Note: Mr. Vennari’s article was originally published in The Fatima Crusader, Issue #87 (2007).
The Question of Authority
If you give me a book – call it The Bible – and you tell me that everything in that book is the infallible word of God, the first thing I’m going to ask is, “Who says?”
Books don’t write themselves. Books by multiple authors don’t just compile themselves into one big book and then proclaim itself to be the written word of God.
No! Someone, or some social unit, which God Himself gave the authority to teach – to teach in His Name, to teach infallibly – must tell me this. Only an authority like that can tell me that this book is the written, infallible word of God.
And it was the Catholic Church, at the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D., through the guidance of the Holy Ghost, that settled once and for all what was the Canon of the New Testament; that decided which books were divinely inspired and which were not.
You remember there were a number of other “Gospels” and “Epistles” circulating; some written by good and holy men but were not the inspired word of God (for example, the Epistles of St. Clement). Others were just plain fabrications, such as the so-called Gospel of Pilate or the Gospel of Nicodemus.
The Church Gave Us the Bible
It was the Catholic Church that decided which books were divinely inspired and which were not. It was the Catholic Church that put the New Testament together, joined it to the Old Testament, and gave the Bible to the world. It was the Catholic Church that produced the Bible, it was not the Bible that produced the Church.
Thus, as I said, the Protestant principle of “The Bible Alone” has no basis in history. The Catholic religion is the only religion that can answer the question: “Who Says?” – that is, “who says the Bible is the written word of God?”
Let There Be Gutenberg!
But the problems don’t stop there. Because if it is necessary to read the Bible for me to be saved, if faith cometh only by reading the Bible, then faith cometh only by the invention of the printing press, which was not invented until the middle of the 15th Century by Johannes Gutenberg.
Before that, all books were hand-copied. It was a laborious, time-consuming and expensive venture. It was not possible to get a copy of the Bible into the hands of every Catholic, or even one to every Catholic family.
We’ve only had Bibles widely distributed for a little more than 400 years. So what about the millions of Christians who lived before that, who would go through their entire lives and never even see a Bible or a printed text of the New Testament?
Now, the theory of “The Bible Alone” – that is, following the Bible alone as the path to salvation – presupposes that the Bible should have been available to all men from the foundation of Christianity. Well, we already saw that this is not the case. We saw that the books of the New Testament were not written until 65 years after Our Lord left the earth. And we saw that the Christian World did not even have a complete, compiled Bible until the year 397 A.D.; and were not even available for mass distribution until the middle of the 15th Century. So the principle of “The Bible Alone” has no basis in history.
Conflicts with Reason
Finally, the principle of “The Bible Alone” is contrary to reason. Because if you give me a book, and you tell me that everything in that book is the written Word of God, and that I have to read it and believe the Bible Alone for salvation, then the first thing I will say to you is: “Fine, then you leave me alone. You just give me that Bible, and I’ll decide what is the true meaning of Scriptures.”
This essentially is the Protestant system. If you go to a Lutheran congregation, you are only buying into Martin Luther’s private interpretation of the Bible.
And if you go to a Methodist congregation, you are only subscribing to another man’s private interpretation of the Bible – a character named John Wesley.
And if you go to a Presbyterian congregation, you’ve only bought into the private interpretation of John Knox, the founder of that group.
And if you are a member of a Protestant denomination, there is no reason why you could not stand up and say to the preacher: “Brother, I believeth you walketh not in truth. Your interpretation is wrong! I have found the correct meaning.”
And if you are zealous enough, and eloquent enough, and determined enough, you could start to preach, and you could start your own Protestant congregation – because that is how they all started.
And we see that this is the consequence of private interpretation of the Bible. Because, according to the Protestant system – every man reading the Bible and coming to his own interpretation – the logical conclusion of this is that there could be as many Protestant religions as there are individuals. There is no church for them established by Christ to teach in His name! There is no authority established by God to tell me that I might have made a mistake!
So this is one of the many reasons I could never be a Protestant. We see that the “Bible Alone” principle is contrary to Scripture, the “Bible Alone” principle is not supported by history, and the “Bible Alone” principle is contrary to reason; for it ends up in thousands of conflicting interpretations of Scripture and is contrary to what Our Lord established His Church to be.
The Bible Made a Catholic Out of Me!
One of the many Protestants who finally discovered this truth was a man named Paul Whitcomb.
Paul Whitcomb was a Protestant minister whose intense study of Sacred Scripture led him to accept the Catholic Church as the only true Church established in the Bible. This is all laid out in an out-of-print booklet titled The Bible Made a Catholic Out of Me.
Mr. Whitcomb studied Scripture through the “interpretation by correlation” method.
Here’s how the method works: He would focus on a given phrase in Scripture, such as “Son of God”, and he would search throughout the Scriptures and find every instance where that phrase was used, in order to come to the Biblical truth about what a given phrase means.
When Mr. Whitcomb used this interpretation by correlation method for the word “Church”, it led him to a discovery he did not expect, summarized in four points