The Church in our times
Opinions of some biblical researchers have recently been aired on television, according to which Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin, did no miracles and certainly did not rise again from death.
There has also been a debate in the pages of certain newspapers published by the Dutch Reformed Churches. In these, writers have been at pains to defend the traditional Christian doctrines in response to confused readers alarmed that anyone could even think of abandoning them.
The arguments against the doctrines rest on basically two propositions. The first is that, since science has proved that virgin births, miracles and reviving from death contradict the established laws of nature and are impossible, the only other rational explanation is fraud.
The second argument is similar. It is that the first of the four gospels was written about 60 years after Christ’s death, and the intervening period gave Christ’s zealous followers the opportunity to depict their hero as a wonder-worker and even as God himself.
Such arguments are not new. Serious biblical scholars have refuted them often in the past, but today’s era is a lot more cynical than its predecessors, and the refutations are often rejected as inadequate and simplistic.
A characteristic of the anti-doctrine attitude is its concentration solely on the texts of the Bible. There is no earnest examination of the Church’s tradition as shown in the earliest non-scriptural writings and the fact that the Christian community existed as a tightly-knit group long before the canon of the New Testament.
Catholicism does not restrict divine inspiration and authority to scripture alone. Its certainty of revealed truth arises from the constant preaching and practice handed on by the Apostles, some of which was written down and accepted as God’s inspired word.
What was not recorded by the evangelists and the other New Testament writers is retained in the Church’s memory. From time to time the Church calls to mind what was done and believed in the past, and it has the unfailing support of the Holy Spirit in this.
It would be absurd to think that the memory of people who had already imbibed the “family” traditions of the time of the Apostles could be crushed out within less that 60 years by acts of deception on the part of the gospel writers.
The early Christian community lived in mutual love and trust and would not be a push-over for deceivers and fraudsters, nor would so many of them have been so willing to be martyred in defence of their beliefs.
The Church firmly holds that divine revelation comes to us from Christ and the Apostles in both oral and written form, and these are equally inspired by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Scripture and tradition together make the mystery of Christ present in the Church of today.
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