Word, Church and Bible
Edward Holloway
The Church, what is she, or it? We use many images. She is our "Mother", also the "Body of Christ", the "Holy People of God", the "Ark of God's Salvation", and others beside. In these we think of the Church of God - his communion with us on earth - as an institution; an institution which is natural, loving and caring like the family, which is also an institution natural to man.
Almost unconsciously we place our personal relationship to God in a category parallel to and running beside that relationship to God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - which we profess in the living body we call the Church. In a similar way we make a distinction between "liturgical prayer" and "private prayer". There is, of course, a distinction, but in truth it is partial and not perfect. In the last analysis all our knowing, praying and loving is "prayer of the Church".We pray within the family of the Church because we are all brothers and sisters to the physical body of Jesus Christ. If we search for the wellspring of this personal and familial belonging in God we must go back and ask some very basic questions. In doing so we will find that we are simultaneously asking what is the source principle of primal revelation and of the Bible.What is the answer to the seeking and searching mind and heart which is in everyone ? Who am I? How do I come to be here? What is my meaning? Who wants me, does anyone love me, where does my real, all-embracing happiness lie? For we are not fulfilled in sun, air, earth, and water like all other life around us. We are not animals; earth and angel mingle as one in us. We are not fulfilled in possessions, fame, fortune, money and physical excitement; even power leaves the heart unloved. All these are gathered under a greater, ordered wisdom at the core of the real, the ultimate "me". This is what I call my "soul", or spirit.Earth, air, sun and flowing waters are not my joy-place. God is the joy-place of man. God is reality, peace that is stable, wise joy in thinking, timeless happiness in possessing. And God as "parent" is also the answer to human seeking. He is "our Father". Parents have children, families are at once all personal and all social. So is the Church. The Church is familial, she herself is "mother" but the "fatherhood" is not of earth. Mother Church binds earth to heaven - to God.Where shall we place the foundation of ‘the Church’ ? Some would say (very beautifully) in the moment of Mary's assent: "behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word". The conception of Christ was the first mutual work of God and men, and Mary is thereby "Mother of the Church". On the other hand there is the perception of the church Fathers who saw the sacramental life of the Church flowing as a gift from the wounded side of Christ. One could look to the priestly ordination of the apostles at the Last Supper, for, after all, the Holy Eucharist is at the centre of the Church's identity. There is a sense in which Pentecost marks the first public moment of evangelisation, of "Church". However in a theology which sees the meaning of all matter in the Word made Flesh, and places the motive of the Incarnation in the ordered flash with which the universe begins, there is another vista for the origin and identity of "the Church".
Genesis
The primal moment of the Church - at once utterly personal and utterly social and communal - is where God, having made "the man", divides the powers of his life and Adam recognises in Eve, "bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, this is to be called She ('isha') for this is taken from He ('ish')" (Gen. 2:23) And with his family - personal and institutional - God walks as with his children, in the cool of the evening air in paradise. We overlook the prophetic, lovely significance of walking with them, "in the cool of the evening air". All the Earth is Eden, God's Garden of Delights; and the friendship of loving recognition and contemplative love, however simple, marks the primal revelation of God to his people.This surely must be the moment of ‘the ‘Church’, but when the covenant of perfect friendship is broken by guile and disobedience, decay and corruption of spirit and flesh follow at once ... " and who has told you that you are naked, except you have eaten of the fruit of the tree that I forbade to you!" (Gen. 3:12). Earth will no longer be Eden, God's Garden of royal delight. The covenant is broken. But it is immediately renewed in friendship, only now through redemption and with pain. And yet the Economy of God goes on unchanged.Sin cannot change the mind or plan of God. His purposes will be vindicated still. "And God said to the serpent: I will place war between you and the woman, her seed and yours, you shall strike against his heel, but he shall crush your head". (Gen. 3:15). But sadly the King's Son shall "come to his own domain and his own will not accept him" (John 1:11) , and His star throws a cross-shaped shadow across the crib. Here is the beginning of ‘Church’; Salvation without sin, Salvation lost through sin; Salvation restored but in Redemption's pain.
The Priority of Solemn Tradition – from Genesis to Revelation
From this brook in Eden rises too the Bible's source. The rivulet enlarges, runs and rolls through history, as the prophet Ezekiel was shown. It is the river of the evocation of the Word of God within the heart and the family of man. But from this insight a vital truth follows, relevant to our own day. We notice the priority of tradition - God's word of teaching - over the hieroglyph and script, the word written down. For long ages there can be no holy scripture, because there is no writing, but there will be a Teaching Church.That original principle subsists to this day in the Catholic Church. She makes no claims for her theologians; for better or worse theologians are only a ‘service industry’! For her priestly and prophetic ministry, however, she claims the right of ‘magisterium’ - the right of office to interpret, if needs be inerrantly, the Godly meaning of "the Book". It was so in the beginning. The Bible is hers. Unless the teaching ministry comes first there will be no written word. The authority of the written word is one principle with the solemn authority of the teaching word.The Lord himself did not leave a book, but He proclaimed: "behold I am with you till the end of the world"( ). Tradition and Holy Scripture are one principle, not two. The written word was - and remains - the one divine teaching throughout all its books and forms of writing. In the development of the Old Testament the Teacher is teaching to a climax, towards his own coming in the flesh as God with us - Emmanuel. And after he ascended to the Father he teaches still, with God's own authority on earth as the 'Environer of man'. "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. When He, the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all things, bringing to your mind whatever I have said to you. He will not speak of Himself, he will receive of mine and reveal it to you" (John 16:12-14).The principle of the Catholic magisterium is not man's feeble and fallible authority, that indeed would be only the word of the theologian. It is the authority of the Spirit, receiving of the both the written and spoken word of the Logos of God. That is why organic development of doctrine - God's own personal leading and guiding towards full understanding - not man's new "insight" is natural to the Church. We have only one Teacher and he is the Christ.The word of the magisterium interprets holy scripture and also past apostolic tradition, as well as new development, judging whether it be true or false. All this is one principle: the word of the Word. From this we know that the Catholic Church is at the Centre of centres. The fullness of God's revelation rises in her and subsists in her from the beginning of the world to its consummation. She is "Genesis" where God walks with men in familial converse and she is "Revelation" where God gathers saints and angels around him in perfect recognition, blessing, adoration and joy.
