https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YLPxtAbk4J8
Yeah, wow. Well, crazy times we’re living in folks. If you’re just joining us, we’ve got Deacon Riley Durkin on the line. Hello everybody. He’s at St. Paul’s Seminary, a transitional Deacon much like myself, and we’re planning on getting ordained June 6th. And now it seems like reality is up in the air. So I just want to show you all this slide here and explain to you how the process of the night is going to go. So I’m going to talk for about an hour. I’m going to go through my slides, teach things, you know, hopefully teach you things about the Bible. And then while the show is going on, you’re free to call the parish number and Father Phil will pick up that number and he’ll forward any questions you might have to me. And then we’ll set aside about 30 minutes at the end of the show. So we’ll talk for an hour and set aside 30 minutes at the end of the show. And that’ll be the time I start going through those questions and answering them. So I really encourage everybody who’s listening, if they have questions while it’s going on, to call while the question is fresh on your mind. Because if everybody saves their questions to write to the end, we might probably overload the phone system here. And the phone system is, you know, we’ve got the machines and we also have Father Phil and that’s about it. So anyway, welcome to How to Read the Bible. Everything you wanted to know and perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about how we as a Catholic Church, how we approach the sacred scriptures, how we read them and how we interpret them. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, okay, Deacon Eric, this is way too simple. Way too simple. You’re over complicating things, Deacon Eric. You just pick up the book and read. You just pick it up and read. Why do we need all this extra work, all this extra time to learn how to read the scriptures? And so I’m going to show you a little clip, a little clip from Superman, right? You remember Richard Donner, 1978, Superman. So let’s take a look at what’s going on here. This is right in the middle of the movie. We already know he’s Superman. I think this is his first thing he does. Alright, so that’s a very short clip, right? And I suppose a lot of people who are watching this probably get what the director was trying to say with that clip. But what if you didn’t know much about Superman? What if you didn’t know that Superman changed into his super underwear and a phone booth? Then you have no idea why the director of that movie needed to include that scene and what that scene was supposed to mean, right? And so what that means is, is that in order to correctly interpret the text of that Superman movie, you needed to understand something from outside the movie. You needed to understand that in the comic books Superman would change his clothes in a phone booth. And if you didn’t understand that, then you would not understand that part of the movie. So we need to learn the framework that the Catholic Church uses to understand the Bible. We’ve got to learn what the Catholic Church has in its head that it uses to read the Bible. And we’re going to talk about the postmodern context that we’re in. We’re going to talk about false schools of biblical interpretation and then the Catholic doctrine on the Bible. And then step two, we’re just going to apply, right? So that’s what I’m hoping to spend most of my time on, is applying what we’ve learned in step one and applying that to specific Bible passages that are usually tricky to interpret. And we’ll spend a lot of time, especially with Genesis chapters one through 11. And then I do want to add that this could be complicated at first. This is something that we’re not used to hearing about. This is something that we’re not used to doing. But if we give it a chance and we could listen to the examples that are going to be given, it will make sense. Right. And Riley’s here on the talk, A, to give a little friendly banter so it’s not just me the whole time. And B, if I start going way off, he’s going to tell me to put the brakes on, so I can explain things a little bit better. Right? So anyway, after we get through the Bible’s trickiest passages, something’s going to happen in step three, and then Father Phil will become the Pope, I’m certain of it. So. Okay. We’ll hold our breath for step three. That’s what I’m staying on at least that long. Yeah. All right. So we’re going to look at alternate interpretations of movies you’re probably familiar with, right? So starting on the left, we’ve got Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s one of the considered one of the greatest movies of the 80s, one of the greatest, you know, kind of teen movies ever. And it’s just a whole lot of wacky shenanigans in it. Well, a dark fan theory states that Ferris was only a figment of the lonely Cameron’s imagination, and none of Ferris’s crazy shenanigans happened. Could you believe that, Riley? I’ve heard it. I’ve heard it before. I actually think it makes the movie a more enjoyable experience. Did you not like it before? Did you not like it the way it’s presented? I never really cared for Ferris Bueller, you know. I thought he was kind of a punk. But that’s me. And I’m definitely me. Yeah. Yeah, it’s something. But I think that’s, and we’ll see it with the other two examples too, so I don’t want to spoil it, but I think this is a good example of showing that it completely changes the way you’ve thought of things before. Right. After hearing us say, you hear about this, the Ferris Bueller example, fan theory about being a figment of the imagination, it changes the whole movie experience. Changes the whole movie experience. That’s exactly right. How you interpret the movie will determine what you think about the movie. So next, Jar Jar Binks. We all remember him. The annoying side character popular only with smart children. I loved Jar Jar Binks when I was like eight, and now I can’t stand him. Now how about this? Jar Jar Binks, the Sith Lord, who played the bumbling fool to hide his machinations with Senator Palpatine. Right. Do you remember who it was who requested the emergency powers, the emergency powers for Senator Palpatine in the third movie? It was Jar Jar Binks. Was it Jar Jar or was it a Gungan Senator? Yeah, he was a Gungan Senator. Yeah. Okay. All right. And then on the right here we’ve got Thomas the Tank Engine, a fun children’s series that features talking cars, trains, and other vehicles going on adventures. Well, how about a depiction of a pre-modern corporate totalitarian dystopia? Now frankly, out of these three theories, that one’s actually one of the strongest, I thought. You could just go ahead and Google Thomas the Tank Engine alternate interpretation and they’ll go through it. It’s like it works really well. So anyway, that’s that. Anything else to add, Riley? Yes, I do. So these are fun, interesting thought experiments, these prep culture examples, but the reality is the director, the person that made the movie, had something in mind. Right, a director’s intent. He had a particular thing that he wanted to portray. