Why an authentic interpreter of revelation is necessary

The following text is the transcript of our Youtube video Why an Authentic Interpreter of Revelation Is Required.

This video is part of a series on “The Sources of Faith”. You can find all the videos in the series here.

Welcome to Catholic Hub! My name’s David, and in this video I’m going to consider the nature of divine revelation from the point of view of the kind of truths that it (supposedly) contains, and what conclusions this leads us to regarding the role of the Church in how we understand revelation.

And I’d like to start off by considering a few points around human knowledge in general.

When humans learn something new, we don’t immediately and instantly understand a new topic as a whole, but instead we progress in a series of judgements about a thing and we gradually build an understanding of the concept in this way. For example, when learning about the moon, we first know it as an object that we see in the sky which is sometimes round and sometimes has another shape, and then we learn that it is very far away in outer space, and the reason why it changes in shape is due to the fact that it spins around the Earth and the shadow cast on it by the Sun make it appear a different shape although it is in fact a sphere.

And so in general, we always proceed from the known towards the unknown and from the material or tangible to the immaterial and the intangible.

What is more, when we learn about some abstract concept, such as the concept of love, or of justice, or any other immaterial and invisible concept which we can understand in the abstract, all the same we still learn about it through tangible examples and similitudes rooted in the material, through which we can make a conclusion of a higher immaterial nature.

For example, when we describe or convey the concept of sadness, we give the example of someone who is crying tears, and whose mouth is turned downwards. Those two tangible things are a sign of something invisible and immaterial happening within the person which is the concept of emotion of which sadness is a certain type, which we feel when we experience pain or loss.

And in fact for every single thought or idea that we have, this always comes back in some way to a material and human example through which we are able to understand the higher and more abstract concepts involved.

Now, if we were to assume that God certainly existed and that he had some kind of important truth to convey to us about himself, what would the nature of this truth or this knowledge be? Well, like God himself, this knowledge would be of a spiritual and immaterial nature, and that means, it would be something that we are not able to understand immediately without giving some kind of tangible human example from which we can abstract the spiritual and supernatural truth.

For example, when we describe God as being our father - we understand the notion of father primarily in a human sense where the father is the one who physically begets a child and passes on his own nature and characteristics to, and who provides for the child’s needs and protects him from danger. And this example allows us to see how God is truly our Father in a higher and spiritual sense, since our existence itself comes from his power and all our earthly needs are continually provided for by Him, and whose spiritual nature we also share - since we are also spiritual through the soul.

This use of a human term to convey a concept of a higher nature is called an analogy. We would say that the term “father” is applied to men and to God analogically, that is, there is an underlying similarity and proportion that is applied in a different way to our human nature and to God’s divine nature.

This use of analogy is necessary whenever we consider a truth which is supernatural since we can only understand it by comparing it with our own human nature.

And so it is clear that a divine revelation that is delivered to men from God and which is not directly infused into our minds, must be delivered to us by means of analogies which signify the higher truth that is of a spiritual nature, and therefore it requires an interpretation - or put otherwise, an explanation of the deeper spiritual meaning, so that we are able to reliably arrive at this truth.

And it is here that we get into the meat of the argument.

If we must rely on a faithful interpretation of God’s message in order to reliably arrive at the spiritual meaning that is contained within it in the form of analogies, we necessarily require an interpreter who already understands the meaning. Now this interpreter can be one of two things.

Either, this interpreter is God himself who enlightens each of us directly as to the meaning of revelation, OR it is a human person. Now, if revelation is delivered to us mediately, i.e. through human speech or writing, it doesn’t make sense for the interpretation of this revelation to be given immediately and directly by God, since in that case why would he not simply infuse the revealed knowledge itself directly into our minds?

Therefore the only possibility is that God’s revelation is interpreted by another human person or group of people, who already understand God’s message - and not only who understand it but who also have been authorised by Him to transmit and distribute it on his behalf.

Now, this description can only apply to the Catholic Church, which is identical with the church founded by Jesus Christ and which can trace its lineage and unchanging beliefs all the back to Christ and the Apostles.

The teaching of Our Lord which He gave to the Apostles is the same teaching that we receive today from the Church.

In the words of St Paul:

Remember your prelates who have spoken the word of God to you; whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation: Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today; and the same for ever

Hebrews 13:9

That’s all for this episode, if you enjoyed it then please do subscribe and give this video a thumbs up, I really appreciate it. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.