The 2005 Aquinas/Luther Conference at Lenior-Rhyne College was devoted to the topic “The Authority of Scripture, Hermeneutic, and Magisterium”, and I was invited to give a lecture on the Catholic understanding of these questions. Below is the text of my presentation, with the extensive footnotes of the original document changed here to brief text notes.

Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me Catholicae Ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas. (I would not believe the truth of the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this.) In phrasing his position thus, St. Augustine placed the question of authority in general and of the Catholic Church’s authority in particular squarely at the center of the credibility of the Gospel and therefore of Holy Scripture. And this should not surprise us. After all, the Lord Jesus neither wrote nor commanded to be written any of the saving doctrine which he preached with his own lips. Rather, invoking the messianic authority received from his eternal Father, the Lord Jesus launched the Church, through the office of the Apostles, on a comprehensive mission of teaching with authority; and so, Jesus said to the eleven “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20) This mission of teaching with authority is clearly meant by the Savior to extend to every nation and to endure until the Day of the Lord, and so the exercise of apostolic teaching authority must be considered an intrinsic part of the Church’s fidelity to her Lord’s command. In other words, the questions of who has authority to teach, of where that authority comes from, and of how that authority is exercised are inextricably bound up with the transmission of the Gospel from generation to generation, and in some sense, it is not possible for the Church to obey Christ’s Great Commission without answering these questions in a satisfactory way. Even more, we may say that knowing with certitude the nature and authority of Holy Scripture depends upon first knowing with certitude that the Church teaches with a divinely given and guaranteed authority, hence St. Augustine: I would not believe the truth of the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this.

In the Catholic Church, this apostolic teaching authority is called magisterium, from magister or teacher, and the Church believes that this teaching office is exercised after the death of the last Apostle only by the bishops who are in communion with the Bishop and Church of Rome and that only through this office is the Gospel transmitted through time without addition or subtraction. The Second Vatican Council formulated this doctrine in Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, in this way: “Among the principal duties of bishops, the preaching of the Gospel occupies an eminent place. For bishops are preachers of the faith, who lead new disciples to Christ, and they are authentic teachers, that is, teachers endowed with the authority of Christ, who preach to the people committed to them the faith they must believe and put into practice, and by the light of the Holy Spirit illustrate that faith. They bring forth from the treasury of revelation things new and old, making it bear fruit and vigilantly warding off any errors that threaten their flock. Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matter of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent” (Lumen Gentium, 25).

That is the settled and irreformable Catholic doctrine on the apostolic authority of bishops  as the only authentic teachers of the Gospel, but please note that so far we have not touched directly on the nature and authority of the Bible. Both in the quotation from St. Augustine and in the passage from Lumen Gentium, the focus is on the relationship between the authority of the Church and the transmission of the Gospel. And for our purposes here, we may stipulate that by “The Gospel” is meant all that God has revealed to the human race for our salvation; that is, the Gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). The next question to be explored, then, concerns the relationship between the Gospel and the books of the Old and New Testament that we call Holy Scripture.

For the best contemporary statement of Catholic belief on this question, we turn again to the Second Vatican Council, this time to Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, which teaches that “Those divinely revealed realities which are contained and present in Sacred Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For holy mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles, holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself....Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writes must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (Dei Verbum, 11).Notice that the Council asserts that the divinely inspired books of Holy Scripture are handed on to the Church herself. In this phrase we find the foundation of the Catholic teaching on the complex relationships among Sacred Scripture, sacred tradition, and the magisterium of the Church. Touching again on the teaching office, Dei Verbum maintains that “the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time. Therefore the Apostles, handing on what they themselves had received, warn the faithful to hold fast to the traditions which they have learned either by word of mouth or by letter and to fight in defense of the faith handed on once and for all. Now what was handed on by the Apostles includes everything which contributes toward the holiness of life and increase in faith of the people of God; and so the Church, in her teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes” (Dei Verbum, 8).