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And each of these movies. I think that actually pushes us right really nicely into our next slide. So we’re going to talk about postmodernism. Now don’t be freaked out by the word postmodernism. It’s not that scary of a word. It began in literature, right? Postmodernism began as a literary theory. And the idea behind postmodernism was two basic ideas. One, death of the author. The death of the author means is that once an author has produced any kind of a text, he no longer has any power over it, right? So a good example of this would be the Lord of the Rings. Now, a lot of people, when it came out, thought that J.R.R. Token was using the ring of power as a metaphor for nuclear weapons. Now, J.R.R. Token heard about this and he said, no, no, it’s just about power generally. It’s not specifically about nuclear weapons, although I can see since nuclear weapons are a form of power, why you would be tempted to think that. Now, in a classical, in a more classical theory of literature interpretation, that would be kind of the end of it. But in postmodernism, you say, no, death of the author. Once the author has produced that text, then he has no more power over it, right? And then secondly, the second principle of this is there’s nothing outside the text, right? So you have to interpret it yourself and you can’t take in almost anything from outside the text to interpret it, right? So that’s kind of the place we find ourselves in. And this has actually had a fair amount of impact on our culture, which is why it’s important to cover this. So we saw how with a tight two hour Hollywood movie, the meaning could be completely changed by having an alternate interpretation. So the basic point that we have to take from this is that what you bring yourself to any text is very important for how you’re going to interpret the text, right? And we’re using text very broadly here, so that could mean a movie or that could mean a TV show or a book or a pamphlet or just about anything. And I think as Catholics, we need to be very clear about this, that this is merely a human limitation and that God himself is the author of the text and he is outside the text, certainly the text of the Bible, but he’s also transcendent over the whole world. And so he has the ability to give a final interpretation of what he wanted to say in the Bible. Yeah, so, Deacon Eric, does that mean, for example, let’s say I’m going through a stressful time in my life, if I were to pick up the scriptures and go to a passage that talks about stress, and I feel like God is really speaking to me through this, could that be true? Could I be able to interpret the scriptures individually in that way? We’ll get there. Oh, great, great. We’ll get there. Just hold that thought. Maybe put it down on the Discord, but we’ll see if I can answer it properly. So, how do we deal with this? Oh, let’s take a very, very practical problem. We’re going to take a Bible passage here. We’ve got Matthew chapter 16. Simon Peter spoke up and said, not to say to anyone that he was the Christ. So, we’ve got a single, single short passage of scripture here, right? And we’ve got multiple interpretations. So, we look over, Catholics were saying Jesus is promising to papacy to St. Peter there. And traditional Catholic theology will say that John chapter 21 is when he actually becomes, when he actually receives that authority. So that’s Peter, do you love me, feed my sheep, we all remember that passage. Now, the Orthodox, those churches, Peter was the first among equals. That’s how they understand this passage. To be clear, sort of interrupt, Orthodox meaning Orthodox, Christians, Catholics, the religion, not Catholics that are in line with papacy. Right, right. So, there was schisms. There was a big schism back in 1081 AD between the Orthodox and the Catholics. So, not together. So, here, Orthodox meaning a different religion entirely. Yeah, usually capital letters will help you out with that. So, anyway, I think Peter was the first among equals and that he didn’t pass any additional power on to his successors. Protestants are about the same thing, except they don’t often believe in such a thing as holy orders. Now, some of them will have some kind of orders, but they don’t believe it’s a sacrament, so it’s kind of complicated. The new atheists, they’d say about this passage, who cares. Far left feminists would see in this passage an oppressive patriarchy. And modern biblical scholars, they have thousands upon thousands of contradictory opinions published in journals that nobody reads but themselves and poor seminarians. So, I don’t know, that might be a little mean right there, but that’s just how I think. Anyway, so we’ve got to figure out, as Catholics, what do we have up here that we use to read the Bible, right? To get the correct interpretation. How do we do that? And so the way we’re going to cover this is to look at people who the Catholic Church would say did not do this properly. People who distorted what Christ intended for the Church. So, we’re going to start off with Martin Luther. Martin Luther lived 1483 to 1546. Now, we want to give a little bit of historical context here. First off, it’s important to remember that the Pope used to wear two hats. The Pope used to wear two hats. He used to wear the hat of being the Pope and he also used to wear the hat of being a governor of a large section of Italy, right? Which means religion and politics were getting really, really mixed up at that time. So, there was very often not only potential religious animosity between the Pope and other people, but there was often political squabbles, right? So, France and the Pope could be squabbling over some political issues. So, that kind of sets the scene. Lots of people were getting kind of tired of Rome trying to compete against their interests. Now, we go to the universities, we’ve got this thing called decadent scholasticism. That’s really…so, scholasticism was a project that was founded in the Middle Ages as a kind of a school of thought and how to do theology. Now, the University of Paris, which was the first major university, was founded in 1150 AD. That was 350 years about before Martin Luther was born. So, if you can imagine how long ago 1670 was, it was quite a while ago. If you think of that almost as ancient history, well, that’s how long we had between the founding of the University of Paris and Martin Luther himself. Now, the reason why that’s important to understand is they had their systems that they set up back in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, right? These were very useful at the time. Well, one of my favorite theologians, Thomas Aquinas, he wrote in the 12th century, 13th century, 13th century. He wrote in the 13th century. He’s got excellent things. But things had kind of stagnated at that point, right? And theology had become less about Scripture and reflecting on Scripture and organizing how we think about Scripture and more about how to put together the most complicated logical puzzles and the most complicated syllogisms we could. And so logic had just this insane amount. Like if you read theological texts from that period, they’re just awful because of how crazy their logic is supposed to be. And it makes your head hurt reading it. Moreover, there were large university faculties at this time, right? And so anytime that anything gets too big, especially university faculties, you’re going to get one thing that’s going to creep in there, mediocrity, right? So everybody’s trying to make a name for themselves. And not everybody is really in a position to revolutionize theology, but everybody needs to make a name for themselves. So they need to find a way to