Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (54 page)

But the rest of the Church determined that Irenaeus had gone one step too far in his attempt to defend the orthodox view of the Incarnation. In reading The Apocalypse as though it taught the promise of a future corporeal kingdom, he had stepped outside the deposit of Faith that had been handed down from the Apostles. Simply put, this Millennium could not be reconciled with Christ’s original teaching. In fact, this view of The Apocalypse led to the rejection of its canonicity in the Eastern Church until it was affirmed that this was not integral to the book’s message. The Church continued to affirm its belief in the unity of the physical and spiritual in the God-Man, Jesus Christ. It never hesitated to teach the physical return of Christ at the final eschaton. It lovingly clung to Christ’s teaching concerning the Eucharist. But the Church adamantly rejected Irenaeus’s novel teaching of a physical Millennium here on earth after the second coming.

What does this have to do with the resurgence of the rapturist movement in twenty-first-century America? Once, while still a Protestant, I made friends with a European theologian. He could not understand why premillennialism was such a potent force in the United States. After all, most of the rest of the Evangelical Protestant world outside the United States found this theological system very unconvincing.

Through that friendship, I came to realize that, just as Irenaeus’s premillennialism must be understood in light of his desire to fight the anti-supernatural Gnostics, American Fundamentalist and Evangelical thought cannot be understood apart from its roots as a reaction against modern skepticism in mainline Protestantism. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, modernist theologians in the Protestant pulpits of America started questioning many of the doctrines the Gnostics rejected: the deity of the God-Man, Jesus Christ; the reality of the Resurrection; and the sure hope of Christ’s return. In the early twentieth century, Protestants began to hear from the pulpit that maybe Jesus was merely a very holy prophet, and that the Resurrection was more an illusion than a reality. The miracles of Jesus were explained away. Like the Gnostics,
Protestant modernists rejected the supernatural in all its physical expressions
.

Just as in Irenaeus’s day, the reaction against this heresy was a movement toward premillennialism. Darby and his followers had already formed a beachhead in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Rapturist premillennialism provided an answer to modern skepticism that the average parishioner could understand. The man in the pew knew what he believed about Christ, and he knew that modern skepticism smelled “off.” Rapturist premillennialism offered a seemingly orthodox alternative.

The Church recognized the common spirit shared by present-day modernists and ancient Gnostics: “[T]he Rationalists [are the] true children and inheritors of the older heretics”
(PD)
. Unfortunately, Catholics were not immune to this virus of the mind. About the time rapturists were gaining momentum in Protestant circles, American Catholics started to flirt with modernist theology. The flirtation turned into a torrid love affair. Perhaps unwittingly, modernist Catholics flung open the doors to rapturists seeking to woo away Catholics disillusioned by skepticism.

Thankfully, the ancient battle against Gnostic skepticism was eventually won in the early Church. Premillennialism then faded away when there remained nothing against which to react. That can give us hope today. If the Church forcefully reaffirms the traditional truths of the Faith, the appeal of premillennialism will inevitably fade, just as it did in the generations following Irenaeus’s time. When the modernist heresy within the American Catholic Church is finally overcome (as it surely will be eventually), rapturism will lose much of its theological appeal to Catholics.

I believe that the first step in the reaffirmation of Christ’s Truth against modernism is to recognize modernists’ assumptions and strategy. Modernists assume that supernatural events are impossible, and they apply that assumption to the Mass, where they place all emphasis on the symbolic nature of Christ’s Body and Blood. Granted, the Eucharist is a symbol, but it is more than just a symbol: it is a sacrament, a sign that
really is
what it symbolizes. When loyal Catholics see the modernist assault on this part of the Mass, they usually rally to protect the deposit of Faith handed down to and through the Church.

Many Catholics, however, do not initially recognize the modernist assault on the other half of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word. There the modernists’ strategy is the same. They deny the supernatural origin of Scripture just as they deny the supernatural nature of the Eucharist. They deny the Church’s historical teaching that the original autographs of the Bible are guaranteed to be inerrant by divine inspiration.

Hear me carefully. I am not arguing against understanding the Bible in the light of poetic, symbolic, apocalyptic, mythological, or phenomenological language. These types of language are used in the Bible and must be understood for what they are. I believe this book illustrates that I am not arguing for the Fundamentalists’ “wooden” view of inerrancy. I will gladly allow rapturists to argue for that position.

What am I proposing, then? Nothing less than a re-emphasis of the historical belief in the “intelligent inerrancy” of the holy Bible. The Church’s historical teaching is that there are no errors in what the Bible means to teach on any subject anywhere—period. Modernists deny this because it requires a supernatural understanding of the inspiration of God, and they abhor any whiff of the supernatural.

The Church has been clear and consistent in this teaching. Vatican II clearly stated that Scripture is fundamentally a revelation of God Himself, culminating in the deeds and words of our Lord Jesus Christ. “The books of both the Old and New Testaments
in their entirety, with all their parts
, are written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have
God as their author
.… God chose men … so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. Therefore, since
everything asserted … 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” (
DV
, 11).

Lest some think this is ambiguous, the council fathers assured us it is a restatement of earlier Church teaching.

