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Misinter-
pretation
of Scripture |
"And consider the patience of our Lord as salvation, as our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, also wrote to you, speaking of these things as he does in all his letters. In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures."
(St. Peter, 2 Pt. 3:15-16) "For heresies are not born except when the
true Scriptures are not well understood and when what is not well
understood in them is rashly and boldly asserted.'' (St. Augustine,
Doctor of the Church)
"[We
must be cautious of the danger that] through some faulty
interpretation we make Christ's Gospel into man's Gospel."
(St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church)
"But whoever understands Holy Scripture
otherwise than according to the meaning of the Holy Spirit, by
Whom it was written, although he may not withdraw from the Church,
still he can be called a heretic." (St. Isidore, Doctor of
the Church)
"Seeing that the same God is the author
both of the sacred books and of the doctrine committed to the
Church, it is clearly impossible that any teaching can, by
legitimate means, be extracted from the former which shall in any
respect be at variance with the latter. Hence it follows that all
interpretation is foolish or false which either makes the sacred
writers disagree with one another, or is opposed to the doctrine
of the Church." (Pope Leo XIII) "For, the fifth Lateran Council, after it
had decided that 'every assertion contrary to the truth of
revealed faith is altogether false, for the reason that it
contradicts, however slightly, the truth,' advises teachers of
philosophy to pay close attention to the exposition of fallacious
arguments; since, as [St.] Augustine testifies, 'if reason is turned
against the authority of sacred Scripture, no matter how specious
it may seem, it errs in the likeness of truth; for true it cannot
be.'" (Pope Leo XIII, "Aeterni Patris", 1879 A.D.) "Experience also shows that this is true,
and aside from other Fathers, St. Augustine states it in the
following words: 'Heresies and other wicked teachings which
ensnare souls and cast them into the deep, arise only when the
good scriptures are badly understood and when what is not well
understood in them is affirmed with daring rashness.'" (Pope
Leo XII, "Ubi Primum ", 1824 A.D.)
"...the great error of those others as well
who boldly venture to explain and interpret the words of God by
their own judgment, misusing their reason and holding the opinion
that these words are like a human work. God Himself has set up a
living authority to establish and teach the true and legitimate
meaning of His heavenly revelation. This authority judges
infallibly all disputes which concern matters of faith and morals,
lest the faithful be swirled around by every wind of doctrine
which springs from the evilness of men in encompassing error. And
this living infallible authority is active only in that Church
which was built by Christ the Lord upon Peter, the head of the
entire Church, leader and shepherd, whose faith He promised would
never fail. This Church has had an unbroken line of succession
from Peter himself; these legitimate pontiffs are the heirs and
defenders of the same teaching, rank, office and power. And the
Church is where Peter is, and Peter speaks in the Roman Pontiff,
living at all times in his successors and making judgment,
providing the truth of the faith to those who seek it. The divine
words therefore mean what this Roman See of the most blessed Peter
holds and has held. For this mother and teacher of all the
churches has always preserved entire and unharmed the faith
entrusted to it by Christ the Lord. Furthermore, it has taught it
to the faithful, showing all men truth and the path of salvation." (Pope Pius IX, "Qui Pluribus", 1846 A.D.)
"Among the special schemes with which
non-Catholics plot against the adherents of Catholic truth to turn
their minds away from the faith, the biblical societies are
prominent. They were first established in England and have spread
far and wide so that We now see them as an army on the march,
conspiring to publish in great numbers copies of the books of
divine Scripture. These are translated into all kinds of
vernacular languages for dissemination without discrimination
among both Christians and infidels. Then the biblical societies
invite everyone to read them unguided. Therefore it is just as
Jerome complained in his day: they make the art of understanding
the Scriptures without a teacher 'common to babbling old women and
crazy old men and verbose sophists,' and to anyone who can read,
no matter what his status. Indeed, what is even more absurd and
almost unheard of, they do not exclude the common people of the
infidels from sharing this kind of a knowledge. But you know the
aim of these societies. In his sacred writings, Peter, after
praising the letters of Paul, warns that in these epistles
'certain things are difficult to understand, which the unlearned
and the unstable distort just as they do the rest of the
Scriptures, which also leads to their destruction.' He adds at
once, 'Since you know this beforehand, be on your guard lest,
carried away by the error of the foolish, you fall away from your
own steadfastness.' Hence it is clear to you that even from the
first ages of Christianity this was a skill appropriate for
heretics. Having repudiated the given word of God and rejected the
authority of the Catholic Church, they either interpolate 'by
artifice' into the Scriptures or 'pervert its meaning through interpretation.' Nor finally are you ignorant of the diligence and
knowledge required to faithfully translate into another language
the words of the Lord. In the many translations from the biblical
societies, serious errors are easily inserted by the great number
of translators, either through ignorance or deception. These
errors, because of the very number and variety of translations,
are long hidden and hence lead the faithful astray. It is of