Next, moving on to the nature of Sacred Tradition, the Council teaches that “This tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down...The words of the holy fathers witness to the presence of this living tradition, whose wealth is poured into the practice and life of the believing and praying Church. Through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known, and the sacred writings themselves are more profoundly understood...”(Dei Verbum 8).

And finally, the three pieces of the puzzle are put together in this way: “Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church. Holding fast to this deposit, the entire holy people united with their shepherds remain always steadfast in the teaching of the Apostles, in the common life, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers...But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.

“It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the teaching authority of the Church...are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls”(Dei Verbum, 10). My own analogy to illustrate the nature of these connections is this: if the Bible is our text book for learning the Christian faith and life, then sacred tradition is our classroom, and the Church is our teacher.

This review of the Second Vatican Council on the questions of Scripture, tradition, and magisterium has been at the service of establishing what I mean by asserting that the Bible is the Church’s Book. The Bible, it is true, has God as its principal author, but having been handed on to the Church herself and entrusted for authentic interpretation only to the successors of the Apostles, the Bible is in every way the Book of the Church, by the Church, and for the Church. And among the consequences of this claim is that those who are not a part of the Church are therefore not able to understand the Bible, at least not fully.  In the same way, those who are not in full communion with the Church by reason of heresy or schism are, it seems to me, also impeded from understanding fully the truths contained in Holy Scripture. And this, in turn, would mean that anyone attempting to interpret the Scriptures correctly would of necessity first have to be an orthodox Christian in full communion with the Church. Accordingly, anyone who does not believe all that the Church teaches to be revealed by God or who is not living according to those revealed truths is not capable of correctly interpreting the Bible, no matter how proficient in the biblical languages or the archaeology of the ancient Near East he or she may be. Let me illustrate this point by analogy to the difference between the sciences of sacred theology and religious studies.

As found in the course catalogues of secular universities (and all too many Christian schools), religious studies is a scientific discipline which has as its object of study the set of human beliefs and behaviors we call religion. According to the structure of this discipline, neither the professor nor the student of religious studies need have any personal religious beliefs; in principle, an atheist can hold the highest chair in any department of religious studies precisely because his own religious convictions and practices are of no greater importance to his professional work than is the religion of a biologist studying paramecia or of a physicist investigating the strong and weak nuclear forces. But this is not possible in the science of sacred theology.

For St. Thomas, theology is simply sacra doctrina, and as Aidan Nichols has pointed out, “In Thomas’s use of the phrase sacra doctrina, it would be a great mistake to think that the word sacra is just some loosely used pious adjective. It bears its proper meaning of ‘divine’. Only God is the Teacher or Doctor in this sacra doctrina, just as only He is the Taught or Doctrine” (Nichols, Discovering Aquinas, p.170).

Expanding on this understanding of theology as sacra doctrina, Romanus Cessario explains that “By definition Christian theology results from intelligent reflection upon the revealed Word of God. As such it embraces within its range of concerns everything which has to do with God himself and the real world He created. Still, because of man’s capacity for an authentic relationship with the blessed Trinity and the special destiny implied in the status of adopted sonship, the human person holds a privileged place among theology’s interests. As a result, the starting point for theology is the words and deeds of Jesus Christ as they have been recorded in the canonical Scriptures. These acta et gesta Christi hold a unique place in the life of the Christian Church precisely because of who Jesus is, a man, one like us, hypostatically united to the divine Logos. For Aquinas theology finds its starting point in the very depths of God’s Being where the Eternal Father speaks the personal Word which perfectly reflects the Godhead. In this St. Thomas reflects the clear Johannine teaching on the Trinitarian origins of all Christian life and thought, ‘Now they know that everything that thou hast given me is from thee; for I have given them the words thou gavest me...’ (John 17: 7-8)” (Cessario, Current Theology at Fribourg, The Thomist, 1987, p.326).From these considerations, we can understand why it is not possible for an atheist, who may be a splendid professor of religious studies, to be a theologian. St. Anselm’s description of sacred theology as fides quaerens intellectum helps us grasp why only a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, only one, that is, with saving faith in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ as recorded in the canonical Scriptures, has the capacity to be a theologian. This means that neither the unbeliever nor the heretic can be a true theologian, and what is true of the theologian is true also of the exegete. Given the fragmentation of theology in our time and the dominance of secular literary criticism in scriptural hermeneutics, this claim will be surprising to many, and Nichols takes note of this: “What strikes the present-day theological student as curious about Thomas’s notion of sacra doctrina is the way it runs together the ideas of revelation, Scripture, Tradition, and theology” (Nichols, Discovering Aquinas, p.171). But this convergence, though perhaps odd to present-day students, is a settled feature of the Catholic Church’s understanding of  the nature and purpose of scriptural exegesis. Once again, the Second Vatican Council: “since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture...should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.