get their name out there. What a lot of theologians at this time did was they overused allegory, right? An allegorical reading of the sacred scriptures, which is a perfectly legitimate thing. But you could see how if somebody was a little overenthusiastic with it, that it could go wrong. And then finally, moral theology at this time was based entirely upon the notion of obligation, right? So moral theology, what’s that? Moral theology is how we understand what God wants us, how God wants us to live as Christians, right? So the theology of morals. In order, at that time, the theology of morals was all, you’re ordered to do this, you’re commanded to that, you have an obligation to do this. That was almost the entirety of the way people talked about it. And they lost sight of things like the fact that we’re called to heaven. That’s a part of moral theology, right? That’s the final goal is to make it to heaven. And they lost sight of that and they had put all these different human happiness. That’s the whole point of going to heaven. That was no longer discussed. It was just all law, law, law, law, law. And so that’s, I think, helps you understand the man, Mark Luther, and his motives for doing what he did. Anything to add, Ross? Yep. I just wanted to summarize that. The point of this is this was a time in church history when we were shifting from one major type of interpreting scriptures to another. And Martin Luther, he didn’t like the way we were changing it, the way the Catholic Church was starting the direction they were starting to move. Some of his arguments, some of Martin Luther’s arguments made sense, but this was a reaction to that. He says we’re getting away from God in the scriptures and talking more and more about man’s, what he thought to be additions to the scriptures. That man was adding things to the Bible in their interpretation aside from what God wanted. Which would be something to actually get mad about, right? Right, right. That’s what was happening. Why wouldn’t you get fired up about that? I’d get fired up about that. But it was a change in the way we were going about things that he didn’t like. I keep forgetting, Riley, that you did some studying of Martin Luther while you were in seminary. I wrote a paper on him, just him as a person, a little bit about his theology. But I thought it was interesting. Yeah, he’s definitely an interesting character. When I was researching this, I had new things I could respect about him. We’ll get to that a little bit later. Just to kind of sum up the whole thing, multiple things can be true at once. The Church can be in need of reform, and Martin Luther could have gone about it the wrong way. That’s kind of the Catholic Church’s take on him. They could certainly recognize the things that they were doing that wasn’t going well. Yeah, some mistakes were certainly made. Yes, yes. Let’s talk about Martin Luther, his life. He was in law school, and then during a lightning storm, while he was outside riding on a horse, he made a vow to become an Augustinian friar. I’ve never met an Augustinian friar. I don’t know if there are very many of them around. This is what he says. They still exist. I’ve never met one, so maybe they’re all over in Europe. Yeah, I think they’re more European than they’re American. Anyway. As a friar, he did strict penances, and was frequently in the confessional. That’s pretty well established. In fact, you can see how the way moral theology was talked about at that time could play into that. You have all these different obligations, obligations, obligations, and how that could really mess with a guy if they didn’t have a firm sense of Christ’s love for them first, before they went about trying to fulfill these obligations. We’ve got a really potent quote here. Martin Luther, looking back at his time, I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul. It’s very interesting, very interesting how he had internalized what was going on at the church at that time. From 1510 to 1520, he was lecturing on the Bible, and at that time he became convinced that the church had distorted the teachings of Christ in St. Paul. He had some kind of a tower experience when he interpreted a certain passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans to mean that there’s justification by faith alone. There are no works that you do to contribute to your own justification in the sight of God. It’s sola fide, only faith. That was a pivotal moment for him. This is an example of what we were talking about with the movies a little bit ago, of Martin Luther saying, this is what God meant by this, and rejecting everything, years, 1500 years of tradition, and saying, I finally got it right, right now. Right, right. That’s why we spend so much time on interpretation. So anyway, 1519, that’s when things really started moving. So anyway, but before we talk about much else, we’re going to talk about steelmanning Martin Luther. So you know what it means to set up a straw man, right? Well, we’re going to set up a steel man. We’re not going to take Martin Luther at his weakest. We’re going to take Martin Luther at his strongest. So Luther teaches that Christ is at the center of scriptures, and Christ is the way to understand the scriptures. What does the church teach? The phrase heart of Christ can refer to sacred scripture, which make known his heart, closed before the passion, as the scripture was obscured. But the scripture has been opened since the passion, since those who from then on have understood it, consider it and discern in it what the in what way that prophecies must be interpreted. So we as Catholics, we also have a Christo centric and Christological reading of the Bible. He put a lot of stress on the literal sense of scripture. So what do the words actually mean? What is the author trying to say here? Right. Well, guess what? The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of scripture and discovered by exegesis. So we can always the process of discovering the meaning of a text following the rules of sound interpretation. All of his senses of scripture are based on the literal. So we also have a primacy of the literal sense. Can you can you explain a little bit more about what that literal sense and what was the other one you said? We got spiritual senses, too. It’s spiritual. Could you just give a two sentence definition? Right. So God can put more meaning into scripture than the original human authors meant when they wrote it down. And by the power of the Holy Spirit and within the context of the church, we can discover what those deeper meanings that God had hidden in the scriptures. We can discover those hidden meanings. And so those are called the spiritual senses. So the literal senses would be understanding exactly what these texts mean. So so I’ll give you an example. You can go back to the Book of Exodus and it says, So Israel went out from Egypt. Right. And so the literal sense of that would mean. Just the people of Israel came out of Egypt. It’s that simple. If you want to get a spiritual sense of that, you could say, well, allegorically, that’s about Christ coming out of Egypt as an infant. You know, remember how they had to flee to Egypt? Well, he came back from Egypt. You can say morally, it’s about the deliverance of a Christian from the power of sin. Right. So you’re taken out of sinful Egypt and brought into the new Israel. You can say, anagogically, that it’s about leaving this sinful