Necessity of Holy Scripture
From this familial relationship of God to men - the answer to the prayer and seeking of the individual soul and the social intercommunion of the word by which men reach out to each other - God must raise up the priest and the prophet through human history. Anthropology (an "in" discipline at the moment) traces the nature of man, as human culture develops, throwing up community and society, the king and the counsellor and the council of state. Any anthropological survey must expect to find the priest and the prophet, and the council of the priest and the teaching rabbi. God must raise it up to be so by right of nature and of grace.This is the Church and it is one principle with God's walking with Adam and Eve in the intimate converse of the cool evening air. We could not possibly dispense with "Holy Scripture", which is the witness to the on-going teaching and communion of God with men through the ages. ‘Scripta manent, verba autem evanescunt.’ It is a cliche' used in conferences to young priests and students against writing imprudent or angry letters, never write when you can speak or telephone - "letters remain, the word dies in the air."In a positive sense, how would we know, how could we prove the wonderful unity and coherence of God revealing and communing through the ages, without the Bible? How could we store the precious heritage of truth and love in psalm and wisdom books, as men grew in maturity and civilization, without the word. How could we be sure of prophecy and the all important evidence of Messianism which is unique to the Bible, unless the same word of God the Teacher were written down? It is the same even in mundane things. You must have written instructions, but if they are not clear to you, go to the one who wrote them down. The same principle applies in the Church. They are her letters, she wrote them down, she knows in the last analysis what they mean.
"Hear 0 Israel"
It is here that the form-critics and now the redaction critics of the Bible - Old Testament and New - go so wrong again and again. The culture did not make the religion in the Judaeo-Christian line. The religion formed the culture. God was always a direct actor in the teaching and the writing through long ages. That is why there is prophecy - God's direct and personal leading on - only and uniquely in the Old Testament and in no other great world religion, even though elsewhere there is beauty, truth and a vocation from great souls to their brethren.In the anthropology of the religions of mankind, (pace Rahner and others) revelation is not of one order and kind. The meaning of the Bible cannot be ascertained adequately from texts and contexts in the history-conditioned culture of its age. There is always a "sensus plenior", a fuller meaning of prophecy and type, which is never totally distinguishable from the so called literal sense. The full sense is perceptible only when, from a future that was then lying ahead, we can look back with the hindsight of fulfilment. And yet the expectation of that fullness was always there. The whole of the Old Testament is one great season of Advent leading to the coming of the Messiah. The greatest of the rabbis were convinced that everything in the Law and the prophets spoke only of fulfilment in the days of the Messiah.The prototype of the Catholic principle of Magisterium and apostolic tradition exists also in the Old Testament. The principles that Newman applied to the coherent development of doctrine from the early Christian Church to now, can be applied in one coherent order of continuity from the Old Testament, through to the New and on to the beginning of the third millennium.There was never simply a written and edited record which every man interpreted as he saw fit (except for the Sadducees, who were the exact counterparts of today's liberal rationalists in Judaism). There was, rather, a living community under God with a magisterial office of teaching, interpretation and development. The scribes and the pharisees sat on the Chair of Moses. Their magisterium was imperfect and prophetic, awaiting the day of the Messiah, but it was still the magisterium of God, not of men, and Christ recognised it while warning against their deviant works.
Oracles of God
All the oracles of Israel have but one beginning - "This is the word of the Lord"! It was an imperfect word, but the word of God's own magisterium, a word of ‘the Church’. Its fulfilment in the perfect word of Yahweh is hymned in the prologue to the Gospel of St. John, but also in the canticle "Benedictus" (Lk ), in which it is proclaimed that the "Bishop" of our souls, who is "the Day-Star" from on high, "has come to visit us".This continuity of principle and type between the Jewish concept of "magisterium" - abiding, divine, teaching authority - and the Catholic concept may be part of the reason why those laborious critiques from the pens of scores of Nordic scripture scholars are consigned to the dustbin of scholarship every fifty years or less. They have little sense of the semitic mind or of a prophetic, divine oracle - a ‘faith speaking to the future’.The concept of a teaching magisterium - of the divine word speaking on earth - is alien to the theology of the Reformation. It was the cardinal principle of the rejection of the Papacy four hundred years ago. The devout Christian rabbi Alfred Edersheim was not a Catholic Christian it is true, but he has in his works all the tenacious semitic reverence for fact handed down and for the principle of prophecy as the shaping force of Israel up to and in the time of Christ. After a century his works have been reprinted as a paperback. (references ) He is still relevant and reliable. Whether there will be similar demand for Bultmann in paper or electronics in a hundred years time is a matter for prudent doubt.
Old Testament and New: One Word
There is not a dividing line between the Old Testament and the New. The old Covenant lives by God's oracle, God's leading on, God's protection of his word - spoken, written and edited down the ages in patriarch and priest, in psalmist and in prophet. It gives us living, vibrant, expectant Messianism as the ‘substantial form’ of the whole of the Old Testament. It passes in perfect continuity of principle in the prologue of St. John's Gospel into the fact and person of the Messiah; Jesus Christ is God from God, God in person, God in the flesh tabernacled among us. "For the Law was given by Moses. Grace and truth have come by Jesus Christ...No man has ever seen God, God the Only-begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1: 17-18).The whole meaning of the Bible and all the beauty of its prophetic and wisdom literature is now fully comprehensible, because the oracle of prophecy has passed, in one continuity of principle, into final fact and final authority. It has passed too into a love for man which is absolute in one who is fully Son of God and fully Son and prince of man. The prologue of St. John's Gospel is the witness of the transition, of the fulfilment of man's expectation from the time God walked with his own in the afternoon air. It is also the witness that the perfect Light has come into the world - for God the Teacher has taken flesh and tabernacles among His people.The principle of divine magisterium - of God teaching both in the private mind and heart and in one family of his People - one authority in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition - continues in Christ, God and Messiah. St. Peter was well aware of the tradition of his fathers. When speaking in defence of St. Paul his colleague, he reminds Jew and Gentile Christian that they must: "understand this first, no prophecy of scripture is subject to private interpretation. For no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men inspired by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (1 Peter ).So the one principle of God teaching, loving, consoling and redeeming "the men Thou gavest Me", persists from the Old Testament and lives within the Church of the New. Only now God the Messiah lives in his people and speaks, declares, loves and offers Himself in them as the sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world.The dimension of Divinity is now finalised among men; and so is the principle of magisterium - God's own personal Word lives in her teaching, her priesthood and her councils. If the Church is not infallible down the ages in her preaching Christ, giving Christ - communing in the private heart, in the family and in the whole community of the People of God, as Jesus, Lord, Lover and Saviour - then there is no Divinity in Christ. And if that is so then we are, as Paul says in another context, of all men the most miserable.Once again, the principle of the Christian faith will be the total, divine authority for faith and fulfilment of the word of The Word. It is Holy Scripture and the apostles teaching through the ages and the Holy Spirit bringing to their mind "the things that I have said to you" (Jn ). Scripture and Tradition are one principle and it is the Tradition which knows the meaning of the Word. The Word is not dead, it lives in a teacher, abiding and declaring.
