Trent sits down with Dr. Scott Hahn to talk about his new book on sacred scripture and the Bible’s journey to being viewed in popular culture as a “secular book”.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Counsel 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 assumed, there’s a general assumption the Bible is a reliable description of salvation history. Even the heretics agreed with that. They just said that it supported their dogmatic, their theological conclusions.
Trent Horn:
But then in 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.
Scott Hahn:
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 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.
Scott Hahn:
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 serious criticism of the critics. And so that’s what I had been doing for several years. Well, fast forward, that’s the background. Foregrounded, about 10 years ago, Dr. Benjamin Weicker 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.
Scott Hahn:
Because almost to a person, people trace historical criticism and 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 Marsilius 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 always incorporating scripture. And so just as nominalism and volunteerism fed into secularization, so we ended up producing this book that Continuum published. It was over 600 pages.
Trent Horn:
It’s a thick book. I love it. It’s thick.
Scott Hahn:
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. Weicker’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.” So finally at long last right after he retired from Franciscan, we released this book from Emmaus Road, here at the St. Paul Center on the Campus of Franciscan. And I’m very excited because one thing that I want to show people is hiding in plain view.
Scott Hahn:
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 CFD [inaudible 00:04:12] and other historical critical scholars have observed. The Sitz im Leben 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? Claiming scientific neutrality, that would be like a botanist ripping a plant out by the roots and bringing it to a lab and wondering why the bright hot lights are causing it to wilt.
Scott Hahn:
Well, when you take an organism out of its natural habitat, that’s what happens, and every scientist knows that, but it’s a pseudo science 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. Again, that would be like a tone deaf music critic claiming to be more neutral or objective precisely because he can’t distinguish you two from Mozart or something. 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 St. Paul Center. Teaching people to read scripture from the heart of the church is reading the Bible on its own terms.
Scott Hahn:
And one of the thought I wanted to mention, and that is 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 I’ve learned so much from Michael Legaspi 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 McKaylas in the 18th century was a pious and devout Protestant, but reducing scripture to scientific exegesis was a big part of his program.
Scott Hahn:
And he inadvertently set into motion something that now 2020 hindsight was eminently predictable. And that is, if you take 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, garbage in garbage out might be a harsh way of putting it. But at the same time, 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… Go for it.
Trent Horn:
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 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 Annals is another, Josephus’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 Sola Scriptura.”
Trent Horn:
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 Sola Scriptura eyes, it slides into secularism pretty quickly.
Scott Hahn:
That’s right. This is so similar to what Brad Gregory establishes in the Unintended Reformation, his massive study. And that is the reformers did not intend to secularize scripture obviously. But in as much as they desacramentalized worship, 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, 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 differences, but you also set into motion 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.
Scott Hahn:
We’re getting it right, more so than our predecessors. But what we also do is to show that it’s not just Luther, it’s not just [inaudible 00:08:41], it’s not just King Henry, it’s also Thomas Hobbes. It’s especially Benedict de Spinoza and it’s also John Locke, Richard Simone. And you have Protestants, Catholics and Jews who are all in the hijacking of scripture from the church to the state, from the monastery and the magistarium 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.
Scott Hahn:
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, postmodern deconstructionist approach to 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.
Scott Hahn:
And so we have to show the limits of historical criticism. As Ratzinger pointed out, it’s only the historical past that 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 an 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-
Trent Horn:
Well, 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 that through his omniscience.
Scott Hahn:
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, which is what [inaudible 00:10:52] called a pious fraud. So what we have to recognize is that reading scripture from a hermeneutic of faith as Cardinal Ratzinger put it, is reading the Bible on its own terms. 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 a genre as well as the authorial intention.
Scott Hahn:
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 hypothesis 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.
Trent Horn:
Amen to that. 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.
Scott Hahn:
Great. Well, go to stpaulcenter.com, stpaulcenter.com, and Emmaus Road is 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, this is going to be a throwaway line that I say too fast, but that’s typical for me, I suppose. 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.
Scott Hahn:
And what did they call the New Testament? This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the [foreign language 00:13:15]. 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 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 just as the early church believers were too.
Scott Hahn:
And so here again is another example of where historical critical study done in a way that is truly objective and within a hermetic of faith is spiritually more satisfying and scientifically superior.
Trent Horn:
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Hahn, and be sure to check out Dr. Hahn’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.
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