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30 • Part I. The Creed: The Faith Professed
authors used within the specific cultural circumstances in which they
were writing.
The Church’s response to Fundamentalism is that Revelation is
transmitted by Apostolic Tradition and Scripture together. The Church
and Apostolic Tradition existed before the written New Testament. Her
Apostles preached the Gospel orally before writing it down. The Apostles
appointed bishops to succeed them with the authority to continue their
teaching. Scripture alone is insufficient. Authoritative teaching is also
needed. That is given to us by the Church’s teaching office. Catholics,
then, accept Scripture and Tradition as one “sacred deposit of the Word
of God” (CCC, no. 97, citing DV, no. 10). Although this sets us apart
from those who believe only in the Bible as their source of revelation,
Catholics accept and honor both Scripture and Tradition “with equal
sentiments of devotion and reverence”
(CCC, no. 82, citing DV, no. 9).
In response to biblical literalism, the Church holds that “the books
of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which
God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred
Scriptures” (DV, no. 11). At the same time, the Church recognizes that
the interpreter of Scripture needs to attend to the literary forms—such
as poetry, symbol, parable, history, song, or prayer—in which the Bible
is written. The interpreter “must look for that meaning which the sacred
writer . . . given the circumstance of his time and culture, intended to
express and did in fact express, through the medium of a contemporary
literary form” (DV, no. 12).
Historical Reductionism
Another challenge comes from scholars and others who deny the super-
natural aspects of the Gospels, such as the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, mir-
acles, and the Resurrection. We call this
reductionism
because it reduces
all Scripture to the natural order and eliminates the reality of divine
intervention.
The Church’s Pontifical Biblical Commission has dealt with
approaches of this kind in its publications
Instruction on the Historical
Truth of the Gospels
and
The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church
.