CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

It was a dramatic and distressing image: a group of worshipers gathered for the last time at All Saints Episcopal Church in North Attleboro MA, then being replaced within a week by another group of worshipers gathering for the first time in the same church space.

The surface reason was simple enough: the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, which owns the building, had expelled the first group from the church for its rejection of Church teachings—specifically the acceptance of gay unions and gay ordinations—and handed the church over to a second group who accept those teachingsinations gay ordinations.

Moreover this startling image is likely to be repeated. Seven congregations have separated themselves from Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, which is now claiming ownership and control of their church properties. We’re likely to see the same thing it elsewhere, and we need to understand what is going on and why.

On one level, nothing terribly new is happening. As Jimmy Carter pointed out in his recent book Our Endangered Values:

Protestant church congregations…have always been inclined to divide because of theological issues, social questions, or personal disputes and this may be one reason for our enormous expansion.

I have often lectured on the difference between the “Catholic solution” and “Protestant solution” to resolving conflicts. Whereas Catholics tend to engage in a sometimes bitter power struggle to preserve church unity at all costs, Protestants tend to agree to disagree and go their separate ways. The result in America is an officially unified Catholic Church housing millions of discontented Catholics, and Protestants divided into more than 300 denominations.

Yet the Episcopal churches engaged in these current disputes in many ways resemble Catholics more than Protestants. They have priests rather than ministers, Masses rather than services, and celebrate sacraments and saints much as we Catholics do. Moreover, the issues that are dividing these congregations are the very hot button issues that have divided the entire country including Catholics. Most of these issues deal with sexuality (including homosexuality) and “family values” (including same-sex marriage). For the Episcopal churches, the trigger was the election of an openly gay Bishop to lead the Diocese of New Hampshire.

But members on both sides of these disputes are correct in saying that the real divide is deeper than the question of sexual ethics. It is about the very nature of Christian tradition. The departing people are quick to say they are committed to “Following Scripture.” They mean, for example, that they cannot accept ordaining homosexuals or welcoming homosexual couples because they believe homosexuality is condemned in the Bible.

Few Christians would object to the notion that “Following Scripture” is an appropriate standard for Church policies and practices. The real trouble is, Christians are divided over what exactly “Following Scripture” means. This is not a new dispute, but has sharpened in recent years, and it covers several points.

We all agree the Biblical texts are inspired—but we argue whether that means the human authors were guided by divine vision, or actually took dictation verbatim from God. We agree that the Bible is the “Word of God”—but for some this refers to the Biblical message as a whole, while for others it refers to every single word in the text (even the English-language text). We all believe the Bible is “true”—but does that mean it contains the key to understanding the true meaning of life, or that it contains no errors of fact, history, or science?

In short, we all read the same Biblical texts—but we don’t all interpret those texts the same way. And we even argue about interpretation itself: some say that’s up to the reader, other say it’s up to Jesus, others say it’s up to Church officials—and still others say the text always speaks for itself!

This situation is particularly complicated for Catholics. Fifty years ago, most Catholics only kept Bibles as a good place to record family events like baptisms and marriages. Few actually read it—and anyhow “Catholic Bibles” contained stilted English translated from an archaic French translation of a medieval Latin translation of the original Greek and Hebrew texts. Even in church, Catholics only heard the Gospel texts, since the other Biblical texts (the letters of Paul for example, or the Old Testament books) were read sotto voce and in Latin.

After Vatican II, those readings were heard in English, and we got new translations, and the Church finally encouraged people to read the Bible for themselves (instead of discouraging or forbidding Bible reading, as it had in previous Catholic generations). But how? It’s not enough to simply read the pages of the Bible; Catholics also need to figure out how to understand what is on those pages.

For more than 100 years, moderate and progressive Protestants have been developing a modern method to facilitate this understanding, generally called the historical-critical method. It employs a number of scholarly tools to uncover as much as possible about the situation, outlook, languages, and intentions behind the writing of any Biblical book, so that readers can understand what the original author really meant. The aim: to reduce the chance of misinterpreting the meaning of words written thousands of years ago by people living in a totally different time and culture.

Catholic scholars were latecomers to this movement. They were tied (by tradition and often by church authority) to the habit of giving symbolic or allegorical readings to scriptures without any evidence that such symbolism or allegory was intended. By Vatican II, however, Catholic Biblical studies had made up a great deal of lost time and joined mainstream Protestantism in using the historical-critical method.

Meanwhile, however, growing numbers of conservative Protestant churches were adopting an opposite approach (developed during the 20th century) of always reading scripture literally, and assuming that the each word meant exactly the same thing to the author as it means to us. As these churches grew, cable television and pharmacy bookracks and local Bible studies and even the halls of Congress filled with Biblical literalists.

Many Catholics got caught in the middle, between the scholars’ new methods and the popular literalism of Protestant fundamentalists. The scholars’ new methods were well established in mainline Protestant parishes through preaching and religious education, but Catholics often knew little about such methods and did their Bible study under the guidance of literalists.

So while these two approaches have split churches such as the Southern Baptists and the Episcopal churches in Massachusetts and Virginia, they have left most Catholics simply confused: Should we read the bible literally? Should we read it critically? How do we do that?

This confusion is dangerous in an age when authority is in crisis. Scandal and mismanagement have already hurt the credibility of Church authorities. Confusion over interpreting the Bible deprives us of the full authority of Sacred Scripture to guide our life in faith.

The conclusion ought to be obvious: we need to heed the lesson of our Protestant brothers and sisters, and accept the urgent challenge of forming ourselves in a strong, united attachment to a common Biblical faith—before the very sacred texts that ought to bind us begin to tear us apart. Once again, Jimmy Carter’s experienced rings true:

Much of our energy is spent in internecine warfare, in arguments and debates that not only are divisive but tend to incapacitate us as we work in the name of Christ. The many differences among Christians create confusion, fragmentation, and even acrimony, and it is difficult for individual believers to comprehend and adhere to the fundamental elements of our faith. The broader consequence of all these divisions is that global evangelical work suffers and our reputations are tarnished as we contend with one another. Instead, religion should provide the way to heal the differences that separate people, based on the paramount law that Jesus taught, to love our neighbors as ourselves.