I've been working on this post for awhile, so forgive me for changes in tense or POV, but I finally decided I'd just hit the publish button and move on to other ideas...
For the past several months I've been engaged in an ongoing dialog with a local Jehovah's Witness (JW). He stopped by the house on a Saturday about 6 months ago and wanted to share his faith with me by reading me a Bible passage. I listened, then we discussed his understanding, informed by his interpretation (which was actually the Watchtower Society's interpretation) and my understanding, informed by the Catholic Church's teaching. It was a good discussion, and nearly every other weekend since he stops by and we have an ongoing discussion.
A few weekends back was a rather interesting discussion that I thought would make a good topic for a post. Our talk turned away from simply reading a passage and trying to unpack it and turned to considering how the Bible came to us, who truly has the authority to interpret the Bible, and whether it is reasonable to reject Catholic teachings and rely solely on the Bible with or without another teaching authority.
Generally speaking, I won't present my JW friend's position as I don't want to misrepresent what he said and I didn't record the conversation so all I would be unable to quote him and am pretty sure my paraphrasing would be shaded by my perspective. Instead I'll just lay out the ideas I presented to him, mixed with some thoughts that have subsequently come to mind.
Each time we have met, we have enjoyed reading a passage from the Bible, comparing the translation he uses (New World Translation) to the multiple translations I own and read (Revised Standard Version CE, New American Bible, and Douay-Rheims). We have found that we agree on many points larger points, but diverged in many of the details, though there are some big areas of disagreement like the existence of Hell and eternal punishment, the Trinity and Divinity of Jesus. When we read a passage that one of us believes supports our belief or contradicts the others, it seems the difficulty lies in the interpretation of the passage or the context in which the passage is interpreted.
My JW friend, will frequently turn to the Watchtower for support, interpretation or understanding, though sometimes he does not acknowledge that as the source of his "personal" interpretation. While I almost always, and openly, turn to the Catholic Church for my interpretations, or at least the framework and context for interpretation.
In our talks, I've never directly challenged the authority or reliability of the Watchtower Society. Maybe I should have, and based on last weekend's discussion, I'm quite certain that is where our next discussion will head. But, up until now we have simply discussed the Bible and our beliefs and understanding as two believers witnessing their faith to one another to find common ground and to find differences that might lead us to greater truth or better understanding. But that changed last weekend.
My JW friend questioned why I trust "the Catholic Church's teachings and interpretations, when so often they contradict what the Bible says?" Huh! That was a brazen question. Not just brazen, but it pointed so clearly in the direction of what I had known all along, that our differences of opinions largely stem from one of us embracing a full understanding of history and Truth, and the other having a much narrower vision and relying on limited information and context. At that moment I got pretty fired up to give him a Catholic perspective and answer for his question.
I verified with my friend that he believed (nor my belief, his) that everything we need to know, love, and follow God could be found in the Bible, that he was an adherent to Sola Scriptura. While, I can observe that he is not reliant exclusively on the Bible (he demonstrates in his actions that he needs the Watchtower also) I accepted his profession at face value. And I made the point that the Bible is a Catholic book.
That got him asking me "How so?"
Well, it's really quite simple. Prior to the late 4th Century there was Jewish scripture which, depending on the rabbi you spoke with, might be just five books or it might be the entire Septuagint or it might be something in between. There were also various scattered writings of first generation Christians, apostles and immediate disciples of Jesus or direct disciples of the Apostles which recorded the life of Jesus or elaborated upon his life for the purpose of instructing people that had already accepted Christianity when it was preached in person. For over 300 years after Christ's resurrection there was no Bible. People came to know Jesus through the oral teachings of evangelists, only once they had heard the Gospel with their ears might they receive some follow-up writing that was simply to clarify or reinforce what had been orally handed on.
And, by the middle of the 4th century, some of those writings were being presented up front during the conversion process as well as being provided for building and reinforcing the oral teaching. But, there were numerous accounts of the life of Jesus circulating and countless epistles and revelations going from community to community and some were questionable if not completely contradictory to one another and a lot of questions and confusion started to develop. So, the bishops of the Church, in communion with the Pope gathered to sort through the existing writings and clearly identify which were the inspired word of God and which were just good teaching but not absolute truth and even which were heresy. The result of the discussions and prayer directed and protected by the Holy Spirit (as promised by Christ when he established His Church and charged Peter as his first protector of the Faith) was the list of the 73 books of the Catholic Bible which still exists today and was the only Bible known and accepted for over 1100 years.