The Priority of John
The witness to an abiding, divine authority of Peter and the apostles in the Church through the ages (men dying, men being born, men waxing and waning, and over all Christ's claim and command: "all power is given to Me in heaven and on earth, going therefore teach you all the nations … " ) - was brought home to me on the occasion of the definition of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I stood in a vast concourse in the humbler spaces of St. Peter's Square and heard these words:- "by the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and Our own ... we declare, define, and promulgate etc". That is how it is, how it always was: one Authority of Christ the Lord, speaking and writing, living and loving, always Divine - for God is tabernacled among his people. Without this vision, this power to bind the assent of the proud mind and heart of man, there is no Divinty in Christ.We must therefore repudiate and resist the effort being made in present "Catholic" circles to diminish the sincerity, objectivity and the historical witness of the New Testament. Since the end of the Second Vatican Council human arrogance and smallness of mind has had a field-day. In the matter of the Gospel of St. John first and foremost, we reject the suggestion that either it is a late piece of pure theologising by St. John meditating on his time with Christ and putting his own words into the mouth of Christ; or the equally common attempt to make of St. John, and especially the prologue, the combined witness, very late in the second century, of a whole "Johannine Community", who composed the prologue, and among other things the sacerdotal prayer of Christ (John 14-17) as the witness of "the Spirit" in their own minds and hearts.There is not a shred of evidence, of course, that John did not write his Gospel, most probably indeed with editorial help. But the constant effort to "play down" the full startling vision of John, and to ignore its total, obvious unity of theme and detailed eye witness account, is based in the end on sheer refusal to believe that God did become man and did so reveal himself to the disciple he had loved and trained in a unique manner to comprehend his divine personality. In the words of W. Leonard : "It is difficult to resist the conclusion that a cogent reason for modern denial is the clear and even startling portrayal in John of the divine sonship of Christ. If it could be shown that the Gospel was not in fact written by one of Our Lord's immediate followers, but by a Christian of later date, the force of the historical evidence would be weakened thus making it easier to deny its claims". (??)
Repudiation of the De-Mythologists
We have to repudiate the attempted distinction between a "Christ of faith" and a "Christ of history". There is no objective evidence whatever why we should not. It is unacceptable, for instance, to suggest (as Rahner does in his Foundations) that where the infancy narratives of St. Luke offend the modern, Western mind as "mythological", (i.e. they mean what they say) they may "without qualm" be quietly ignored.(9) They may not. They relate, with objectivity, the most objective work of God in human history.The divine actuality of God in the Incarnation is at stake, both in the assertion of the Virgin Birth and also from the actual numinous presence of God (the "shekinah") overshadowing Mary so that the Holy One conceived shall be "the Son of God". Likewise in the Jerome Biblical Commentary (reprint 1974) we read that the account of the Magi and the massacre of the boy infants is quite possibly a midrash - creative legend - indulged by Matthew to highlight Jesus as the king prophesied by Isaiah. Thus, in this view, it never really happened. This in spite of the historical dating of the death of Herod, and the stormy context of the barely gained accession of Archelaus.Do these scholars ever stop to weigh up the psychological state of mind they imply in the evangelists of the New Testament ? Herod may have been a depraved beast, but it would be a monstrous crime to frame even Herod with a murderous outrage he did not commit. Do "scholars" like these know anything about the love of God as an experience, the state of mind, the objectivity, peace and truth with which it floods the soul ?
Development Disproves Midrash
The Fathers of the Church and the great early critical historians of the age of the Fathers did know and have this experience. They treat in a measured, objective way of the critical problems of the New Testament and its canon, but they never doubt the objectivity or historicity of the solemn magisterium handed down. For them it is the "Holy Writ", which is the written witness of the actual teaching Church before the year I00 A.D.There is not a trace of midrash – popular pious legend - in the doctrinal writing of the early Church. If it had been there in the Church's beginnings, it would inevitably have shown in the doctrinal development of Christian theology. The early centuries abound in apocrypha and alleged apostolic writings, especially in the Gnostic communities - much of it truly legendary and mythical in character. These and their ilk have no place in the teaching tradition of the orthodox Church of the great Councils and every historian of doctrine is aware of it.It is therefore unacceptable to suggest that ‘midrash’ - an imaginative foil to bring out the person of Christ - exists in the New Testament and that perhaps at that time people would have been aware of it. If it had been there in the beginning the Church would have developed as Gnostic and eclectic in type, and the structure and type of the great Councils of the first five centuries would have been impossible.The tradition of magisterium which built upon, developed and solemnly defined the things that are of Christ, always treats the New Testament as inspired, factual and objectively true. There is no other way our Christ can be Divine. Otherwise we make of him a "nestorian" creation - a man through whom God most fully worked, but, in his radical person, ultimately a man. Rahner demonstrably has problems here as well.
The Novitiate of the Beloved Disciple
It is a marvel that serious theologians do not see a wonderful clue to the detail, vividness and confidence of St. John's portrayal of the Divinity of Christ in the words, confrontations and ‘prayers to the Father’ which John records for us. He was the ‘beloved disciple’ for just this one thing. He was not Jesus ‘little pet’ among the Twelve. He was prepared and deepened by sheer contemplative love to recognise before, and more completely than all others before the resurrection, that ‘it is the Lord’.The solemn magisterium of the Church is now under attack from disobedience as never before. We are at pains to assert that just as the oracle of God leading on to a climax was the divine magisterium of the Old Testament, so the magisterium of Christ in his Church, solemn and infallible in Pope and Council, is the same one principle of God's divinity among his people, now on earth.There is no way in which the truth which prompted and protected the Scriptures can save those Scriptures from corruption under the critical mind and imperfection of fallen man, other than by a teaching tradition through the ages which is the final word of the Word Incarnate. The Church too, in her spiritual leaders, must have the courage to use that power. It is a power which carries a duty to men and to Christ who ever lives in his Church.If there is no effective power to define and declare the living truth of the Living God made man, who speaks in the New Testament, then after two thousand years those words have only a relative, history-conditioned beauty and truth. They do not bind us. It was all a long, long time ago and people were very simple in those days. Why, they could not even distinguish disease from possession by devils! Jesus Christ did not know exactly who he was supposed to be, so the Christian claim for him to be "divine" has only a limited sense. And we all know that we cannot trust John, he was a dear, beautiful old man running a loyal charismatic community. He rhapsodizes about the master he knew, loved and so sorely missed. So whilst it is all very beautiful and true in a mystic sort of way (whatever that is!) we can be edified, forget it and push on with organizing the third millennium!