What is that teaching? Modernists generally avoid asking, but we need look no further than the ecumenical council immediately before Vatican II—namely, Vatican I (1869–1870). The Fathers of the Church declared that the books of the Bible were canonical, not because “they were afterward approved by her authority, nor
merely
because they contain revelation
without error
, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have
God for their author” (DCF
, II, 7). The fact that revelation in Scripture is error-free is mentioned in an almost off-handed manner, as though no competent Catholic would question it. The inerrant nature of the Bible has a supernatural foundation: God is the
author
of Scripture.

Pius XII’s pontificate (1939–1958) helped implement the teaching of Vatican I, and his writings serve as a basis for understanding the fathers of Vatican II. Pope Pius XII chided those who sought to “
restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals
.… In Scripture divine things are presented to us in the manner which is in common use among men … so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in every respect,
except error
”
(DAS)
. That effectively closes the door on modernists who try to parse the words of Vatican II (cf.
PDG
and
SPA
)!

The Church makes clear that this teaching does not ignore the use of figurative, poetic, phenomenological, or apocalyptic language. “In demonstrating and proving its immunity from all error, [the commentator] should … determine … to what extent the manner of expression or the literary mode adopted by the sacred writer may lead to a correct and genuine interpretation.… When some persons reproachfully charge the Sacred Writers with some historical error or inaccuracy in the recording of facts, on closer examination it turns out to be nothing else than those customary modes of expression and narration peculiar to the ancients … sanctioned by common usage”
(DAS)
. In other words, we must be intelligent in our examination of Scripture and its inerrancy.

In this, Pope Pius XII reiterated a point St. Thomas Aquinas had expounded: “The author of the Scriptures is God.… We must not forget that the literal meaning of a parable or figure of speech is not the figure of speech itself but what it is used to say. When Scripture talks of God’s arm, it is not literally attributing a bodily limb to God but that which an arm represents: power to act. With this proviso we can say that
the literal meaning of Scripture is never in error
” (
SUM
, 4).

Modernists often try to use a straw man to attack the Church’s historical teaching about inerrancy. They try to interpret a parable or poetic text in woodenly literalistic fashion and then mock this interpretation as untenable, uninformed, and anti-intellectual. Yet the Church has always taught “intelligent inerrancy.”

Pope Pius XII offers an enlightening contrast that illustrates what the Church teaches. He states that the Latin Vulgate (a translation) was affirmed by the Church “
to be free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals
.… Its authenticity is … juridical.” In contrast, when approaching the original autographs of Scripture (which are not translations), it is “absolutely wrong and
forbidden
either to narrow inspiration to certain passages of Holy Scripture or
to admit that the sacred writer has erred” (DAS)
. In other words, the Vulgate is trustworthy for faith and morals, but the original texts of the Bible are
without any error whatsoever
. The contrast in the different levels of reliability is clear. Yet modernists persist in their attempts to lower the perception of the Bible’s reliability to the level of the Latin Vulgate: “juridical.”

Why do some modernist Catholics persist in claiming errors exist in Scripture if the Church has denied them that avenue? Much of it seems to stem from the desire for scholarly acceptance of one’s work by one’s peers. The emergence of modernism among Catholic scholars came only after Protestantism had almost entirely been infected with modernist assumptions. The anti-supernatural presuppositions within the historical critical method affect all of its related critical methods. These include form criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism—all grouped as “higher criticism.”

There is some credible evidence that the historical critical method originated with Islamic scholars who were attempting to discredit the Bible’s miraculous account of the life of Christ. (Islam, of course, views Christ as merely a holy prophet.) Modernist Protestants started to employ the historical critical method in earnest during the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Catholic scholars eventually succumbed to the
zeitgeist
(“spirit of the times”) within academia—learning the method from Protestant scholars.

The Church, however, forcefully resisted the skepticism innate within the historical critical method from its very onset: “There has arisen … an
inept method
, dignified by the name of the ‘higher criticism,’ which pretends to judge of the origin, integrity, and authority of each book from
internal indications alone
”
(PD)
.

Of course, some modernists would respond that the Church should simply butt out of this debate. They would claim that they feel hindered by the Magisterium’s guidance. They would assert that true scholarship can occur only in the
absence of faith
. But they forget that theological and biblical studies in the absence of the Church’s Faith immediately degenerate into a mere study of the philosophy of religion.

Biblical Judaism certainly understood the need to interpret Holy Scripture in harmony with the leadership of God’s people. We can see this in Matthew 2:1–12. (We looked at this passage in GR1.) Matthew relates how the Jews predicted the place of Messiah’s birth by referencing Micah 5:2. From our perspective, it is relatively obvious that Micah’s prophecy was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus.

But at the time the prophecy was actually fulfilled, the situation was a tad more opaque, and even the morally bankrupt Herod understood that the study of the Bible was sometimes complex and beyond the limitations of any single person. Placing great importance on the predicted location of the baby King, he immediately called on the leadership of God’s people for the proper interpretation of God’s prophecy (Matt. 2:7). Although he was certainly an evil man, he understood that isolated interpreters can easily fall into error.

During the Old Covenant, the chief priests and scribes Herod interviewed held the position of authority in interpretation. Jesus acknowledged as much three decades later when He said, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you” (Matt. 23:2–3).