The final part of our look at this portion of MAKING SENSES OUT OF SCRIPTURE:
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What is the “analogy of faith”? To answer that let us first ask, what’s an analogy? An analogy is a thing that resembles, is similar to, or comparable to something else. So, for instance, Jesus made use of many analogies in describing the Kingdom of Heaven. He would say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like … ” and then give an analogy. We do the same thing. Elvis sings, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog” and we realize he is employing an analogy, comparing the unfortunate recipient of the song to a hound dog in their behavior.
Going a little bit further, we note that we sometimes speak of an analog as though it were identical with the thing it resembles. So, for instance, I may point to a photograph (that is, an analog) of my wife and say, “I love her.” Even though I point to the photograph, I am really, so to speak, pointing through it to my wife. The photograph is the symbol of what I love, but my wife is the object of my love.
Now let us return to the idea of the analogy of faith.
From time to time, the Church has found it necessary to confront various questions and difficulties in understanding the apostolic deposit of faith which has come down to it. One classic example of this is the problem which confronted the Church in the early fourth century concerning the person of Christ. Just who is he? For three hundred years the Church had preserved the Tradition (received from the apostles themselves) of a general, not-too-carefully-defined faith in Christ as somehow God, yet not the same as God the Father or the Holy Spirit (“The Word was with God and the Word was God” [John 1:1]). At the same time the Church had also been taught by the apostles that there is only one God, not three. Various people made various attempts to reconcile these apparently contradictory data. And in the early third century a man named Arius began preaching a doctrine that he imagined made perfect sense of it all but which, in reality, demoted Jesus to a sort of creaturely godlet and gutted the gospel of its content. This generated enormous controversy and compelled the Church to, once and for all, make a careful examination of its written and unwritten Tradition and define just what it believed about the identity of Christ. The result was the Nicene Creed, which defined the Church’s faith in one God who is three consubstantial Persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Subsequent controversies led the Church to further refine its beliefs in this and a hundred other areas via various conciliar and papal teachings. These teachings summarize, in a certain sense, “what we believe as Catholics.” They are absolutely indispensable in making sense out of the written and unwritten apostolic Tradition handed down to us. Yet, just as the photograph is only a symbol and not the object of my love, so the various creeds and doctrines of the Church—indeed, the Bible itself—are only the symbols or analogies, not the ultimate object, of faith. The Triune God Himself and no mere symbol of Him is the ultimate object of faith.
The primary function of the analogy of faith is, therefore, to provide boundaries within which the proper understanding of Scripture and revelation can thrive, not to micromanage our interpretation of each and every verse of the Bible. The Church is, in fact, disinclined to define its Tradition unless it absolutely must. That is why it has so little dogma to show for two thousand years of activity. But where the Church has definitively spoken, the analogy of faith is essential for helping us get an understanding of the true sense of the text and not run off into the weeds beyond the boundaries of common sense. For the standing temptation of the serious Bible student is often to over-emphasize favorite biblical texts at the expense of other equally important texts. The various doctrines of the Church (always carefully formulated in light of a wide knowledge of written and unwritten Tradition) hold before our eyes the continual necessity to take the whole of Scripture and Tradition seriously when it teaches both that God is one and that God is three, that he is sovereign and that we have free will, that Jesus is man and that Jesus is God as well as a thousand other paradoxes which we, like Arius, are tempted to “resolve” by simply ignoring an inconvenient bit of Scripture in favor of the bit that we “understand.” The analogy of faith and the teaching of the Church therefore acts as a critically essential regulator to curb this temptation to oversimplify from destroying our study of Scripture.
A Note on the Tools of the Trade
To follow the advice of the Second Vatican Council discussed above we will need to avail ourselves of the tools for Bible study. Happily, there are lots of these. They include things like commentaries, concordances, maps, timelines, study Bibles, catechisms, Bible dictionaries, and a host of other helps.[1] Our habit of mind in approaching a given book of Scripture should be to approach it with both reverence and with common sense. That is, we must bear in mind that we are reading a text inspired by the Holy Spirit which is quite literally the word of God. Yet we should also approach it as a word full of grace, not magic. We should bear in mind that, as far as the human author is concerned, he was not clairvoyantly writing with us in mind. When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans and Luke his gospel for Theophilus, they were writing to particular audiences with particular needs, questions, and habits of thought. When Deuteronomy was penned, the thought “How can I make this intelligible to suburban Americans?” was not uppermost in the human writer’s mind. Therefore, the modern biblical reader must approach any text of Scripture with the same sort of circumspection we would feel if reading somebody else’s love letters, diary, or journal. It is only when we understand what the author was trying to say to his original audience that we can then begin to apply his word to our own lives.
On the other hand, our circumspection must not allow us to imagine that only someone with a Ph.D. can read the Bible. Admittedly, there are biblical scholars who fancy that they and they alone know what Scripture says. Some have gone so far as to imagine they can “deconstruct” Scripture to the point that it doesn’t say anything at all. And some scholars of Scripture spend more time reading each others’ critical literature, commentaries, and footnotes than the biblical text itself. But this, like the refusal to use any study materials whatsoever, is an extreme.
The healthy middle ground is occupied by the sensible Catholic who bones up on the background, subject, and authorship of a given book and who pays attention to the footnotes and cross-references in his Bible, as well as reliable scholarship that gives helpful clues about the historical, cultural, theological, and linguistic information necessary to comprehend its meaning. If he hits a passage that angers, puzzles, or baffles him, his first instinct is not to fling the book across the room or offer the first glib “resolution” to the problem that pops into his head, but is rather to see what, if anything, the rest of the Tradition and reliable biblical scholarship has to say about it. And nowhere is this more important than when a passage of Scripture seems to us to “obviously” mean something that is radically at odds with historic Christianity. It is just here that a reliable Catholic study help can do wonders by showing the way in which others have wrestled with the same text with the help of the Holy Spirit. This habit of turning to the Church and its Tradition in order to understand Scripture is completely biblical. Witness, for instance, this incident from the book of Acts:
And behold, an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a minister of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of all her treasure, had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go up and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless some one guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture which he was reading was this: “As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth.”
And the eunuch said to Philip, “Please, about whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about some one else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news of Jesus. (Acts 8:27-35)
The Ethiopian eunuch was neither afraid nor ashamed to acknowledge his bafflement at a passage of Scripture. He asked for help and he got it. Let us, therefore, do the same by making use of the tools God gives us through his holy Church.
Arriving at as clear an understanding as possible of what the original author was trying to say is at the very heart and soul of the literal sense of Scripture. Yet, critical as it is, the literal sense of Scripture is by no means the only sense of Scripture. It exists, not to the exclusion of all other senses, but rather, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes clear, as the basis for all other senses. Bearing in mind then the survey of Scripture that we saw in Chapters 1 through 5, let us look at those other senses and see some of the ways in which our Lord and his apostles taught the Church to read its Bible for all it is worth.
[1] The appendix to this book lists a good starter kit of such tools.
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One Response
“We do the same thing. Elvis sings, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog” and we realize he is employing an analogy, comparing the unfortunate recipient of the song to a hound dog in their behavior.”
Well, actually, Elvis is using a metaphor 🙂