QUOTATION: The Magisterium

The teaching office of the apostles’ successors does not represent a second authority alongside Scripture but is inwardly a part of it. This viva vox is not there to restrict the authority of Scripture or to limit it or even replace it by the existence of another – on the contrary, it is its task to ensure that Scripture is not disposable, cannot be manipulated, to preserve its proper perspicuitas, its clear meaning, from the conflict of hypotheses.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “The Holy Spirit as Communion”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: Interpreting Scripture

God's precepts will never be obeyed if every man may boldly devise for himself a conscience based on a commentary on God's Word that he's crafted himself, according to his own fantasies. For in this matter--in which people justify their private devotions--these word of the Scripture are proved true "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end leads to hell" (see Proverbs 14:12).

If a man should doubt his knowledge and understanding of anything written in the Scripture, he's not wise, then, to take upon himself the authority to interpret, boldly depending on his own mind. Instead, he should depend on the interpretation of the holy teachers and the saints of old, and on the interpretation that's been received and allowed by the universal Church through which the Scripture has come into our hands and has been delivered to us in the first place. And without the Church, as St. Augustine says, we couldn't know which books are Holy Scripture.

 If a man won't take the teachings of the Catholic faith as a rule of interpretation when he studies the Scripture--but instead, being distrustful, studies the Scripture to find whether or not the faith of the Church is true--he cannot fail to fall into errors.

--St Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies

QUOTATION: Four Prophets to Four Evangelists

Isaiah chiefly foretells the mystery of the Incarnation, which is why he is read during the time of Advent by the Church, and Jeremiah the mystery of the Passion, hence he is read in Passiontide, and Ezekiel the mystery of the Resurrection, hence his book finishes with the raising of the bones and the repair of the temple. Daniel, however, is included among the prophets insofar as he predicted future events in a prophetic spirit; although he did not speak to the people in the person of the Lord, he dealt with the divinity of Christ. Thus the four prophets answer to the four Evangelists, and also to the call to judgement.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, The Inaugural Sermons in Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings, Penguin.

QUOTATION: Scripture

To read Sacred Scriptures means to turn to Christ for advice.

--St. Francis of Assisi

QUOTATION: Learning Biblical Wisdom

The wisdom of the Scriptures is learned rather by prayer than by study.

--St. Philip Neri

QUOTATION: Sacred Tradition Equal to Scripture

Of the dogmas and proclamations preserved in the Church, some we possess from written teaching, while others we have received in secret from the Tradition of the Apostles; these both have the same validity for true religion. And no one will gainsay these points, at least if he is even moderately versed in ecclesiastical institutions.

--St. Basil the Great

QUOTATION: God in Scripture

Why is God never represented as shouting in Revealed Scripture? It is because He is so near He has no need to shout.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Academic Ignorance and Bad Exegesis

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Selective Belief

If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: The Church and the Bible

In fact, a church without a credible biblical foundation is only a chance historical product, one organization among others, and the humanly constructed framework of which we spoke. But the Bible without the Church is no longer the powerfully effective Word of God, but an assemblage of various historical sources, a collection of heterogeneous books from which one tries to draw, from the perspective of the present moment, whatever one considers useful.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 1985 (Pope Benedict XVI)

QUOTATION: Philosophy, Bible Scholarship and the Supernatural

In a popular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion on the date at which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must have been written after the execution of St. Peter, because, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St. Peter. ‘A book’, thinks the author, ‘cannot be written before events which it refers to’. Of course, it cannot—unless real predictions ever occur. If they do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author has not discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes it for granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he is right: but if he is: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by historical inquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historical work, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historical conclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have been reached at all. His work is therefore quite useless to a person who wants to know whether predictions occur. The author gets to work only after he has already answered that question in the negative, and on the grounds which he never communicates to us.

--C.S. Lewis, Miracles

QUOTATION: God's Action in the World And Bible Scholarship

The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern world-view, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history—that everything to do with God is to be relegated to the domain of subjectivity. And so the Bible no longer speaks of God, the living God; no, now we alone speak and decide what God can do and what we will and should do. And the Antichrist with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times.


--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.

QUOTATION: Knowledge of Scripture

A man who is well grounded in the testimonies of the Scripture is the bulwark of the Church.

--St. Jerome: In Isaiam, 54:12