“To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to ‘literary forms’. For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred write intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture...But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the same spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith. It is the task of exegetes to work according to these rules toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture, so that through preparatory study the judgment of the Church may mature. For all of what has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God” (Dei Verbum, 12).These words of Dei Verbum echo in many ways two passages of St. Thomas. The first concerns the necessity and purpose of exegesis, where St. Thomas writes that: “The truth of the faith is contained in Holy Scripture diffusely and in different ways, some of which envelop it in obscurity. That is so much so that to extract from Sacred Scripture the truth of the faith much study and application are required, to which most people, absorbed as they are by other concerns, are in no position to give themselves or to attend. That is why it was necessary to draw from the Scriptures and to formulate as a summary something absolutely clear which could be proposed to the faith of all. Nonetheless, it is not a question of things added to the Holy Scriptures but of things drawn out of them” (Summa Theologiae, IIa, IIae, q.1, a.9, ad. I). The second passage of St. Thomas concerns what happens when an exegete comes to a conclusion contrary to the teaching of the Church: “We must stand by the decision of the pope rather than the opinion of other men, even though they may be learned in the Scriptures. For the pope has the right and duty to determine concerning the faith, a determination he indicates by his judgment” (Quaestiones quodlibetales, 9, 16). Here again we see the unfolding of the Church’s belief “that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the teaching authority of the Church...are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others” (Dei Verbum, 10).Early in the 1990's, two documents were published which were largely shaped by the hand of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, known to us now as Pope Benedict XVI, and which shed light on the practical consequences for the work of theologians and exegetes of the connections among Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium. The first of these was the Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian promulgated on 24 May 1990 by Cardinal Ratzinger in his capacity as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and on the explicit approval of Pope John Paul II. This document reminds Catholic theologians that they are not professors of religious studies and that their work always takes place within the wider Church and under the authority of the Church’s pastors, who alone are charged by Christ the Lord with the authentic transmission of the Gospel. The second document was published on 15 April 1993 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and it is called The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church. This document includes a preface by Cardinal Ratzinger and was published along with an address by Pope John Paul II given during a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissiums Deus and the 50th anniversary of Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, both of which are dedicated to biblical studies. While the Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian was addressed specifically to contemporary concerns of the day, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church was not written solely because of contemporary problems in the Church; rather, as Cardinal Ratzinger explains, “The problem of the interpretation of the Bible is hardly a modern phenomenon, even if at times that is what some would have us believe. The Bible itself bears witness that its interpretation can be a difficult matter. Alongside texts that are perfectly clear, it contains passages of some obscurity. When reading certain prophecies of Jeremiah, Daniel pondered at length over their meaning (Dn 9:2). According to the Acts of the Apostles, an Ethiopian of the first century found himself in the same situation with respect to a passage from the book of Isaiah (Isa 53: 7-8) and recognized that he had need of an interpreter (Acts 8:30-35). The Second Letter of Peter insists that ‘no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of private interpretation’ (2 Pet 1:20) and it also observes that the letters of the Apostle Paul contain ‘some difficult passages, the meaning of which the ignorant and untrained distort, as they do also in the case of the other Scriptures, to their own ruin’(2 Pet 3:16). The problem is, therefore, quite old” (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, 1993, p.29).

