How the Bible became a secular book (with Scott Hahn)

hey everyone welcome to the council of trent podcast i'm here at franciscan university of steubenville at the defending the faith conference joining me is dr scott hahn professor of theology we're going to talk about your new book the decline and fall of sacred scripture i'm super excited by the book because it seems like throughout church history everyone is assumed there's a general assumption the bible is is a reliable description of salvation history even the heretics agreed with that they just said that it supported their dogmatic their theological conclusions but then at some point in history things change and suddenly the bible goes from being presumed to be true unless facts show otherwise to now being presumed to be false unless some secular scholar rescues this tell us a little bit more about how that happened and also just kind of how this book came about sure well let me start with how this book came about because the background is actually connected to catholic answers 25 years ago here in steubenville we had carl keating and he was speaking at defending the faith which is where you're speaking and we invited him over to our house and down to the basement where the library is and he was impressed with the library but he was more intent upon interviewing me we had a conversation but he had a recorder like you do and uh it went i think a couple of hours by the time he edited it down he wanted to publish the conversation in this rock and so 25 years ago it came out and it was entitled the bible politicized and i shared a lot of what i'd been studying for the last eight years ever since cardinal ratzinger had delivered the erasmus address in new york city back in 88 on the crisis in biblical interpretation where he called for a um a serious criticism of the critics and so that's what i had been doing for several years well fast forward that's the background for grounded about 10 years ago dr benjamin weiker and i a colleague here who just retired he and i began working on a project entitled politicizing the bible the roots of historical criticism and the secularization of scripture but at the end of the subtitle was what surprised most scholars 1300 to 1700 because almost to a person people trace historical criticism and the the secularization of scripture back to the early 1700s and of course that's where historical criticism is emerging in a way that is philosophically self-conscious but when you go back to the 14th century you find of course william of ockham you also find marcellus of padua and then fast forward a century to machiavelli all of these people were advancing bad philosophy you might say as a shorthand but as as always incorporating scripture and so uh just as nominalism and volunteerism fed into secularization so uh we ended up producing this book that um uh continuum uh published it was over 600 pages i mean i love teaching it but students don't love being assigned it because it is so deep into the history of biblical interpretation as well as the history of philosophy and political philosophy which was dr wyker's specialty and still is so people who read it would almost always ask can you summarize synthesize simplify and we said yeah but it's not going to be as easy as it sounds and so finally at long last right after uh he retired from franciscan we released this book from uh emmaus road here at the saint paul center on the campus of franciscan and i'm very excited because you know one thing that i want to show people is hiding in plain view it's an obvious fact except that nobody notices it and that is as a matter of historical fact the bible is an ecclesial document it is written for the liturgy and i mean this is something that c f d mu and other historical critical scholars have observed the zitzim laban is the eucharistic liturgy in the first generation so why are you interpreting it totally apart from the church the worship the sacraments the eucharist you know claiming scientific neutrality that would be like a botanist ripping a plan out by the roots and bringing into a lab and wondering why the bright hot lights are causing it to wilt well when you take an organism out of its natural habitats that's what happens and every scientist knows that but it's a pseudoscience that is applying to scripture when you rip it out of the context of the church the life of faith and you interpret in a way that is secularized you know again that would be like a a tone-deaf music critic claiming to be more neutral or objective precisely because he can't distinguish you two from mozart or something you know and and so what i want to do what both of us want to do in this book is really to reinforce what we've been doing for 20 years at the saint paul center teaching people to read scripture from the heart of the church is reading the bible on its own terms and one other thought i wanted to mention and that is uh the book is also influenced by a range of other scholars we're not the only ones we're not necessarily the best ones although i must think that we are but you know i've learned so much from michael lagossi in particular who defended a doctorate at harvard that ended up getting published as a book he was a protestant at the time a graduate of westminster seminary he subsequently became orthodox but michael was the one who initially showed us that johan david michaelis in the 18th century was a pious and devout protestant but reducing scripture to scientific exegesis was a big part of his program and he inadvertently set into motion something that now you know 2020 hindsight was eminently predictable and that is if you if you take this this gift of god's inspired word out of the context of the church and put it in a university system that is increasingly secular you know garbage and garbage out might be a harsh way of putting it but at the same time the the secularized worldview that was becoming increasingly hostile to the supernatural the miraculous and all of that it just really proves what ratzinger was saying when he yeah let me let's let's tie that together because the thesis is so fascinating that we think in the modern age is when you start to get disbelief about scripture but we we can go like let's go to the protestant reformation it seems what you're saying is that nowadays people look at the bible as well the bible is one ancient book tacitus's annals is another joseph's antiquities it's just another ancient book but we as catholics believe it's not it's meant to live its life in the liturgy but then if you get to the protestant reformation the protestants will say we can't have the bible intimately wed with the church at least with the catholic church or the liturgy because we believe in solo scriptura so we're going to analyze the bible one would think on a friendly term just apart from the church but what you're saying is that that unintentional thing in them trying to separate it from