Essential Witness of Divine Magisterium
Relying on the Bible alone, subject to such interpretation as "the Spirit" may give to each and every reader, cannot save Christianity in the third millenium. This has to be said at the beginning of a decade of ‘ evangelisation’. There would be no authority left with which to preach and proclaim. What we require from the pages of the Gospels and the teaching and pastoral epistles which back them up and apply them, is first the personality and authority of God himself in the impact of Jesus Christ from those pages.There is only one ‘I’ in Jesus Christ, the ‘I’ who said "before Abraham was made I AM" (Jn ). The person or "act-centre" which speaks in the New Testament is, as St. John's prologue so vividly declares, the Living Mind and Love through which all things were made, visible and invisible. We don't want a ‘Jesus who was us like us, but more holy under pain!’. It is a falsehood which has spoiled too much post-conciliar theology, that before the Church was ‘let free’, we emphasized the Divinity of Christ too much and suppressed his humanity. Both accusations are false and devotions like that to the Sacred Heart of Jesus give the retort to either error. The whole of the Messianic urge of the old Testament culminates in the Episcopate of God the Messiah and there is no power in the New Testament unless we accept St. John in particular just as he is.Such has always been the life, witness, love and solemn declaration of the Roman and Catholic Church. In the modern world it is not the Bible alone which will save Christianity, but the word of magisterial, divine teaching that wrote the Bible and, through apostles and evangelists, first developed and then defined it through the centuries.Scripture plus an exercised Magisterium is the sole hope of any evangelisation in a world which has long lost its certainties, but not the lusts which helped it to forget. We must have a new apologetics, and not the courteous indifferentism of so many catechetical programmes which neither teach the Divinity of Christ to men, nor form it in the souls of men.Human beings are going to grow more godlike in all their power over the laws of matter and the engineering at the bases of the Universe. It is pitiful to base any re-evangelisation of this culture on a scheme of Christianity which is based on a human interpretation of a holy book which, in that tradition of theology which relies on ‘Scripture alone’, has already been abandoned by its theologians and worse by its bishops. If there is to be any meaningful ecumenism (and there has been little up to now) this crisis over the Divinity in Christ and the claims of Christ upon the human conscience must be faced.
At the Heart of the Matter
At the heart of the matter is the need to answer the question of the meaning of Man and the control and direction of man's fallible, but free and powerful spiritual intellect. Matter is controlled within the Universe, Man is not. We must vindicate anew the reality of a soul in Man which is not one with matter-energy, nor some sort of incoherent "self-transcendence", which is intelligible in neither the order of science nor in the order of free spirit.The only sign we have to give to modern men and women that human life does have, as we would expect, a controlling and directing Spirit unto its fulfilment and salvation, is the continuity in time and the continuity in principle of that one unique divine magisterium which is the Bible and Tradition as one and the same revelation. Then we can show the Church's life of development and definition which again is in strict continuity with that one same principle. The teaching Divinity of God in Christ (not an authority which is just "for private reading") must exist on earth and be bravely exercised on earth. It can be shown through the ages, although the courage to re-proclaim it is not too evident just now, as good men and women agonize in doubt.The miracle of the "teaching tradition" of solemn doctrine for which the infallibility of God is claimed, consists partly in its very existence on earth, (it is a corollary of the claim for Christ of a real teaching ministry until the end of time), and partly because, in the development and definition of doctrine, it answers the needs of God's People. Answers must be given; human nature demands them. They must be final, or human nature disregards them.At this time of great crisis we must expect of God that he give new support in his Church and a new prophetic vision. When this is done, (and we think it has been), there can then emerge a new vision and a new insight into the Mind of God in Christ, and into the Love - human and divine - in Christ. It will renew and command the spirit of man. There will follow from this insight a call to a deeper conformation of us all to the personality of Christ as Son of God and Son (Prince) of Man.As God and man Jesus is the norm of human joy and fulfilment. We are made to the image of God; it is to God we approximate. A new vision must make the point, which needs making, that man is not self-fulfilled, nor morally autonomous. There is for us a control and direction, a law of life and being. It is centred in God and God has communed and is in communion with us.The growth and noble deployment of a truly human personality does not, cannot, consist through technological self-mutilation or the abdication of human responsibility in our loving by ever more brilliant pills and chemicals. The true vision of human holiness and of the self-dignity of human love which we could give to the young would thrill many of them. We know it does. There is no guarantee, or expectation that all or even most will accept that way. Did they when men crucified Jesus ? "But to as many as did Receive Him, He gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the urge of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God". (John 1: 12-13).
From Genesis to Apocalypse
This is the meaning and mission of ‘Church’ from Genesis, from the ‘beginnings’, until now. Perhaps later someone might ponder the perspective in which this ‘inculturation’ into Christ should be done in sermons, schools, parish groups, the intimacy of the home and the communing of Christian friendship. Then, beyond renewal in the Church, lies the going out to other Faiths in sweetness and utter humility.For now, this article has been concerned with the main wonder of God's communing with men - the coherence and utter continuity of God's control and direction of the spoken word and the written word of divine tradition until now. God has walked and talked with us ‘as friends’, in mutual communing ‘in the cool of the evening air’, sweetly and wonderfully, in the original communion of innocence, through priest and prophets under the labour of sin; and now finally in the painful and most loving communion of Redemption. This is Word, Church, and Bible
References
1. The linking of the Hebrew word "eden", pleasure, or delight, to the Septuagint rendering by "paradise', an enclosed garden or park, gives us the sense of "Garden of Delight". It would belong to a great Lord, who would go out to commune with guests and courtiers after siesta, in "the cool of the evening air". The Islamic concept of heaven, the two "Gardens of Delight" are very similar.
2. Ezekiel 47: 1-12. The vision begins in his time but reaches out to the Messianic flood of grace andhealing.
3. Ref. Catholicism: A New Synthesis. Chapter I 1, Evocation of the Word.
4. Matthew 23; 2-4. Christ is summary in his dismissal of the Sadducees.
5. 2 Peter 1:20 & 2: 1. Then in 3:15-16. The authority of "scripture" is conferred on Paul, which equates apostolic authority in the beginning of Christianity with the "inspired word of God".
6. From A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (1953). Gospel of St. John, p.97 1.
7. Published from Howard Way, Harlow, Essex, but apparently the work of the Mother of God community, Gaithersburg, USA. The meditations are excellent and orthodox, sometimes very beautiful. One's point is that orthodoxy, based on a biblical scholarship which is permissive and hypothetical is like a house built on sand. The gales of time will bring it down. The front cover translates John 1: 14 as "the glory as of a father's only son" with a small "f" which is inadequate to the Greek, and to the context of the prologue,
8. Jerome Biblical Commentary (1974 printing) Gospel of St. Matthew, by John McKenzie,
9. K. Rahner. Foundations, e.g., pp 244-6; Jesus Christ; 280-300. The Midrash cornment on p.376. But the whole of Rahner's Christology in his attempt to put a human personality into Christ as well as a divine, ends one suggests, in obvious Nestorianism. Matters are complicated by Rahner's obvious "difficulty" with the doctrine of the Trinity. The suggestion in Foundations that the concept of Purgatory could possibly be syncretized with the Eastern belief in the reincarnation of souls, is also rather eyebrow raising.
10. The Gospel ofst. John, FAITH, May/June 1983.
11. Son of man: Meditation on Psalm 8, FAITH, July/ Aug 1983, v. 15, no. 4. Important also: "Jesus Did He Know Who He was.7" (Faith Pamphlet Series).