Ratzinger then explains why the document was published: “The Pontifical Biblical Commission desires to indicate the paths most appropriate for arriving at an interpretation of the Bible as faithful as possible to its character both human and divine. The Commission does not aim to adopt a position on all the questions which arise with respect to the Bible, such as, for example, the theology of inspiration. What it has in mind is to examine all the methods likely to contribute effectively to the task of making more available the riches contained in the biblical texts. The aim is that the Word of God may become more and more the spiritual nourishment of the members of the People of God, the source for them of a life of faith, of hope and of love...(cf Dei Verbum, 21)” (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, p.33).The document then discusses, among other topics, the historical-critical method of interpretation, various forms of literary analysis, the role of human sciences in understanding biblical texts, philosophical hermeneutics, the senses of Scripture (the literal, spiritual, and fuller sense), and the task of the exegete in interpreting the Bible in the life of the Church. Having surveyed the landscape of this sacred science, the document concludes with this exhortation: “Through fidelity to the great Tradition, of which the Bible itself is a witness, Catholic exegesis should...maintain its identity as a theological discipline, the principal aim of which is the deepening of faith. This does not mean a lesser involvement in scholarly research of the most rigorous kind, nor should it provide excuse for abuse of methodology out of apologetic concern. Each sector of research (textual criticism, linguistic study, literary analysis, etc.) has its own proper rules, which it ought to follow with full autonomy. But no one of these specializations is an end in itself. In the organization of the exegetical task as a whole, the orientation towards the principal goal should remain paramount and thereby serve to obviate any waste of energy. Catholic exegesis dos not have the right to become lost, like a stream of water, in the sands of a hypercritical analysis. Its task is to fulfill, in the Church and in the world, a vital function, that of contributing to an ever more authentic transmission of the content of the inspired Scriptures” (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, pp.129-133).All of the above, I believe, makes intelligible my claim that only an exegete who, no matter what his or her scientific credentials and scholarly standing, is in full communion with the Catholic Church is capable of providing a genuine interpretation of Holy Scripture, and among the consequences of such necessity is this conclusion: An exegete or theologian who offers an interpretation of Scripture that contradicts the doctrine of the faith taught by the magisterium of the Church and that must be accepted as definitive is, by that fact, excluded from full communion with the Church and therefore the voice of that scholar is not within the Church but without. This means that the Christian faithful should give no heed to arguments advanced by such persons and that in deliberations about Christian doctrine and discipline, the Church’s pastors should not be moved by novelties urged by exegetes and theologians from without the Church. Let’s take this to cases.

A quick survey of the relevant literature would reveal that various exegetes and theologians who still identify themselves as Catholic seek to justify by interpretations of Sacred Scripture the following false propositions which no Catholic can accept:

+ that the Blessed Virgin Mary bore children other than the Lord Jesus

+ that in his human intellect, the Lord Jesus had no knowledge before his Resurrection of his divine nature

+ that the miracles of the Lord Jesus described in the New Testament were not observed by the Apostles or other disciples but were later creations of the Church designed to teach a lesson

+ that women can and should stand in persona Christi and preside at the celebration of the Holy Eucharist and that by his own free and sovereign choice the Lord Jesus did not restrict the ministry of Word and Sacrament to men alone

+ that homosexual acts can be morally good and that the Church should bless or even sacramentalize relationships based upon homosexual acts

+ that the hierarchical constitution of the Church is not willed by the Lord Jesus but is a later corruption of and departure from the egalitarian community established by Christ

These six examples merely serve to illustrate that novelties based upon errant interpretations of Scripture are offered from time to time offered by scholars who identify themselves as Catholic, but this does not mean, as we have seen, that such positions can legitimately be held by Catholics or that the Church is obliged to give a sympathetic hearing to such arguments. But so far my analysis has concerned only Catholics. What about Lutherans? Or Anglicans? Or Presbyterians? In other words, what about Christians in communions that do not have and that reject as a matter of principle an authoritative magisterium capable of excluding from Christian doctrine and discipline an interpretation of Holy Scripture which is demonstrably false? Is there a theological mechanism available to such Christians which could justify, say, the repudiation as heretical of the proposition that homosexual acts can be morally good and that the Church should bless relationships based upon such acts?

