In the Old Testament book of Amos, the prophet preaches an alarming warning of a coming famine, “not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD” (Amos 8:11). It could be argued that for many generations, we Catholics in particular—whether aware or not—have been living through just such a famine.
What many Christians call the “Reformation” has caused deep wounds among the people of God, one of the most grievous of which was the tearing asunder of the two greatest gifts by which God shares himself with the world he made: his words (Scripture) and his life (Sacraments). Yet we learn in Deuteronomy that God’s words are life itself, by which God’s people are made able to live long in the land (32:46–47), and in the Psalms that “the law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul” (19:7).
Sadly, in the aftermath of the Reformation, many who left the Church clung desperately to the conviction that they could nonetheless continue to hear and be nourished by the voice of God issuing from the sacred text they held dear, and justified their departure on the basis that they had so heard, even if they were now separated from the sacramental life of the Church. Those who remained united to the Church looked askance at this, choosing—often in reaction—to prioritize the sacramental life over the quest to encounter God in the sacred pages. The tragic result is that for many Catholics, the Church’s Bible has become a closed book.
Left unaddressed, wounds can fester, giving rise to additional wounds and requiring more proactive measures to facilitate their healing. One of the additional wounds can be seen in the way alternative modes of reading and understanding Scripture—e.g., as religious and largely fanciful mythology—have arisen in the eras following the great wounding. The so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries ushered in all manner of new discoveries, including an explosion of knowledge about the past from our expanded capacity for historical inquiry, alongside an explosion of knowledge about the universe and our world’s place within it.
Owing in part to the recent invention of the printing press, the woundedness of the Church was made so visible and new truths about both the ancient and modern worlds made so readily accessible that in due time the Bible’s numerous appeals to the miraculous—e.g., that God had made the world through the power of his word; that he had condescended to enter it as a man; and that despite suffering a most gruesome death, he had been raised bodily from the dead and thus defeated the greatest enemy to life—were now refitted with purely naturalistic explanations clothed in the assured results of scientific method. The formerly exalted status of the biblical text as a witness to the reality and activity of the divine in the life of the world was reduced to Israel’s and the Church’s thoughts about a God whose existence no longer formed the ground of rational discourse.
Against this backdrop, our late Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, saw in stark relief the enormity of the challenge this development presented. The Bible has been marginalized by the scientific community, privatized and politicized by our society, and relegated to a quaint but impotent religious artifact on the shelf of the pious. It is read at length in the Liturgy of the Church, but heard as if from another room by those who sit in the pews.
In response to our Holy Father’s call (cf. Verbum Domini §§72–75) the work of the Emmaus Institute for Biblical Studies is to re-open the closed book for the Catholic lay faithful, as well as for the priests who shepherd them who may feel burdened by the weight of the task of drawing out and presenting for those in their care the treasures it contains.
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