earth behind and inheriting the new heavens and the new earth. So those are the three kinds of spiritual interpretations that you can have in the Old Testament. You could have the moral, how we should act, the allegorical prophecies about Christ and the anagogical things to expect in the life to come. You think that’s enough? Can the church ever say we’ve exhausted everything we can know about this particular passage? No. No, there’s always new depths. We’ll get there when we get to the good guys, but we’re still with the bad guys. OK. Yeah. All right. So moving on. One other thing I wanted to define that you were talking about, Deacon Eric, we talked about Luther having Christological and Christocentric views of Scripture. What all that means is that and he was right in this point that all the entirety of the Scriptures, Old Testament and New Testament, all point towards Jesus. They’re centered in Christ, Christocentric. Right. Right. So anyway, Luther teaching that interpreting the New Testament in light of the Old and the Old Testament in light of the New. And as we have in our own catechism, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New. So there’s another point in contact between us and Martin Luther. If God does not open and explain Holy Writ, that’s just an old English way of talking about the Bible, none else can understand it. It will remain a closed book enveloped in darkness. Well, our own catechism says, but since sacred scripture is inspired, there is another and no less important principle of correct interpretation without which scripture would remain a dead letter. Sacred scripture must be read and interpreted in light of the same spirit by whom it was written. So the church depends on the power of the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible correctly. And that’s exactly what Martin Luther said. So is he actually Catholic? No, he’s not Catholic. So I’m just going to kind of lay out here how Martin Luther interpreted the scriptures. So that first bullet point, he holds to the perpiscuity of scripture. Perpiscuity is just a really big fancy academic word, meaning being completely clear and easy to understand. He’s convinced of its basic clarity. He assumes that each passage of God’s word possesses one clear, definite and true sense of its own. Right? So that’s very interesting. We got a quote from here. There’s not on earth a book more lucidly written than the Holy Scripture compared with all other books. It is as the sun compared with all other light. Then Luther distinguishes between the intelligibility of the contents of scripture and the clarity of the words through which this revealed content is communicated. So he obviously had to account for the fact that some passages of scripture are kind of difficult. So how did he do that? He accounted for that by saying that the words used could be more or less clear. Now, there is a true method of interpretation which puts scripture alongside scripture in a bright and proper way. So if you’ve got a more clear passage and a less clear passage, you use the more clear passages to interpret the less clear passages. So a doubtful and obscure passage must be explained by a clear and certain passage. Alright, so. And then finally, everything is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit. So this is from Luther’s small catechism. The Holy Spirit calls, gathers and enlightens and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ into one true faith. So this is maybe a point you could help enlighten me on, Deacon Riley, of how the Holy Spirit operates in Lutheran’s understanding of the church. Yeah, I mean, at first glance this looks pretty Catholic, right? I mean, I think it’s interesting to read this and say that the Holy Spirit enlightens people to come to a correct interpretation of a certain passage or a certain Bible story based on what other people in the past have thought. It sounds like a Catholic argument for tradition, right? Yeah, yeah. So this is where Luther veers off is that each individual, he thinks that each individual has the capacity to interpret something correctly, but we never know if it is, if we have done it correctly or not. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So it’s like, you could have the perfect interpretations of Galatians 1.25 and not know it. Right. So he’s saying people have the capacity to understand it, but we don’t know if we’re right. Catholics say we have the capacity to understand a correct interpretation, and we know that it’s right because the church affirms it. Yeah, yeah. Luther didn’t have that last piece. And it seems to me like just about every Protestant denomination would have to follow in the same suit. Right, because if there’s no, I mean we’re kind of veering off here to talk about papal primacy and church authority, but if you don’t have a central authority to say yes that’s right or yes that’s wrong, if God hasn’t given that gift to an institution like the Catholic Church, it makes sense. There’s no way of knowing if we’re right or not. Yeah, yeah. And we can just give our best guesses, but that’s not the way Jesus wants his word to be understood. Right, right. And so anyway, thanks for that. That’s really helpful I think. Martin Luther considered the Gospel of John, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 Peter and 1 John to be what he considered apostolic texts. And so his definition for an apostolic text was any text that preached Christ clearly. And so anywhere in the New Testament, you could find more apostolic texts and less apostolic texts. So a non-apostolic text would just preach Christ only indirectly. And so that was how his principle of interpreting Scripture worked. And so I have a quote from him here. He says, referring to all these books, these are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salvatory for you to know, even if you were to never see or hear any other book or doctrine. Therefore, St. James’s letter is really an epistle of straw compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it. So I know I’ve heard that epistle of straw thing thrown around more than once, but that’s the context of it. He’s not saying it’s simply an epistle of straw, but compared to the other parts of the New Testament, it’s an epistle of straw. So I think that’s actually a pretty helpful context to understand what he actually meant when he said that. Yeah, Luther, well, he did have a great reverence for Scripture as being God’s Word, as something to be admired. He sometimes looked at it and studied it as though you or I would study the Iliad of the Odyssey as a piece of ancient text written by fallen humans and not each word, each passage having being the Word of God. He did believe that, but it didn’t have the weight that we see it as Catholics. Does that make sense? I think so. I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t actually objectively make sense, and that’s why it might be hard to understand. Anyway, and then finally he talks about the Word of God is and should remain the sole rule and norm of all doctrine. So that’s rejecting sacred tradition, and we’re going to cover sacred tradition hopefully tonight. Wow, time’s flying. So let’s get a move on. We’re going to talk about John Calvin, too. He’s roughly contemporary with Luther, a fair bit younger, the two major figures from that time. Now Luther was kind of a shoot from the hip kind of guy, and John Calvin was more systematic