little concern to these societies if men reading their vernacular
Bibles fall into error. They are concerned primarily that the
reader becomes accustomed to judging for himself the meaning of
the books of Scripture, to scorning divine tradition preserved by
the Catholic Church in the teaching of the Fathers, and to
repudiating the very authority of the Church. For this end the
same biblical societies never cease to slander the Church and this
Chair of Peter as if We have tried to keep the knowledge of sacred
Scripture from the faithful. " (Pope Gregory XVI,
"Inter Praecipuas", 1844 A.D.) "For
some go so far as to pervert the sense of the [First] Vatican Council's
definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put
forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that
immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat
of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a
human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they
say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden. In interpreting
Scripture, they will take no account of the analogy of faith and the
Tradition of the Church. Thus they judge the doctrine of the Fathers and
of the Teaching Church by the norm of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the
purely human reason of exegetes, instead of explaining Holy Scripture
according to the mind of the Church which Christ Our Lord has appointed
guardian and interpreter of the whole deposit of divinely revealed
truth. Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal
sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under
the Church's vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a
new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By
means of this new exegesis of the Old Testament, which today in the
Church is a closed source, would finally be thrown open to all the
faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish,
difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning
of the Scriptures. Everyone sees how foreign all this is to the
principles and norms of interpretation rightly fixed by our predecessors
of happy memory, Leo XIII in his Encyclical 'Providentissimus Deus,' and
Benedict XV in the Encyclical 'Spiritus Paraclitus,' as also by
Ourselves in the Encyclical 'Divino Afflante Spiritu.' It is not
surprising that novelties of this kind have already borne their deadly
fruit in almost all branches of theology." (Pope Pius XII, "Humani
Generis", 1950)
"Nay, rather,
[the Modernists] do in fact describe it
with no hesitation, so that you would believe that they saw the
very writers with their own eyes as they applied their hand in
every age to amplifying the Sacred Books. Moreover, to support
these actions they call to their aid a criticism which they call
textual; and they strive to convince us that this or that fact or
expression is not in its own place, and they bring forward other
such arguments. - You would indeed say that they had prescribed
for themselves certain types, as it were, of narrations and
discourses, as a result of which they decide with certainty what
stands in its own place or in a strange place. - Let him who
wishes judge how skilled they can be to make decisions in this
way. Moreover, he who gives heed to them as they talk about their
studies on the Sacred Books, as a result of which it was granted
them to discover so many things improperly stated, would almost
believe that no man before them had turned the pages of these same
books; and that an almost infinite number of doctors had not
examined them from every point of view, a group clearly far
superior to them in mind, and erudition, and sanctity of life.
These very wise doctors indeed, far from finding fault with the
Sacred Scriptures in any part, rather, the more thoroughly they
investigated them, the more they gave thanks to divine authority
for having deigned so to speak with men. But alas, our doctors
with respect to the Sacred Books did not rely upon those aids on
which the modernists did; thus they did not have philosophy as a
master and guide, nor did they choose themselves as their own
authority in making decisions. Now, then, we think that it is
clear of what sort the method of the modernists is in the field of
history. The philosopher goes ahead; the historian succeeds him;
right behind, in order, works criticism, both internal and
textual. And since it is characteristic of the first cause to
communicate its power to its consequences, it becomes evident that
such criticism is not criticism at all; that it is rightly called
agnostic, immanentist, and evolutionist; and that so, he who
professes it and uses it, professes the errors implicit in the
same and opposes Catholic doctrine. - For this reason it can seem
most strange that criticism of this kind has such weight today
among Catholics. This obviously has a twofold cause: first of all
the pact by which the historians and the critics of this kind are
so closely joined, the differences of nationality and the
dissension of religions being placed in the background; then the
endless effrontery by which all with one voice extol whatever each
of them prattles, and attribute it to the progress of science; by
which in close array they attack him who wishes to examine the new
marvel or his own; by which they accuse him who denies it of
ignorance, adorn him with praises who embraces and defends it.
Thus no small number are deceived who, if they should examine the
matter more closely, would be horrified. - From this powerful
domineering on the part of those in error, and this heedless
compliance on the part of fickle souls, a corruption in the
surrounding atmosphere results which penetrates everywhere and
diffuses its pestilence." (Pope St. Pius X, "Pascendi
dominici gregis", 1907 A.D.) "By the doctrine of Jerome those statements
are well confirmed and illustrated by which Our predecessor, Leo
XIII, solemnly declared the ancient and constant faith of the
Church in the absolute immunity of Scriptures from any errors...