looking at it through the magisterium through the life of the liturgy through friendly protestant solo scriptural eyes it slides into secularism pretty quickly that's right i mean this is so similar to what brad gregory establishes in the unintended reformation his massive study and and that is the uh the reformers did not intend to secularize scripture obviously but inasmuch as they de-sacramentalized worship they they thought they were putting front and center the proclamation of the bible but really the fact is from the very beginning you think of luke 24 you know he opened the scriptures their hearts were burning but their eyes weren't open until the breaking of the eucharistic bread and so when you de-center the eucharist and you focus on the bible you end up not only creating a chaos of interpretive you know uh differences uh but you also set an emotion something that well 500 years after the reformation we have over 40 000 denominations all founded by people who are preaching the bible and they would pass a polygraph we're getting it right more so than our predecessors you know but what we also do is uh to show that it's not just luther it's not just cranmer it's not just king henry it's also thomas hobbes it's especially benedict spinoza and it's also john locke richard simone and uh you know you have protestants catholics and jews who are all participating in the hijacking of scripture from the church to the state from the monastery and the magisterium to the university and so from faith that is united to reason to reason alone and so you have this incipient rationalism already a century after the reformation and if you just trace the trajectory you will see this meta-narrative of the secularization of scripture basically means that what we have today with radical marxist materialist feminist post-modern deconstructionist approach of the scripture all of this was foreseeable in fact all of this was practically inevitable so what do we do well we can wring our hands we can bewail the fact or we can transplant this and put it back where it belongs and recognize that it was never really uprooted within the church unfortunately so many catholic theologians biblical scholars and exegetes and the seminarians who trained under them only know this one approach and so we have to show the limits of historical criticism you know as ratzinger pointed out it's only the historical past it doesn't make anything present it's always a hypothesis so you can't move from the hypothetical to the certitude of faith and it's always and only merely the human it never introduces or establishes the divine the miraculous the prophetic only god knows the future and he is excluded by the methods themselves and so it's kind of like it reminds me of when new testament scholars secular new testament scholars read the gospels and say oh well this gospel had to have been written after the fall of jerusalem because jesus predicts that the temple will be destroyed as if he's not divine and could know you know know that through his omniscience that's right and that's true for isaiah and jeremiah and daniel as well it also it always has to be prophecy after the fact you know which is what velhausen called a pious fraud you know so what we have to recognize is that you know reading scripture from a hermeneutic of faith as cardinal ratzinger put it is reading the bible on its own terms and and that's what every writer wants but that's also what every careful reader needs to do that is you want to read like the usa today you want to read time magazine you want to read a book according to its genre as well as the authorial intention well matthew mark luke and john were not just reliable witnesses good writers they were men of prayer men of faith mystics and so the more we enter into that shared faith the more critical sympathy we bring to bear upon the text and i think at the end of the day we'll see that not only is this approach to scripture more spiritually satisfying it's also and this is important scientifically superior it exerts and it exhibits a greater explanatory power and so the hypotheses for interpreters within the living tradition are going to basically tap right into the deep meanings that were intended by the prophets by the evangelists by the apostles and also by the holy spirit who we share amen where can people get a copy of the book and let people know more where they can find your research and more about the st paul center great well go to saint paul center dot com center emmaus road has this it's our publishing arm and it has an amazing array of titles and you can order this one the decline and fall of sacred scripture or how the bible became a secular book and you'll see other things too that are all part of this project of reading sacred scripture from the heart of the church or what we develop as a liturgical way of reading the bible one last thought you know this is going to be a throwaway line that i say too fast but that's typical for me i suppose um you know we want to be new testament christians as catholics and protestants but the thing that was a breakthrough for me was oh 20 years ago even after i became a catholic noticing that the only thing jesus ever called the new testament the only time jesus ever uttered the phrase the new testament in luke 22 20 was when he was in the upper room on holy thursday instituting the eucharist and what did he call the new testament this is the cup of my blood the blood of the kaine diatheke the new covenant the new testament he doesn't say write this in remembrance of me he says do this my takeaway was simple the new testament was therefore a sacrament long before it began to well before it started becoming a document and it doesn't devalue the document when you when you subordinate the word that is inspirated to the word incarnated and truly present in the eucharist it doesn't dilute the power and the truth of scripture it endows it with a power that is so much greater and so as catholics we're not only new testament christians we're eucharistic followers of just as the early church believers were too and so here again is another example of where historical critical study done in a way that is truly objective from within a hermitage of faith is spiritually more satisfying and scientifically superior well thank you so much dr han and be sure to check out dr han's new book i'll leave a link to it in the description below for this video and we hope that you guys have a very blessed day hey thanks for watching this video if you want to help us produce more great content like this be sure to click subscribe and go to trenthornepodcast.com to become a premium subscriber you'll help us create more videos like this and get access to bonus content and sneak peeks of our upcoming projects

Channel: The Counsel of Trent

Views: 18,538

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Id: yV3MpihIhbw

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021