and organizational thinker. And so I just found, oh, I didn’t put the citation in here. I got these all from a website. I forgot to put the citation here, so I’m not trying to plagiarize. But this one website, Calvinist website, had these principles. All scripture is clear. He has that in line with Luther. And then scripture should be interpreted according to these. The intention of the author, its historical context, the original grammar, the literary context, that there could be command, can be meanings behind his original words. And so what did Calvin say about that? The commandments and prohibitions always contain more than it is expressed in words. So Luther, Calvin’s theory was that if God gave a commandment, it’s not just the command that we have to follow, but the reason why God gave the commandment. So thou shalt not kill doesn’t mean just don’t kill. It also means that murder is wrong. And that’s the intention behind the law. And then we’ve also got figures of speech. So scripture ever talks about his hands. It doesn’t literally mean that God has, you know, God has hands like that. His hands is just a metaphor or a figure of speech. So as you can see, the broad outlines of things, John Calvin is very similar to Luther. And so we don’t have to spend all that much time on him, I don’t think, unless you’ve got something to add, Reverend Mr. Durgan. You’re breaking up a little bit towards the end. But I mean, it sounds as though Calvin agreed that not everything should be taken literally. Is that what you’re saying? Right, right. So there could be figures of speech and some hidden meanings in the scripture, especially in the commandments and prohibitions. Like when Jesus says that if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out, that wasn’t a command. That wasn’t to rip your eye out. Yeah, OK, OK. It was a figure of speech, just the way we would read it now. Right, right. Yeah, so Calvin allowed for that. So, you know, these were smart dudes. And I guess in my view of things, God could have actually set things up like that. Like if there wasn’t going to, you know, I obviously hold to the Catholic system of things, but if the Catholic system wasn’t going to be it, like that could work. So that’s about as nice as I can be to him. It’s also, you know, I found this Lutheran apologetics website and they pointed out a lot of ways in which Catholics often don’t talk about Luther correctly. So Luther is super easy to take out of context. He was a bombastic, larger than life figure, was prone to use extreme exaggerations. So you can remember things, you know, sin boldly, a pistol of straw, the idea that he added the word alone into the letter to the Romans. You know, those… He was using the deuterocanonical text. Well, he didn’t. He didn’t do that. Exactly. Right, that’s what I’m saying, but that’s a misunderstanding. Right, right. He kept those seven books of the Bible, which Catholics have and most Protestant churches don’t. He kept that in. So anyway, I just did a little… You just don’t necessarily believe the easiest thing to believe about Luther. He was a complicated figure and a lot of what he says in context doesn’t sound quite as bad as it does out of context. But at the end of the day, it still doesn’t stand up. So I think ultimately the problem with Luther and Calvin is that there’s a problem of authority in there. So first off, if the Scriptures are the sole rule of faith for the Church, then how do you set a canon? Right, so the canon, that’s the list of books that are in the Bible. That’s the canon of Scripture. So how do you set that canon? Because there isn’t anywhere in the Old or New Testament that tells you these are the Bible. Second off, if you’ve got a disagreement about interpretation of Scripture, there’s really no way to go. So if you read the Gospel of St. John, Jesus prays to the Father during the Last Supper, I pray that they may be one as we are one. Right? Holy Father, keep those you have given to me true to your name, so that they may be one like we are one, like us. So if we’re really supposed to be united as a Church, there should be some way to ensure that unity is visible and made manifest. And the first thing that people end up disagreeing on is usually the interpretation of Scripture. And if I say I’m inspired by the Holy Spirit and Deacon Riley says he’s inspired by the Holy Spirit, who do we have to appeal to? And then I think probably just the biggest thing is that it doesn’t seem to have worked, this whole Protestant experiment. We have at least two Lutheran churches in America. We’ve got the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Missouri Synod Lutherans. I don’t know how long ago they split or what they split over. Neither do I. And one of the things Luther did say towards the end of his life as well is, well, he said in an effort to destroy one pope, he created many. He did say that? Yeah. Okay. I was not aware of that. I couldn’t give you a primary text. Well, it’s on your head then if it’s wrong. Please, yes, if I’m wrong, someone tell me. So ultimately, I think those are just your two biggest arguments against what the Reformers were doing. Were unable to establish an authority for interpreting the Scripture and fragmented into thousands of different Protestant denominations. And so this vacuum of authority led to the popularization of critical biblical scholarship. Now, especially beginning, especially in the 1700s, people were getting tired of all the different fights. Right. So there were there’s a period of time about 75 years after after the Protestant revolt, when they had the wars of religion, as they’re called. Some of those wars were partially political, but some of them were purely religious. And, you know, just so much fighting, so much fighting. So the big one, the big one that people remember is the Thirty Years War. And that had about, I think, 14 million casualties over 30 years. That’s pretty awful. People were tired of all this fighting. And so they’re like, okay, we’re doing all this fighting. What can we unite on? Now, at the same time in philosophy, we enter into the modern period. And the modern period was when reason became to be really, really, really a big deal. Everybody was all about reason, all about reason. So critical biblical scholarship became a place where people would go to have an authority that they could trust, because the authority of reason was trusted deeply at that time during the Enlightenment period. You know, the modern, the modern period. We should we should just make the clarification, the authority of reason by itself. Yes, yes. Yeah, having no other, exactly what Luther was saying, having no other appeal besides what I can come up with in my own mind. Yeah. And if enough people agree on that, whether they’re scholars or not, that must be the true one. Again, looking at the Bible like you would study any ancient text, such as the Iliad of the Odyssey. Right, right. So anyway, when we use the word criticism, that just means careful analysis. So it’s not like you hear biblical criticism. It’s like somebody pointing at the Bible and saying, why don’t you do a better job? It just means critical analysis. So we’ve got these different, different ways of analyzing the text. We’ve got textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, tradition criticism, and redaction criticism. And with their powers combined, they make up the historical critical method of