Edward Holloway
The Church, what is she, or it? We use many images. She is our "Mother", also the "Body of Christ", the "Holy People of God", the "Ark of God's Salvation", and others beside. In these we think of the Church of God - his communion with us on earth - as an institution; an institution which is natural, loving and caring like the family, which is also an institution natural to man.
Almost unconsciously we place our personal relationship to God in a category parallel to and running beside that relationship to God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - which we profess in the living body we call the Church. In a similar way we make a distinction between "liturgical prayer" and "private prayer". There is, of course, a distinction, but in truth it is partial and not perfect. In the last analysis all our knowing, praying and loving is "prayer of the Church".We pray within the family of the Church because we are all brothers and sisters to the physical body of Jesus Christ. If we search for the wellspring of this personal and familial belonging in God we must go back and ask some very basic questions. In doing so we will find that we are simultaneously asking what is the source principle of primal revelation and of the Bible.What is the answer to the seeking and searching mind and heart which is in everyone ? Who am I? How do I come to be here? What is my meaning? Who wants me, does anyone love me, where does my real, all-embracing happiness lie? For we are not fulfilled in sun, air, earth, and water like all other life around us. We are not animals; earth and angel mingle as one in us. We are not fulfilled in possessions, fame, fortune, money and physical excitement; even power leaves the heart unloved. All these are gathered under a greater, ordered wisdom at the core of the real, the ultimate "me". This is what I call my "soul", or spirit.Earth, air, sun and flowing waters are not my joy-place. God is the joy-place of man. God is reality, peace that is stable, wise joy in thinking, timeless happiness in possessing. And God as "parent" is also the answer to human seeking. He is "our Father". Parents have children, families are at once all personal and all social. So is the Church. The Church is familial, she herself is "mother" but the "fatherhood" is not of earth. Mother Church binds earth to heaven - to God.Where shall we place the foundation of ‘the Church’ ? Some would say (very beautifully) in the moment of Mary's assent: "behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word". The conception of Christ was the first mutual work of God and men, and Mary is thereby "Mother of the Church". On the other hand there is the perception of the church Fathers who saw the sacramental life of the Church flowing as a gift from the wounded side of Christ. One could look to the priestly ordination of the apostles at the Last Supper, for, after all, the Holy Eucharist is at the centre of the Church's identity. There is a sense in which Pentecost marks the first public moment of evangelisation, of "Church". However in a theology which sees the meaning of all matter in the Word made Flesh, and places the motive of the Incarnation in the ordered flash with which the universe begins, there is another vista for the origin and identity of "the Church".
Genesis
The primal moment of the Church - at once utterly personal and utterly social and communal - is where God, having made "the man", divides the powers of his life and Adam recognises in Eve, "bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, this is to be called She ('isha') for this is taken from He ('ish')" (Gen. 2:23) And with his family - personal and institutional - God walks as with his children, in the cool of the evening air in paradise. We overlook the prophetic, lovely significance of walking with them, "in the cool of the evening air". All the Earth is Eden, God's Garden of Delights; and the friendship of loving recognition and contemplative love, however simple, marks the primal revelation of God to his people.This surely must be the moment of ‘the ‘Church’, but when the covenant of perfect friendship is broken by guile and disobedience, decay and corruption of spirit and flesh follow at once ... " and who has told you that you are naked, except you have eaten of the fruit of the tree that I forbade to you!" (Gen. 3:12). Earth will no longer be Eden, God's Garden of royal delight. The covenant is broken. But it is immediately renewed in friendship, only now through redemption and with pain. And yet the Economy of God goes on unchanged.Sin cannot change the mind or plan of God. His purposes will be vindicated still. "And God said to the serpent: I will place war between you and the woman, her seed and yours, you shall strike against his heel, but he shall crush your head". (Gen. 3:15). But sadly the King's Son shall "come to his own domain and his own will not accept him" (John 1:11) , and His star throws a cross-shaped shadow across the crib. Here is the beginning of ‘Church’; Salvation without sin, Salvation lost through sin; Salvation restored but in Redemption's pain.
The Priority of Solemn Tradition – from Genesis to Revelation
From this brook in Eden rises too the Bible's source. The rivulet enlarges, runs and rolls through history, as the prophet Ezekiel was shown. It is the river of the evocation of the Word of God within the heart and the family of man. But from this insight a vital truth follows, relevant to our own day. We notice the priority of tradition - God's word of teaching - over the hieroglyph and script, the word written down. For long ages there can be no holy scripture, because there is no writing, but there will be a Teaching Church.That original principle subsists to this day in the Catholic Church. She makes no claims for her theologians; for better or worse theologians are only a ‘service industry’! For her priestly and prophetic ministry, however, she claims the right of ‘magisterium’ - the right of office to interpret, if needs be inerrantly, the Godly meaning of "the Book". It was so in the beginning. The Bible is hers. Unless the teaching ministry comes first there will be no written word. The authority of the written word is one principle with the solemn authority of the teaching word.The Lord himself did not leave a book, but He proclaimed: "behold I am with you till the end of the world"( ). Tradition and Holy Scripture are one principle, not two. The written word was - and remains - the one divine teaching throughout all its books and forms of writing. In the development of the Old Testament the Teacher is teaching to a climax, towards his own coming in the flesh as God with us - Emmanuel. And after he ascended to the Father he teaches still, with God's own authority on earth as the 'Environer of man'. "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. When He, the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all things, bringing to your mind whatever I have said to you. He will not speak of Himself, he will receive of mine and reveal it to you" (John 16:12-14).The principle of the Catholic magisterium is not man's feeble and fallible authority, that indeed would be only the word of the theologian. It is the authority of the Spirit, receiving of the both the written and spoken word of the Logos of God. That is why organic development of doctrine - God's own personal leading and guiding towards full understanding - not man's new "insight" is natural to the Church. We have only one Teacher and he is the Christ.The word of the magisterium interprets holy scripture and also past apostolic tradition, as well as new development, judging whether it be true or false. All this is one principle: the word of the Word. From this we know that the Catholic Church is at the Centre of centres. The fullness of God's revelation rises in her and subsists in her from the beginning of the world to its consummation. She is "Genesis" where God walks with men in familial converse and she is "Revelation" where God gathers saints and angels around him in perfect recognition, blessing, adoration and joy.
