United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

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 .