One possibility would be to invoke the seven notes of true development of doctrine elaborated by John Henry Newman in An Essay on the Development of Doctrine. There Newman proposed seven tests that would distinguish mere novelty from a genuine development of  Christian teaching, and the seven can be summarized this way. A true doctrinal development must:

1. Exhibit preservation of type.

2. Possess continuity of its principles.

3. Have the power of assimilation.

4. Show its logical sequence.

5. Anticipate its own future.

6. Conserve its own past.

7. Demonstrate chronic vigor.

Newman believed that the whole Bible discloses development of doctrine over time and that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments provided for by God in his eternal Plan of Salvation. One example of the self-evident existence of the development of doctrine is pointed out by St. Augustine, who insisted that the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New (St. Augustine, Quaet. In Hept., 2, 73: PL 34, 623). But while Newman insisted that Christian doctrine does develop, he also held that no Christian doctrine could ever mutate into a contradiction of itself and that any effort to interpret Scripture or make a theological argument which resulted in such a contradiction was thereby revealed to be heresy. Using Newman’s seven notes or tests, therefore, I believe that even Christians who do not have an authoritative magisterium could provide a conclusive rejection of the novel and heretical suggestions, to return to the examples, that homosexual acts can be morally good or that women can be priests. Such a demonstration, of course, would be persuasive only to other Christians who accept the validity of Newman’s argument about the development of doctrine, and it is clear that many Christians in our day do not consider themselves bound to such an understanding of legitimate development. So, is there any other recourse for Christians seeking to demonstrate that theological novelties of the sort mentioned above do not constitute true or even possibly true developments of Christian doctrine? Yes, I think there is. And it is the sacred liturgy of Christian worship.

Let’s return to Dei Verbum. There the Council teaches that “the Church, in her teaching, life and worship (emphasis mine), perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes” (Dei Verbum, 7). Reference is also made to the description of the Church’s first days in the Acts of the Apostles, “Holding fast to this deposit (of the Word of God) the entire holy people united with their shepherds remain always steadfast in the teaching of the Apostles, in the common life, in the breaking of the bread, and in prayers...”(Dei Verbum, 10). And finally, Dei Verbum reminds us of the most privileged place for the proclamation and explanation of the Scriptures: “The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since, especially in the sacred liturgy (emphasis mine), she unceasingly receives and offer to the faithful the bread of life from the table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body” (Dei Verbum, 21).

This conciliar teaching is echoed and amplified in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, where the Pontifical Biblical Commission teaches that “From the earliest days of the Church, the reading of Scripture has been an integral part of the Christian liturgy, an inheritance to some extent from the liturgy of the Synagogue. Today, too, it is above all through the liturgy that Christians come into contact with Scripture, particularly during the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist.

