On top of that, the Bible references customs and historical events without explaining them. Needless to say, interpretation is not a trivial matter, and the temptation to read certain doctrines into the text is rather difficult to avoid for conservatives and liberals alike.

Among conservative Protestants (i.e. so-called fundamentalists) there is a tendency towards semantic literalism, which insists, for example, that if Genesis says the universe was created in six days, it was no more and no less than six days, and “day” means exactly the same thing as it does now. At some level this is a metaphysical decision, and one that in my opinion is motivated both by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the primacy of reason as well as more recent fears at the way in which liberal theologians have manipulated Scripture to cast doubt on Jesus’ existence and divinity. Unfortunately, semantic literalism often leads people to read verses out of context. To a large extent, however, even very conservative Protestant sects make a real attempt to practice proper exegesis – understanding individual statements in Scripture in the context of the whole Bible and the times in which they were written.

Where Catholics differ is that they also accept two other sources of divine teaching: Tradition and the Magisterium. Tradition encompasses the teachings of Jesus and the apostles that were not included in the Bible. Protestants tend to get their panties all bunched up over the fact that this Tradition is not written down anywhere, forgetting that some things were so obvious that they didn’t have to be written down, and that before the printing press books were extremely valuable and only used for storing the most important information. The Magisterium is the body of Church teachings that have interpreted Scripture and Tradition, and it is in the Magisterium that we find, for example, the dogmas of the Trinity, or the simultaneously divine and human nature of Jesus, neither of which is explicitly delineated in the Bible.

As I noted last week, the Catholic position on Scripture comes from the belief in a visible Church, in the responsibility of the community to decide together what the Bible and the Christian faith are all about. The more difficult proposition is that the teachings of the bishops and the popes are, along with the Bible, preserved from error. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind. Both Protestants and Catholics believe that God communicates truthfully with humanity. The question is how God does so, and how that message is kept free from error. The important thing for me is to continue trusting in the person of God, not in human knowledge of God.

After writing this essay, I discovered a similar critique of Sola Scriptura, written from a more Catholic viewpoint here.