Preface: The Word in Words and Images

Catholicism is "not a religion of the book." It is instead a religion of the Word—Christ himself, the Logos of the Father in whom everything has been communicated to us and passed down in two forms. "Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture," the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum tells us, "then, are bound closely together, and communicate one with the other. For both of them, flowing out from the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing, and move towards the same goal." That goal is that the presence of Christ be made manifest in the life of the Church throughout history.

This understanding, shared by our Orthodox brothers and sisters, is usually denied by our Protestant brothers and sisters, who generally deny that the Word is found in any medium except the written Scriptures. For them, Scripture is the only place to which one can turn to receive the message of the Word in a public, authoritative way. Catholics (and Orthodox, for that matter) are not forbidden from thinking there is something true about the traditionally Protestant take on Scripture. While the Protestant notion of Scripture as perspicuous, or clearly expressed and easy to understand, is not something that a Catholic can accept, the notion that all truth is indeed found in Scripture is quite easy to believe. Bl. John Henry Newman's Essay on Development argued for the development of doctrine and the need for an infallible authority in part on the basis of the inchoate and seemingly incomplete nature of the Revelation of Jesus Christ as it is found in the Bible. Where, for instance, does the Bible have an inspired table of contents that tells us which books are in it? Nevertheless, Newman indicated a belief that all truths might be found there. In fact, he seemed to think that the seeming incompleteness of the Bible was not caused by being incomplete, but by including all truth in an unsystematic, mysterious, and veiled fashion.

It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures. Of no doctrine whatever, which does not actually contradict what has been delivered, can it be peremptorily asserted that it is not in Scripture; of no reader, whatever be his study of it, can it be said that he has mastered every doctrine which it contains.¹

A 1984 commercial for Prego pasta sauce features an Italian-American father chastising his newlywed son for getting sauce from a jar. As he lists what ingredients must be there for a successful sauce—and marriage—the son repeats, "It's in there." After the son puts a spoonful of sauce into his mouth, the father exclaims, wide-eyed, "It's in there!" So it is with Scripture. Those who approach with faith and openness will find that all the truths of the world, though not obvious on the outside and not accessible simply by reading without the tradition and authority of the Church, are indeed "in there."

That is why the development of lay Catholics studying Scripture has been such a powerful one in the modern world. While many Reformation-era polemics about the Church's denial of the laity's right to read the Scriptures in various time periods have been exaggerated, it is nonetheless true that in the last few centuries regular reading of Scripture has not always been emphasized in the whole of the Catholic Church. Newman himself complained of the lack of Catholic scripture study in an 1883 letter to...