Necessity of Holy Scripture
From this familial relationship of God to men - the answer to the prayer and seeking of the individual soul and the social intercommunion of the word by which men reach out to each other - God must raise up the priest and the prophet through human history. Anthropology (an "in" discipline at the moment) traces the nature of man, as human culture develops, throwing up community and society, the king and the counsellor and the council of state. Any anthropological survey must expect to find the priest and the prophet, and the council of the priest and the teaching rabbi. God must raise it up to be so by right of nature and of grace.This is the Church and it is one principle with God's walking with Adam and Eve in the intimate converse of the cool evening air. We could not possibly dispense with "Holy Scripture", which is the witness to the on-going teaching and communion of God with men through the ages. ‘Scripta manent, verba autem evanescunt.’ It is a cliche' used in conferences to young priests and students against writing imprudent or angry letters, never write when you can speak or telephone - "letters remain, the word dies in the air."In a positive sense, how would we know, how could we prove the wonderful unity and coherence of God revealing and communing through the ages, without the Bible? How could we store the precious heritage of truth and love in psalm and wisdom books, as men grew in maturity and civilization, without the word. How could we be sure of prophecy and the all important evidence of Messianism which is unique to the Bible, unless the same word of God the Teacher were written down? It is the same even in mundane things. You must have written instructions, but if they are not clear to you, go to the one who wrote them down. The same principle applies in the Church. They are her letters, she wrote them down, she knows in the last analysis what they mean.
"Hear 0 Israel"
It is here that the form-critics and now the redaction critics of the Bible - Old Testament and New - go so wrong again and again. The culture did not make the religion in the Judaeo-Christian line. The religion formed the culture. God was always a direct actor in the teaching and the writing through long ages. That is why there is prophecy - God's direct and personal leading on - only and uniquely in the Old Testament and in no other great world religion, even though elsewhere there is beauty, truth and a vocation from great souls to their brethren.In the anthropology of the religions of mankind, (pace Rahner and others) revelation is not of one order and kind. The meaning of the Bible cannot be ascertained adequately from texts and contexts in the history-conditioned culture of its age. There is always a "sensus plenior", a fuller meaning of prophecy and type, which is never totally distinguishable from the so called literal sense. The full sense is perceptible only when, from a future that was then lying ahead, we can look back with the hindsight of fulfilment. And yet the expectation of that fullness was always there. The whole of the Old Testament is one great season of Advent leading to the coming of the Messiah. The greatest of the rabbis were convinced that everything in the Law and the prophets spoke only of fulfilment in the days of the Messiah.The prototype of the Catholic principle of Magisterium and apostolic tradition exists also in the Old Testament. The principles that Newman applied to the coherent development of doctrine from the early Christian Church to now, can be applied in one coherent order of continuity from the Old Testament, through to the New and on to the beginning of the third millennium.There was never simply a written and edited record which every man interpreted as he saw fit (except for the Sadducees, who were the exact counterparts of today's liberal rationalists in Judaism). There was, rather, a living community under God with a magisterial office of teaching, interpretation and development. The scribes and the pharisees sat on the Chair of Moses. Their magisterium was imperfect and prophetic, awaiting the day of the Messiah, but it was still the magisterium of God, not of men, and Christ recognised it while warning against their deviant works.
Oracles of God
All the oracles of Israel have but one beginning - "This is the word of the Lord"! It was an imperfect word, but the word of God's own magisterium, a word of ‘the Church’. Its fulfilment in the perfect word of Yahweh is hymned in the prologue to the Gospel of St. John, but also in the canticle "Benedictus" (Lk ), in which it is proclaimed that the "Bishop" of our souls, who is "the Day-Star" from on high, "has come to visit us".This continuity of principle and type between the Jewish concept of "magisterium" - abiding, divine, teaching authority - and the Catholic concept may be part of the reason why those laborious critiques from the pens of scores of Nordic scripture scholars are consigned to the dustbin of scholarship every fifty years or less. They have little sense of the semitic mind or of a prophetic, divine oracle - a ‘faith speaking to the future’.The concept of a teaching magisterium - of the divine word speaking on earth - is alien to the theology of the Reformation. It was the cardinal principle of the rejection of the Papacy four hundred years ago. The devout Christian rabbi Alfred Edersheim was not a Catholic Christian it is true, but he has in his works all the tenacious semitic reverence for fact handed down and for the principle of prophecy as the shaping force of Israel up to and in the time of Christ. After a century his works have been reprinted as a paperback. (references ) He is still relevant and reliable. Whether there will be similar demand for Bultmann in paper or electronics in a hundred years time is a matter for prudent doubt.
Old Testament and New: One Word
There is not a dividing line between the Old Testament and the New. The old Covenant lives by God's oracle, God's leading on, God's protection of his word - spoken, written and edited down the ages in patriarch and priest, in psalmist and in prophet. It gives us living, vibrant, expectant Messianism as the ‘substantial form’ of the whole of the Old Testament. It passes in perfect continuity of principle in the prologue of St. John's Gospel into the fact and person of the Messiah; Jesus Christ is God from God, God in person, God in the flesh tabernacled among us. "For the Law was given by Moses. Grace and truth have come by Jesus Christ...No man has ever seen God, God the Only-begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1: 17-18).The whole meaning of the Bible and all the beauty of its prophetic and wisdom literature is now fully comprehensible, because the oracle of prophecy has passed, in one continuity of principle, into final fact and final authority. It has passed too into a love for man which is absolute in one who is fully Son of God and fully Son and prince of man. The prologue of St. John's Gospel is the witness of the transition, of the fulfilment of man's expectation from the time God walked with his own in the afternoon air. It is also the witness that the perfect Light has come into the world - for God the Teacher has taken flesh and tabernacles among His people.The principle of divine magisterium - of God teaching both in the private mind and heart and in one family of his People - one authority in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition - continues in Christ, God and Messiah. St. Peter was well aware of the tradition of his fathers. When speaking in defence of St. Paul his colleague, he reminds Jew and Gentile Christian that they must: "understand this first, no prophecy of scripture is subject to private interpretation. For no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men inspired by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (1 Peter ).So the one principle of God teaching, loving, consoling and redeeming "the men Thou gavest Me", persists from the Old Testament and lives within the Church of the New. Only now God the Messiah lives in his people and speaks, declares, loves and offers Himself in them as the sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world.The dimension of Divinity is now finalised among men; and so is the principle of magisterium - God's own personal Word lives in her teaching, her priesthood and her councils. If the Church is not infallible down the ages in her preaching Christ, giving Christ - communing in the private heart, in the family and in the whole community of the People of God, as Jesus, Lord, Lover and Saviour - then there is no Divinity in Christ. And if that is so then we are, as Paul says in another context, of all men the most miserable.Once again, the principle of the Christian faith will be the total, divine authority for faith and fulfilment of the word of The Word. It is Holy Scripture and the apostles teaching through the ages and the Holy Spirit bringing to their mind "the things that I have said to you" (Jn ). Scripture and Tradition are one principle and it is the Tradition which knows the meaning of the Word. The Word is not dead, it lives in a teacher, abiding and declaring.