reading the Bible. So we’re going to go through these in detail. Textual criticism is focused on getting the best version of the biblical text. So what you have to remember is that the autographs of scripture were inspired, but the copies were not. You may be asking, what’s an autograph of scripture? Well, all that word means in this context is what the inspired author himself was writing. So those were inspired. The copies are not. And so therefore the copies are not necessarily free from error. So there are no surviving autographs. We don’t have any of the original scriptures. We only have the copies. So handwritten copies, you know, they didn’t have Xerox machines back then. Could have numerous differences, errors, additions, and missing pieces. And so textual criticism was aimed at trying to get together the best version of scripture we can, closest to the original. And we’re actually pretty daggone good at it. Now, that being said, there is goodness to this. There’s goodness to all of them, such as when we’re studying the scriptures, we can do things like look at the original language and see a certain meaning that we wouldn’t have been able to understand otherwise. No, God doesn’t want us to turn our brains off when we open up the Bible. And so that’s what makes kind of this critical scholarship so difficult to deal with is the fact that, okay, well, how much can we know by reason? And how much should we leave to faith? So we’re going to be getting there. So textual criticism, trying to get the best version of the biblical text, generally uncontroversial. It does not cause people a whole lot of problems. We get to source criticism. Well, this is a huge deal. This might be the last topic we actually get to today. The question source criticism is asking is who wrote this part of the Bible? So did Moses write the Pentateuch or not? Was there one Isaiah? Were there three? Was there a school of people named the prophet Isaiah? Who wrote the Gospel of John? When did he write it? And this was really became a big deal in 1844. Well, little after that, a fellow by the name of Julius Wellhausen, a German scholar, came up with the most popular form of the documentary hypothesis. And so he didn’t believe that Moses was actually a historical figure or that Israel ever lived in Egypt, that the Pentateuch was compiled. So the Pentateuch, that’s the first five books of the Bible at Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, was compiled after the Babylonian exile around 400 BC or so from four different documents, the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the priestly documents. And so that was our friend Jadep, who actually wrote the five books of the Bible. And he was using this to explain some of the odd things that modern readers find in the first five books of the Bible. Variations in language and style. So the Yahwist will always use Yahweh, the title Yahweh for God. But when you get to the Elohist, the supposed document, it always uses the term Elohim for God. And they both kind of translate to mean the same thing, but they’re different languages. Duplications and repetitions. So there’s multiple codes of law throughout the first five books of the Bible. And they’ll say that one of them was a Deuteronomist and another one was a priestly and another one was an Elohist. And then different theological perspectives. So the Yahwist is apparently a very anthropomorphic depiction of God. It talks about like in Genesis, God walking through the garden and calling out to Adam and Eve, whereas the Elohists were referring to sort of a distant God, right? And so these were the dominant theories in the late 19th and 20th centuries up to about the 1980s. But again, we’re talking biblical scholarship here. So everybody was trying to come up with their own flavor of the documentary hypothesis ice cream. And so some people would say it was earlier. Some people would say it was later. Some people would say that there were just traditions. Other people would say they had actual documents that he was writing off of. So it’s all very complicated. But the thing to remember too is that these are theories. Theories in the sense that it’s a bunch of smart people, smarter than Deacon Eric or I, that are saying this could have been an option. It could have also been that Moses wrote down the whole thing. The church leaves us free to believe either one. Because at the end of the day, what’s the Bible for? It’s for our salvation, it’s for our spiritual good. It’s God speaking to us. And who wrote it, who put pen to paper, doesn’t really matter in that respect. Right, right. So thank you for that. That was good. We’re going to talk about the next two, the next three things. They’re a little less complicated. So we’ve got form criticism. So that’s basically genre. So trying to figure out what genre is this unit of scripture. If you ever hear somebody say pericope, that’s just like a basic unit of scripture. You know, one story, one passage. A Bible story. Yeah, a Bible story, right. And then the life setting or the Sitz ein Leben. So there’s lots of Germans working in this field. So form criticism. Some dude named Herman Gunkel came up with it. And he wrote a book on the Psalms. So you’ll notice that different Psalms come from different eras. It’s actually a collection of different things. It’s not like King David wrote the entire book of the Psalms. So it’s a rather uncontroversial thing. You know, different genres of stories. You want to make sure if it’s a list of names, you don’t try and read it like a law code. However, a lot of the Bible can’t have its life setting quite so easily placed. So this led to kind of the development of tradition criticism and redaction criticism. So tradition criticism is attempts to reconstruct a hypothetical oral tradition behind the written version of the text. Right, behind the written version of the Bible. So this tradition criticism would try and say this was kind of what the original story was like and this is how it got written down. And then redaction criticism attempts to reconstruct the reason and timing for an editor writing the book of the Bible the way he did. So some guy named Martin Knoth argued that everything from Joshua to the book of Second Kings was written and edited by a single scribe in the seventh or sixth century B.C. to advance Deuteranistamic theological ideas. So theology that’s prominent in the book of Deuteronomy. And so taken together, these disciplines are called the historical critical method of reading the Bible. So we’re going to talk about important, important and necessary for understanding the Bible like you would understand any any text. But for for the sake of you or I or the people in the pew, it’s it’s important to understand all of it isn’t necessary for you going to heaven. Right, right. And so it’s important to know that this exists. Right. So when we look at the historical critical method, it’s just regular old Catholics in the pew. What I’m going to say is that it’s impossible to ignore the historical critical method. First off, we’re now a lot more scientifically minded than, say, St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Jerome, which is live in a different era. And we kind of think of things differently. So we are more scientifically minded. What that means basically is that we don’t see God under every rock. And in certain generations, that’s kind of how people worked. We tend to look around