“In principle, the liturgy...the high point of which is the Eucharistic celebration, brings about the most perfect actualization of the biblical texts, for the liturgy places the proclamation in the midst of the community of believers, gathered around Christ so as to draw near to God. Christ is then ‘present in his word, because it is he himself who speaks when Sacred Scripture is read in the Church’. Written text thus becomes living word” (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, pp. 119-120).So, the proper and privileged place for the Church to hear and understand the Sacred Scriptures is in the sacred liturgy. But even more than that, the liturgical texts themselves help us to grasp the full meaning of the biblical faith we profess. This is what is meant by the ancient adage lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief), which is based upon the teaching of Prosper of Aquitaine, a monk who served as secretary to Pope St. Leo the Great and who was a devoted student of St. Augustine. In a document called the Capitula Coelestini, Prosper offers an argument against the heretical Pelagian teaching on grace, in part, by an appeal to the sacred liturgy. He writes that “In addition to these inviolable decisions of the blessed Apostolic See, by which our most holy fathers, rejecting the arrogance of this harmful novelty, have taught us to attribute to the grace of Christ both the first steps of a right will and the necessary progress to a praiseworthy ardor and even the perseverance in these effort until the end, let us consider equally the rites of the priestly supplications which, transmitted by the Apostles, are celebrated in the same manner in the entire world and in the whole Catholic Church, in such a way that the order of supplication determines the rule of faith” (Prosper of Aquitaine, Capitula Coelestini, 8). The final clause of Prosper’s text is found in Latin as ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, and Catholic tradition interprets this to mean that the content of prayer reveals the faith of the one praying. Combining these strands of lex orandi, lex credendi and the teaching that the proper place for the proclamation and explanation of Holy Scripture is in the celebration of the sacred liturgy, we find a real possibility for rejecting false teaching offered to the Church in the name of spurious interpretations of the Bible. The chair or cathedra from which the bishop exercises his teaching office is not, like that of the professor, found in a university or a library; the cathedra is found in a church, in a cathedral church. But even Christians who do not share the Catholic understanding of the unique role of bishops in transmitting the Gospel without corruption can still embrace and teach that the Christian community finds in divine worship a true font of teaching and theology. In fact, theologia prima is sacred theology offered by the worshiping community in the service of understanding more deeply the sacred mysteries of Christ celebrated and made present by the sacred liturgy.

Now using the six novel doctrines I mentioned above as tests, try to find any Christian liturgy of either East or West, from the Ascension of the Lord Jesus to the day before these novelties were proposed in the late 20th century, which gives a warrant for these new teachings as true developments of doctrine. It cannot be done, and one cannot find such liturgies because they simply do not exist. On the contrary, the liturgical texts we do have provide strong, clear, and constant warrant for the Church’s refusal to accept proposals to teach new doctrines that contract received and irreformable teaching. Take, for example, the Nuptial Blessing of the contemporary Roman Rite which speaks of God the Father’s eternal plan that the marriage of one man and one woman be the “one blessing not forfeited by original sin or washed away in the flood”. By itself, of course, such a text does not prove that homosexual marriage is an impossibility, but it does provide another dimension of a question much larger than the partisans of revision will admit.

In his masterful treatise on moral theology, Les sources de la morale chrétienne, the Belgian Dominican Servais Pinckaers, O.P. offers a neologism to describe the way in which some exegetes and theologians choose either categories of interpretation or principles of exegesis which restrict rather than enlarge the reader’s approach to a text. He calls this the intellectual error of “schizoscopia”, meaning a reading of a text that cuts off (schizein) from view (skopein) essential elements of the text’s content and meaning (Romanus Cessario, Current Theology at Fribourg, The Thomist, 1987, pp. 348-349). This tendency to “schizoscopia”, it seems to me, is a prerequisite for anyone attempting to persuade a Christian communion to accept as a legitimate development of doctrine something that flatly contradicts received and settled Christian teaching on that question, and any such communion which falls prey to this tactic has then enshrined “schizoscopia” in both the doctrine it teaches and the liturgy it celebrates. Such a cutting off from view for the Christian people of doctrine after doctrine can only serve to impoverish, and perhaps finally to starve, a Christian communion and lead those ensnared in that poverty to spiritual death. And surely that cannot be accepted by those who would follow Christ the Lord.

So, what remedy would I propose for Christians without an authoritative magisterium seeking to refute interpretations of Holy Scripture that contradict the received teaching of the Church?  First, attempt to employ the seven tests described by Newman to see if a novel teaching constitutes a true development of Christian doctrine or a deformation of the same. Second, follow the wisdom of the early Church and test novelties by Prosper of Aquitaine’s adage: lex orandi, lex credendi. If the texts of the sacred liturgy, especially those of the undivided Church, cannot co-exist peacefully with a novel doctrine, then it should be assumed false until proven true. And if neither of those solutions should be sufficient to safeguard the deposit of faith given once and for all to the Church, then what? Against the skeptics and revisionists, I suggest that we stand with St. Augustine: I would not believe the truth of the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this. It does, and so I do.