The Priority of John
The witness to an abiding, divine authority of Peter and the apostles in the Church through the ages (men dying, men being born, men waxing and waning, and over all Christ's claim and command: "all power is given to Me in heaven and on earth, going therefore teach you all the nations … " ) - was brought home to me on the occasion of the definition of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I stood in a vast concourse in the humbler spaces of St. Peter's Square and heard these words:- "by the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and Our own ... we declare, define, and promulgate etc". That is how it is, how it always was: one Authority of Christ the Lord, speaking and writing, living and loving, always Divine - for God is tabernacled among his people. Without this vision, this power to bind the assent of the proud mind and heart of man, there is no Divinty in Christ.We must therefore repudiate and resist the effort being made in present "Catholic" circles to diminish the sincerity, objectivity and the historical witness of the New Testament. Since the end of the Second Vatican Council human arrogance and smallness of mind has had a field-day. In the matter of the Gospel of St. John first and foremost, we reject the suggestion that either it is a late piece of pure theologising by St. John meditating on his time with Christ and putting his own words into the mouth of Christ; or the equally common attempt to make of St. John, and especially the prologue, the combined witness, very late in the second century, of a whole "Johannine Community", who composed the prologue, and among other things the sacerdotal prayer of Christ (John 14-17) as the witness of "the Spirit" in their own minds and hearts.There is not a shred of evidence, of course, that John did not write his Gospel, most probably indeed with editorial help. But the constant effort to "play down" the full startling vision of John, and to ignore its total, obvious unity of theme and detailed eye witness account, is based in the end on sheer refusal to believe that God did become man and did so reveal himself to the disciple he had loved and trained in a unique manner to comprehend his divine personality. In the words of W. Leonard : "It is difficult to resist the conclusion that a cogent reason for modern denial is the clear and even startling portrayal in John of the divine sonship of Christ. If it could be shown that the Gospel was not in fact written by one of Our Lord's immediate followers, but by a Christian of later date, the force of the historical evidence would be weakened thus making it easier to deny its claims". (??)
Repudiation of the De-Mythologists
We have to repudiate the attempted distinction between a "Christ of faith" and a "Christ of history". There is no objective evidence whatever why we should not. It is unacceptable, for instance, to suggest (as Rahner does in his Foundations) that where the infancy narratives of St. Luke offend the modern, Western mind as "mythological", (i.e. they mean what they say) they may "without qualm" be quietly ignored.(9) They may not. They relate, with objectivity, the most objective work of God in human history.The divine actuality of God in the Incarnation is at stake, both in the assertion of the Virgin Birth and also from the actual numinous presence of God (the "shekinah") overshadowing Mary so that the Holy One conceived shall be "the Son of God". Likewise in the Jerome Biblical Commentary (reprint 1974) we read that the account of the Magi and the massacre of the boy infants is quite possibly a midrash - creative legend - indulged by Matthew to highlight Jesus as the king prophesied by Isaiah. Thus, in this view, it never really happened. This in spite of the historical dating of the death of Herod, and the stormy context of the barely gained accession of Archelaus.Do these scholars ever stop to weigh up the psychological state of mind they imply in the evangelists of the New Testament ? Herod may have been a depraved beast, but it would be a monstrous crime to frame even Herod with a murderous outrage he did not commit. Do "scholars" like these know anything about the love of God as an experience, the state of mind, the objectivity, peace and truth with which it floods the soul ?
Development Disproves Midrash
The Fathers of the Church and the great early critical historians of the age of the Fathers did know and have this experience. They treat in a measured, objective way of the critical problems of the New Testament and its canon, but they never doubt the objectivity or historicity of the solemn magisterium handed down. For them it is the "Holy Writ", which is the written witness of the actual teaching Church before the year I00 A.D.There is not a trace of midrash – popular pious legend - in the doctrinal writing of the early Church. If it had been there in the Church's beginnings, it would inevitably have shown in the doctrinal development of Christian theology. The early centuries abound in apocrypha and alleged apostolic writings, especially in the Gnostic communities - much of it truly legendary and mythical in character. These and their ilk have no place in the teaching tradition of the orthodox Church of the great Councils and every historian of doctrine is aware of it.It is therefore unacceptable to suggest that ‘midrash’ - an imaginative foil to bring out the person of Christ - exists in the New Testament and that perhaps at that time people would have been aware of it. If it had been there in the beginning the Church would have developed as Gnostic and eclectic in type, and the structure and type of the great Councils of the first five centuries would have been impossible.The tradition of magisterium which built upon, developed and solemnly defined the things that are of Christ, always treats the New Testament as inspired, factual and objectively true. There is no other way our Christ can be Divine. Otherwise we make of him a "nestorian" creation - a man through whom God most fully worked, but, in his radical person, ultimately a man. Rahner demonstrably has problems here as well.
The Novitiate of the Beloved Disciple
It is a marvel that serious theologians do not see a wonderful clue to the detail, vividness and confidence of St. John's portrayal of the Divinity of Christ in the words, confrontations and ‘prayers to the Father’ which John records for us. He was the ‘beloved disciple’ for just this one thing. He was not Jesus ‘little pet’ among the Twelve. He was prepared and deepened by sheer contemplative love to recognise before, and more completely than all others before the resurrection, that ‘it is the Lord’.The solemn magisterium of the Church is now under attack from disobedience as never before. We are at pains to assert that just as the oracle of God leading on to a climax was the divine magisterium of the Old Testament, so the magisterium of Christ in his Church, solemn and infallible in Pope and Council, is the same one principle of God's divinity among his people, now on earth.There is no way in which the truth which prompted and protected the Scriptures can save those Scriptures from corruption under the critical mind and imperfection of fallen man, other than by a teaching tradition through the ages which is the final word of the Word Incarnate. The Church too, in her spiritual leaders, must have the courage to use that power. It is a power which carries a duty to men and to Christ who ever lives in his Church.If there is no effective power to define and declare the living truth of the Living God made man, who speaks in the New Testament, then after two thousand years those words have only a relative, history-conditioned beauty and truth. They do not bind us. It was all a long, long time ago and people were very simple in those days. Why, they could not even distinguish disease from possession by devils! Jesus Christ did not know exactly who he was supposed to be, so the Christian claim for him to be "divine" has only a limited sense. And we all know that we cannot trust John, he was a dear, beautiful old man running a loyal charismatic community. He rhapsodizes about the master he knew, loved and so sorely missed. So whilst it is all very beautiful and true in a mystic sort of way (whatever that is!) we can be edified, forget it and push on with organizing the third millennium!