And, introducing the definitions of the Councils of Florence and
Trent, confirmed in the Vatican Synod, he has the following:
'Therefore, nothing at all matters ... otherwise He Himself were
not the Author of all Sacred Scripture'. Although these words of
Our predecessors leave no place for ambiguity or evasion, We must
grieve, Venerable Brothers, that not only were there not lacking
some among those outside the Church, but even among the sons of
the Catholic Church, moreover - which wounds Our soul more
severely - among the clergy itself and the teachers of the sacred
disciplines, who relying proudly on their own judgment, either
openly reject the magisterium of the Church on this subject or
secretly oppose it. Indeed, We approve the plan of those who, to
extricate themselves and others from the difficulties of the
Sacred Codex, in order to eliminate these difficulties, rely on
all the aids of scholarship and literary criticism, and
investigate new avenues and methods of research; but they will
wander pitifully from their purpose, if they disregard the
precepts of Our predecessor and pass beyond certain limits and
bounds which the Fathers have set [Prov. 22:28]. Yet by these
precepts and limits the opinion of the more recent critics is not
restrained, who, after introducing a distinction between the
primary or religious element of Scripture, and the secondary or
profane, wish, indeed, that inspiration itself pertain to all the
ideas, rather even to the individual words of the Bible, but that
its effects and especially immunity from error and absolute truth
be contracted and narrowed down to the primary or religious
element. For their belief is that that only which concerns
religion is intended and is taught by God in the Scriptures; but
that the rest, which pertains to the profane disciplines and
serves revealed doctrine as a kind of external cloak of divine
truth, is only permitted and is left to the feebleness of the
writer. It is not surprising, then, if in physical, historical,
and other similar affairs a great many things occur in the Bible,
which cannot at all be reconciled with the progress of the fine
arts of this age. There are those who contend that these
fabrications of opinions are not in opposition to the
prescriptions of Our predecessor, since he declared that the
sacred writer in matters of nature speaks according to external
appearance, surely fallacious. But how rashly, how falsely this is
affirmed, is plainly evident from the very words of the Pontiff.
And no less do they dissent from the doctrine of the Church who
think that the historical parts of Scriptures depend not on the
absolute truth of facts, but only on what they call the relative
and harmonious opinion of the multitude; and they do not hesitate
to infer this from the very words of Pope Leo, because he said
that the principles established regarding the things of nature can
be transferred to the historical disciplines. And so they contend
that the sacred writers, just as in physical matters they spoke
according to what was apparent, so they related events
unwittingly, inasmuch as these seemed to be established according
to the common opinion of the multitude or the false testimonies of
others; and that they did not indicate the sources of their
knowledge, and did not make the narrations of others their own.
Why shall we refute at length a matter plainly injurious to Our
predecessor, and false and full of error? For what is the
similarity of the things of nature and history, when the physical
are concerned with what 'appears to the senses,' and so should
agree with phenomena; while on the other hand the law of history
is chiefly this, that what is written must be in agreement with
the things accomplished, according as they were accomplished in
fact? If the opinion of these men is once accepted, how will that
truth of sacred story stand safe, immune from every falsehood,
which Our predecessor declares must be retained in the entire text
of its literature? But if he affirms that the same principles that
have a place in physics can to advantage be transferred to history
and related disciplines, he certainly does not establish this on a
universal basis, but is only professing that we use the same
methods to refute the fallacies of adversaries as we use to
protect the historical faith of Sacred Scripture against their
attacks... Nor is Sacred Scripture lacking other detractors; We
recognize those who, if they are restrained within certain limits,
so abuse right principles indeed that they cause the foundations
of the truth of the Bible to totter, and undermine the Catholic
doctrine handed down by the Fathers in common. Among these Fathers
[St.] Jerome, if he were still alive, would surely hurl the sharpest
weapons of his speech, because, neglecting the sense and judgment
of the Church, they very smoothly take refuge in citations which
they call implicit, or in accounts historical in appearance; or,
they contend that certain kinds of literature are found in the
sacred books, with which the whole and perfect truth of the divine
word cannot be reconciled; or, they have such an opinion on the
origin of the Bible that its authority collapses and utterly
perishes. Now, what must be thought of those who in expounding the
Gospels themselves diminish the human faith due them and overturn
divine faith? For what our Lord Jesus Christ said, and what He did
they are of the opinion did not come down to us entire and
unchanged, although they are witnesses of all those who wrote down
religiously what they themselves had seen and heard; but that -
especially with reference to the fourth Gospel - part came down
from the evangelists who themselves planned and added much, and
part was brought together from the account of the faithful of
another age. Now, Venerable Brethren, with the passing of the
fifteenth generation after the death of the greatest Doctor We
have communicated with you not to delay to bring these words to
the clergy and your people, that all, under the patronage and
leadership of Jerome, may not only retain and guard the Catholic
doctrine of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, but may also
cling most zealously to the principles which are prescribed in the
Encyclical Letter, 'Providentissimus Deus,' and in this Our own..." (Pope Benedict XV, "Spiritus Paraclitus",
September 15, 1920 A.D.) Also
See: The
Church's Traditional Interpretation of Holy Scripture Is Not
Subject To Correction | Difficulty
of Scripture | Literal
/ Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture | Modernists
/ Scripture | Private
Interpretation / Twisting Scripture | Proper Interpretation of Scripture | Written
/ Oral Tradition
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