Now, here's the key thing that so many seem to miss, ignore or dismiss: Those bishops had a clear understanding of what they had been taught by the Holy Spirit through Apostolic succession. They had a clear understanding of what every writing they considered said. Guided by the Holy Spirit they discerned the a list of writings that were in complete harmony with what the Church taught and believed. There was absolutely nothing the Church taught and believed that was contradictory to what was in the inspired Scripture and there was absolutely nothing in the inspired Scripture that was contrary to what the Church taught and believed.
Certainly, one is free to believe that between Christ's ascension and the council that determined the table of contents of the Bible that the Truth was lost. But, for a non-Catholic Christian that presents two major problems. First, in Matthew 16:18 Jesus establishes the Church with Peter, giving Peter a place of primacy among the Apostles and most importantly he PROMISES that the gates of Hell not prevail against that Church. So the first problem is this: Did Jesus fail in his promise to preserve the Church from Satan's lies? Or was the Church still intact doing its mission of preserving and spreading the Gospel? If one thinks the Church had succumbed to lies and was no longer faithfully preserving the Truth revealed by Jesus, that's a pretty serious problem for a Christian. Christ failed to keep his promise?
The second problem stems from the first. If the Church was no longer the "pillar and bulwark of the Truth" what reason does a Christian have to put any trust in the Bible? The list of books in the Bible was made by THE CHURCH. If the Church had apostatized then the Bible's table of contents has to be seen as part of that apostasy. If the Church had not fallen away from preserving the Truth, then the entirety of the Church's teachings, faith, and interpretation must be acknowledged. Particularly, one must absolutely realize the point that the Church's teachings and the Bible could not be in conflict in any way.
Those that follow the principle of Sola Scriptura miss the simple fact, no where in the Bible does it list what books are supposed to be in the Bible. That list comes from the Catholic Church. A complete bound edition of the Bible with the 73 books it contains was not handed from Jesus to the Apostles or from God to the bishops at Nicea. No, the bishops at Nicea asked the Holy Spirit for the guidance that Jesus promised the Apostles and that He assured us would always be there for the visible leaders of His Church, they reviewed the hundreds of existing documents that claimed to be authentic teachings and the same way the Holy Spirit for 300 years had ensured that the Truth would be preserved made sure that only the Truth was preserved. And countless books and letters were rejected and only 73 were retained. While Marin Luther made personally informed decisions to toss aside some books of the Bible, he never once considered the hundreds of other writings that were rejected. That's an interesting approach. He dismissed the veracity and authority of the Church's defining of the Canon of Scripture, but he trusted they didn't mistakenly exclude anything? And non-Catholic's today just blindly accept that he was right to reject the authority of the Church (which Christ promised would always prevail) and that there is no reason to question the decisions of one man to reject some books while never questioning if any other errors were made in establishing the Canon of Scripture.
Look. The Council of Nicea either had the authority and protections of the Holy Spirit and the Canon of Scripture should be accepted. Or the Church had failed and the council was in apostasy in which case every single choice they made should be questioned and at some point the reformers should have gone back and considered all the writings that were rejected. But that has never happened.
Further, my JW friend had never considered the 300+ year period between Christ's ascension and the Council of Nicea and in my experience few Protestants of any denomination have. They have not considered that for over 300 years there was no Bible, there was simply oral communication of the teachings of Christ, oral tradition, Sacred Tradition.
They miss that the Gospels and Epistles themselves state that everything Jesus did and said could not possibly be written by the authors of those books and letters. We can look at what is in the Gospels and recognize that while the Apostles were with Jesus daily for three years, it barely accounts for that period of time. Did Jesus just spend three years repeating the same things to the Apostles? Or did He teach them far more in that time together? Based on the epistles and the writings of the early fathers of the Church it seems pretty obvious that there was a lot more teaching going on that didn't get recorded as Gospel, but was retained in the oral teachings of Sacred Tradition. Even the epistles refer to the fact that Christians in the early Church should retain what was taught by mouth as well what is in writing.
We briefly discussed other historical realities like the illiteracy that was prevalent for the centuries between Christ and the printing press. The expense and rarity of Bibles which made oral instruction the only realistic way to preserve and pass on the faith for over 1300 years. The fact that for the majority of the history of Christianity the notion of Sola Scriptura was not considered and was patently impossible. For all the time non-Catholics like JW's spend trying to point out how the Catholic Church "suddenly" changed dogma (which it has never done) they are completely oblivious to the fact that their faith is entirely dependent on a change in dogma that suddenly appeared over 1300 years after Christ and the Apostles deaths and which finds no sanction from any Divine authority.
It's a curious problem for non-Catholic Christians to consider... and for the first time, it left my JW friend without an answer. His last two visits he has seemed to have struggled to find footing. He pulls out his Watchtower publications to answer my questions or give his interpretations.