Essential Witness of Divine Magisterium
Relying on the Bible alone, subject to such interpretation as "the Spirit" may give to each and every reader, cannot save Christianity in the third millenium. This has to be said at the beginning of a decade of ‘ evangelisation’. There would be no authority left with which to preach and proclaim. What we require from the pages of the Gospels and the teaching and pastoral epistles which back them up and apply them, is first the personality and authority of God himself in the impact of Jesus Christ from those pages.There is only one ‘I’ in Jesus Christ, the ‘I’ who said "before Abraham was made I AM" (Jn ). The person or "act-centre" which speaks in the New Testament is, as St. John's prologue so vividly declares, the Living Mind and Love through which all things were made, visible and invisible. We don't want a ‘Jesus who was us like us, but more holy under pain!’. It is a falsehood which has spoiled too much post-conciliar theology, that before the Church was ‘let free’, we emphasized the Divinity of Christ too much and suppressed his humanity. Both accusations are false and devotions like that to the Sacred Heart of Jesus give the retort to either error. The whole of the Messianic urge of the old Testament culminates in the Episcopate of God the Messiah and there is no power in the New Testament unless we accept St. John in particular just as he is.Such has always been the life, witness, love and solemn declaration of the Roman and Catholic Church. In the modern world it is not the Bible alone which will save Christianity, but the word of magisterial, divine teaching that wrote the Bible and, through apostles and evangelists, first developed and then defined it through the centuries.Scripture plus an exercised Magisterium is the sole hope of any evangelisation in a world which has long lost its certainties, but not the lusts which helped it to forget. We must have a new apologetics, and not the courteous indifferentism of so many catechetical programmes which neither teach the Divinity of Christ to men, nor form it in the souls of men.Human beings are going to grow more godlike in all their power over the laws of matter and the engineering at the bases of the Universe. It is pitiful to base any re-evangelisation of this culture on a scheme of Christianity which is based on a human interpretation of a holy book which, in that tradition of theology which relies on ‘Scripture alone’, has already been abandoned by its theologians and worse by its bishops. If there is to be any meaningful ecumenism (and there has been little up to now) this crisis over the Divinity in Christ and the claims of Christ upon the human conscience must be faced.
At the Heart of the Matter
At the heart of the matter is the need to answer the question of the meaning of Man and the control and direction of man's fallible, but free and powerful spiritual intellect. Matter is controlled within the Universe, Man is not. We must vindicate anew the reality of a soul in Man which is not one with matter-energy, nor some sort of incoherent "self-transcendence", which is intelligible in neither the order of science nor in the order of free spirit.The only sign we have to give to modern men and women that human life does have, as we would expect, a controlling and directing Spirit unto its fulfilment and salvation, is the continuity in time and the continuity in principle of that one unique divine magisterium which is the Bible and Tradition as one and the same revelation. Then we can show the Church's life of development and definition which again is in strict continuity with that one same principle. The teaching Divinity of God in Christ (not an authority which is just "for private reading") must exist on earth and be bravely exercised on earth. It can be shown through the ages, although the courage to re-proclaim it is not too evident just now, as good men and women agonize in doubt.The miracle of the "teaching tradition" of solemn doctrine for which the infallibility of God is claimed, consists partly in its very existence on earth, (it is a corollary of the claim for Christ of a real teaching ministry until the end of time), and partly because, in the development and definition of doctrine, it answers the needs of God's People. Answers must be given; human nature demands them. They must be final, or human nature disregards them.At this time of great crisis we must expect of God that he give new support in his Church and a new prophetic vision. When this is done, (and we think it has been), there can then emerge a new vision and a new insight into the Mind of God in Christ, and into the Love - human and divine - in Christ. It will renew and command the spirit of man. There will follow from this insight a call to a deeper conformation of us all to the personality of Christ as Son of God and Son (Prince) of Man.As God and man Jesus is the norm of human joy and fulfilment. We are made to the image of God; it is to God we approximate. A new vision must make the point, which needs making, that man is not self-fulfilled, nor morally autonomous. There is for us a control and direction, a law of life and being. It is centred in God and God has communed and is in communion with us.The growth and noble deployment of a truly human personality does not, cannot, consist through technological self-mutilation or the abdication of human responsibility in our loving by ever more brilliant pills and chemicals. The true vision of human holiness and of the self-dignity of human love which we could give to the young would thrill many of them. We know it does. There is no guarantee, or expectation that all or even most will accept that way. Did they when men crucified Jesus ? "But to as many as did Receive Him, He gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the urge of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God". (John 1: 12-13).
From Genesis to Apocalypse
This is the meaning and mission of ‘Church’ from Genesis, from the ‘beginnings’, until now. Perhaps later someone might ponder the perspective in which this ‘inculturation’ into Christ should be done in sermons, schools, parish groups, the intimacy of the home and the communing of Christian friendship. Then, beyond renewal in the Church, lies the going out to other Faiths in sweetness and utter humility.For now, this article has been concerned with the main wonder of God's communing with men - the coherence and utter continuity of God's control and direction of the spoken word and the written word of divine tradition until now. God has walked and talked with us ‘as friends’, in mutual communing ‘in the cool of the evening air’, sweetly and wonderfully, in the original communion of innocence, through priest and prophets under the labour of sin; and now finally in the painful and most loving communion of Redemption. This is Word, Church, and Bible
References
1. The linking of the Hebrew word "eden", pleasure, or delight, to the Septuagint rendering by "paradise', an enclosed garden or park, gives us the sense of "Garden of Delight". It would belong to a great Lord, who would go out to commune with guests and courtiers after siesta, in "the cool of the evening air". The Islamic concept of heaven, the two "Gardens of Delight" are very similar.
2. Ezekiel 47: 1-12. The vision begins in his time but reaches out to the Messianic flood of grace andhealing.
3. Ref. Catholicism: A New Synthesis. Chapter I 1, Evocation of the Word.
4. Matthew 23; 2-4. Christ is summary in his dismissal of the Sadducees.
5. 2 Peter 1:20 & 2: 1. Then in 3:15-16. The authority of "scripture" is conferred on Paul, which equates apostolic authority in the beginning of Christianity with the "inspired word of God".
6. From A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (1953). Gospel of St. John, p.97 1.
7. Published from Howard Way, Harlow, Essex, but apparently the work of the Mother of God community, Gaithersburg, USA. The meditations are excellent and orthodox, sometimes very beautiful. One's point is that orthodoxy, based on a biblical scholarship which is permissive and hypothetical is like a house built on sand. The gales of time will bring it down. The front cover translates John 1: 14 as "the glory as of a father's only son" with a small "f" which is inadequate to the Greek, and to the context of the prologue,
8. Jerome Biblical Commentary (1974 printing) Gospel of St. Matthew, by John McKenzie,
9. K. Rahner. Foundations, e.g., pp 244-6; Jesus Christ; 280-300. The Midrash cornment on p.376. But the whole of Rahner's Christology in his attempt to put a human personality into Christ as well as a divine, ends one suggests, in obvious Nestorianism. Matters are complicated by Rahner's obvious "difficulty" with the doctrine of the Trinity. The suggestion in Foundations that the concept of Purgatory could possibly be syncretized with the Eastern belief in the reincarnation of souls, is also rather eyebrow raising.
10. The Gospel ofst. John, FAITH, May/June 1983.
11. Son of man: Meditation on Psalm 8, FAITH, July/ Aug 1983, v. 15, no. 4. Important also: "Jesus Did He Know Who He was.7" (Faith Pamphlet Series).