the world and we see matter and energy. That’s really good for science, but you got to start finding room for God in your vision because it’s just not enough to run the human soul, just see matter and energy everywhere. You need something divine, something transcendent to uplift you. So anyway, historical critical method has valuable things to offer. Sometimes I’ll use historical critical ideas in my preaching. I’m a lot more likely to use more traditional exegesis like St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, but sometimes the historical critical method can get valuable insights. And the church itself, in a 1992 document released by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, said that you can’t just ignore this, so we can’t ignore it. But one thing I think is really important to remember is that the historical critical method is an atheistic approach to scripture. So what do I mean by that? The method of the historical critical method does not assume that God exists. It just assumes the text as we have it is the way to go. So we look at, say, the book of the prophet Isaiah. Traditional exegesis would say, yep, there was one Isaiah, and he wrote the entire book before the exile. The historical critical method looks and sees that it talks about King Cyrus in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Somewhere, it’s in the chapter 40s somewhere, I don’t have the exact citation before me. It talks about King Cyrus, who is going to send the people of Israel home from Babylon back to Israel. And historical critical scholars will look at that and say, well, it has to be the case that somebody else wrote that part because they didn’t know about the prophet Isaiah yet. And I look at that and I say, no, like, why couldn’t God have told Isaiah about some guy named King Cyrus who was going to deliver the people of Israel from Babylon? That’s perfectly reasonable if you have a theological view of scripture. And so that’s just where you have to be careful with the historical critical method is in the very way you do it, it doesn’t have any any God included. So like, yeah, it’s something to say, Deacon. No, no, I’m just agreeing with you. This is this is it’s good. It’s necessary for academics to better understand the times to better understand the scriptures in a literary literary sense. But it’s it’s not the most important part of the Bible, but any stretch of the imagination. Right. All right. So there has been a movement against overdoing the historical critical method in in Bible scholarship. So, see, did I get my slides out of order? Nope, nope. Slides are perfectly in order. There’s a movement called Canonical Interpretation, which is aimed at getting the meaning of the text and not worrying about how we got to the text. That’s been a big move since the 80s. That’s what I think a lot of what our professors in seminary did, Bishop Betancourt and Father Carl, with how they taught scripture. So, you know, it’s not all doom and gloom everywhere. And Moses didn’t exist. And the Bible was written, you know, the year eighty three hundred or whatever. Anyway, so anyway, I think just to close up here, we’re going to talk about the new atheists. So this is just kind of a vaguely organized movement of Internet atheists. Your most popular people are going to be Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. And I’m most familiar with the work of Sam Harris, who we have there on the right side of the screen. So he’s a neuroscientist and a philosopher of sorts. And his view of religion is that it’s a type of science. So what do I mean by that? Well, he looks at Genesis, Chapter one and looks at the way Genesis, Chapter one explains the world. And he, you know, the basic worldview, scientific worldview at that time was that the earth was flat and that there was a dome covering the earth. There was water underneath the earth. That’s where the oceans came from. And then there was water over above the dome. And that sometimes fell down as rain. Right. And so he looks at that as ancient people trying to understand their world in a scientific way. They’re just really bad at it because they don’t have the scientific method. He literally saw Jordan Peterson. So I’m not the god of the gaps is the term that he would use. A god that exists because we don’t understand what’s going on around us. We say God must have done it. That’s the term the Peresides or a lot of new atheists. Yeah, yeah, the god of the gaps. Thank you. That’s I hadn’t thought to say that. And so he would look at certain type of Christian moralities, love of neighbor, those being very good. He looks at Christian metaphysics. So, you know, God, God creating the universe, God sustaining the universe. God’s going to come again and wreck the universe up. He looks at that as being all bad. So he would like to keep the morals, but he’s that the metaphysics are bad. So anyway, he’s a deterministic materialist, which means he doesn’t believe in a soul. Right. Because in order to have soul, you need to have something other than matter. And he believes that only matter exists. So deterministic. So everything is always going to play out like a clock ticking. So every everything you see can be traced back to a prior physical cause. It could be traced back to a prior physical cause all the way back to the Big Bang. So this actually, you know, completely destroys Western civilization because we assume that people have a soul and a free will in Western civilization. That’s why we punish people for crimes. You know, why do you why did you get sent to prison? Well, I was drunk driving, you know. So but people should still love each other. Right. The universal benevolence, it’s kind of a utilitarian idea. That’s kind of his take on things. And so my my thought is, is that he’s got far too restrictive view of knowledge that everything that’s knowledge for Harris is whatever can be tested empirically, whatever can be tested scientifically, whatever can be seen and touched. And there’s all sorts of things that can’t be empirically tested, you know, like the justice versus an injustice of any given ruling on a case. You can’t run an experiment to determine that. You can’t empirically verify the scientific method. It’s impossible to empirically verify that because you’d using be using the scientific method to verify the scientific method. And that’s called circular reasoning. And you can’t empirically verify a mother’s love. It’s just not how it works. You know, you can’t run an experiment. I think that’s the big one there to understand that there’s there’s something more than just what we can touch and look at under a microscope is you can’t you can’t measure love. We all know that it’s there. We all know that it exists. But it’s not something that. That. Harris would be able to explain by looking at synapses in brain chemistry, for example. Right. And he creates a very empty universe, a very depressing universe where life is just an exchange of electrons. Say that is the survival mechanism. Love is a survival mechanism. Yeah. Because if a mother doesn’t bond with her infant, then the infant dies. So genetically, over centuries, mothers that love their infants were selected more than mothers who didn’t. