This does
not prevent me from willingly recognizing my debt with regard to certain Church
movements, in particular the Catholic charismatic renewal, to whom I owe to
have rediscovered in depth a living faith, and whose liturgical songs, entirely
taken from the Word of God, were my first real contact with this one, further
in contact with the groups of evangelical biblical studies animated by Mr.
Rempp in Lyon. Nevertheless, my faith, which has always been nourished by the
Word of God, and has been "turned upside down" by the Gospel of John
and, above all, by the Epistles of Paul could no longer ignore the conflict, more
and more vividly, between what Holy Scripture actually says, and the reception
by a tradition too largely contaminated by the influence of Greek philosophy – that
of Aristotle in particular. By giving favor often to the moral and social
questions rather than the question of salvation, the Catholicism doesn’t permit
us to understand why the evangelical message is truly a 'good news' - in proportions probably inimaginable. The decisive experience, which was at the heart of
this conversion to a more evangelical faith, is the discovery that, beyond
subjectivism of any personal interpretation of Scripture, gave rise to what
Luther called Illuminism, it is traversed by a vital breath that the weight of
dogma and tradition can end up suffocating under the philosophical arsenal
deployed by Catholicism to make the revelation acceptable in the court of
human reason. It does not enter into the object of this foreword to examine the
report of Sacred Scripture and Tradition, on which we will have ample
opportunity to return to the conclusion of this work. We know that the
Protestant Reformation inaugurated by Luther made "sola scriptura",
Scripture alone, his slogan, and this against the outgrowth of a tradition that
ends up partially by becoming emancipated from Scripture, and becoming
normative for the interpretation of Scripture itself. The Catholic tradition
certainly does not claim to add new revelations to Scripture, contrary to what
many Protestants think. It was the remarkable effort of Cardinal Newman, in his
Essay on the Development of the Christian Doctrine (1845), to have shown that
the Catholic dogmatic obeyed a logic of internal development (each dogmatic
affirmation giving rise to new developments) which draws its source in Holy
Scripture itself. What the Catholic calls "Tradition" would not be,
as the most fundamentalist Protestants believe, a betrayal of Holy Scripture,
but it would rather be the unveiling of all its internal potentials, the
historicity of the dogma being integral part of this progressive revelation
which was enveloped, by germinating in Scripture itself. Being thus understood, as
the unfolding of what was certainly misunderstood by the anterior generations,
but what was latent in Scripture ("Marian theology" is, for
Catholics, exemplary of this development), the dogmatic Tradition would then be
the even heart of the Scripture, which unveil its plenary sense, and it will belong to
The Magisterium of the Church, to discern what is, in the dogmatic development proposed
by theologians, conform to the true meaning of Holy Scriptures.
Our purpose
is not to pronounce on the value and legitimacy of the Tradition. But question
is to know what really happens to Scripture when theological debates no longer
come from the difficulties or obscurities of Scripture (and God knows there are
difficult and obscure passages!) but only from the internal debates of the same
tradition, as we see, for example, on a question as controversial as that of
Grace, which was so much written about in the XVIe and XVIIe centuries. Between
a Saint Augustin reflecting in the Grace from the Epistles of St. Paul, and a
Henri de Lubac, reflecting in The Mystery of the Supernatural, on this same
question from a reflection encompassing all the tradition of the Church (and
which mentions Scripture only as a purely occasional, while it should be the
touchstone of all spiritual discernment) one can only remain wary of this dogmatic
outgrowth, which deprives the non-specialist of any possibility of having
access to the true meaning of the Scriptures. This meaning is then
"confiscated" by a single intellectual elite capable of following all
the meanders in which such fights are often festering. Christ, however, was not
so tortuous, and he knew that the message of the Gospel, which is addressed
first to the "poor of the heart", is immediately accessible to him
whose heart and intelligence are opened by the action of the Holy Spirit. Does
he not declare: "I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, to have
hid this mystery from the wise and learned, and to have it revived to the
youngest" (Matthew, 11. 25)? Is it not to overthrow this word of Christ
that to wish to reserve the key to the interpretation of Scripture to a learned
elite, or to a enlightened Magisterium, there where Christ promises, on the
contrary, the assistance of Holy Spirit to all those who faithfully keep and
meditate on his Word?
Also, for
the sake of honesty, and because we must nevertheless recognize the greatness
of Catholic theology, I wanted to confront, in the three essays of which this
book is composed, the Catholic interpretation and the Protestant interpretation,
with as much objectivity as possible, showing to what respective logics each of
them obey. The Catholic reader will find that I have not deformed any Catholic
positions, as is often the case in this kind of debate, and that I rather tried
to present them with the maximum of sympathy possible in the three studies
proposed, even if I allowed myself certain criticisms, in the introduction and the
conclusion, which aimed less at Catholicism itself than at its questionable
reduction to "Thomist orthodoxy". If this essay can contribute to
changing the way by which many Protestants look at Catholicism, and vice versa,
one of the major objectives of this essay will be already reached, so much has
it seemed to us, during the course of writing this work, that much
misunderstanding in the dialogue between Catholicism and Evangelical
Protestantism comes from the inability to enter into the internal logic of the
opposing position, and to marry its point of view. Now, some differences remain
irreducible, and we do not pretend to resolve them. But a better understanding
of the opposing doctrine seems to us to be the condition of a real dialogue,
even if each one remains on his position.