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just it’s not love. It’s just the survival of the human population. Super romantic. Yeah, right. It’s like, you know, go up to your wife tonight and say, I’m having an intense physical reaction towards you so much. So much. I have such intense chemical reactions for you. So anyway, I think that’s about all we’re going to get to tonight. So let’s see if we’ve collected any questions. You spoke a little bit about the spiritual sense of scripture, which was a question. And then do you want to talk a little bit about original languages? Original languages? Sure. That’s pretty easy. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. I’ve never learned how to read Hebrew. Yeah, I don’t know it either. Now, there were parts of the Bible, of the Old Testament, that were written in Greek. So if you look at the wisdom of Solomon, that was in the Greek canon of things. I believe the Book of Tobit was maybe we only have the Greek of that. So some of them they think might have had a Hebrew original that’s been lost, and others might have been composed in Greek. So that’s the Old Testament. There’s a very famous Old Testament translation into Greek. That’s called the Septuagint. So that’s a very big, important document because it shows how the Jewish people in the third century B.C. were approaching the Hebrew text by the way they translated it. So it’s very valuable to actually look at that because we have both the Maseratic text, that’s the Hebrew text, and we have the Septuagint. And both of those combined, you can give you a real clear idea of the way they were translating this or that word, as the way that they were interpreting this or that word at that time. And then the New Testament was written entirely in Greek. I think there was an ancient tradition that Matthew originally wrote his gospel in Aramaic, but we haven’t proven that. It’s not a church teaching, so you’re not necessarily bound to believe that. Any more on languages you think people need to know, TK? Just that we don’t, as you said before, we don’t have any of the original copies of languages. What we do know, I think we have the biggest copy in the Greek is the earliest. Is that true? Right, right. So… But we were able to tell certain other languages the books were written in because of the Greek that’s used. Go over that again, please. I said, well, the earliest text we have of most of the scriptures is in Greek. Is in the Greek, right, because that was a very widespread translation. Right, but we can tell that there’s books that are written in other languages, such as Hebrew, and maybe portions in Aramaic because of certain Greek words and terms of phrases that are used. Well, I haven’t heard Aramaic, but I think that’s the only way we can tell. Well, I haven’t heard Aramaic, but there’s a lot I don’t know about the Bible. I know it’s cool. But we don’t have any copies. Right, obviously we don’t have any copies. Yeah, yeah. And really, it doesn’t matter what language it’s written in because primary author is the Holy Spirit. Right. So, you know, it’s okay to use a translation. We’re all using translations. Okay, so if I’m sitting and reading the scripture, trying to understand, going through a difficult portion of my life, how should I go about interpreting God speaking to me through the words of the Bible? Right, so some people would call that private interpretation. I would say that you could also use the word application. So, you know, I’ve got this going on in my life and I’m going through a hard time. Maybe you can go through a good time, right? You’re just praying with scripture. But like, wow, this passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah is really speaking to me right now. So I’ll give an example from my own life. When I was in my first year of fourth college, right, so my fourth year of seminary, first semester, first semester, that’s what I meant to say, first semester of fourth college, I was praying with Isaiah chapter 35 where it talks about the renewal of Israel. There will be springs bubbling forth in the desert and where there was a desert, there will be a garden. It’s just kind of a scene of restoration and of hope. And I was praying about that and I was first thinking about the church and how, you know, we’re losing so many members and people don’t believe in the faith like they used to. And we’re having a priest shortage and we’re having all these scandals going around all over the place and how we needed the Holy Spirit to do the same thing with the church. And I was just pretty straightforwardly just applying kind of that feeling that the ancient Jews would have had during the exile to our own situation here. And it was like, yeah, it was all flowing perfectly well in my prayer. And then a little voice just popped in my head and said, and you’re going to be a part of that as a priest. I was like, whoa, thank you, God. And after that, yeah, well, you waited till my fourth year of seminary to get me sealed in there, but it all worked out. This time it was perfect. So what am I trying to say? What am I trying to say? So yeah, you could call that a private interpretation of scripture if you wanted to. You could certainly do that. I would generally call it an application of scripture. So an application of the Bible to this portion of my life. And as long as you’re within the boundaries of church teaching, that you’re kind of encompassed in that. So you’re not saying, you know, God’s calling me to go murder people. That’s a kind of over the top example. And, you know, as long as you’re within that, you’re free to do that as much as you want. You’re free to apply the scripture. That’s what a lot of preaching is actually, is applying the scripture to what’s happening in our lives today. Yeah. So if I’m stressed out and I’m reading through this, praying through the Psalms, and it says that I can’t remember what a Psalm is, God is my sure foundation, and I feel a lot of comfort in that, does that mean I need to start Googling and looking at my catechism to see if that’s a legitimate interpretation? No. They won’t kind of know there. But if I’m reading through it and I find a passage and I think, oh, I think God is telling me that hell doesn’t exist. Yeah. Or God’s telling me to go destroy my enemies. Because you could get that out of the hole still. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good example. Because there’s a boy crack open. I think it’s Psalm 112. That’s a that’s a maledictory song. It’s like, would not want to be on the receiving end of that. I think it’s Psalm 112. Look at that. I have a Bible right here. Psalm 112. Yeah. Fun fact, they cut this one out of the brevery. Out of the portions of it. No, they cut the entire thing. What’s the technical word for that portions that we don’t pray in our brevery? Maledictory Psalms. That’s what it is. The cursing Psalms. Yeah. Oh, it’s Psalm 109. Do not be silent, O God, of my praise, for wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues. They beset me with words of hate and attack me without cause. May his days be few. May another seize his position. May his children be orphans and his wife a widow. May his children wander about and beg. May they be driven out of the ruins they inhabit. May the creditor seize all that he has and strangers plunder the fruits of his toil. And on and on and on like that. So yeah, that’s where you have a spiritual interpretation of the Bible. So it’s a spiritual senses, moral senses. You direct that on a spiritual level. You don’t go and kill this man and make his wives, widow, make his wife a widow and his children orphans and force them out to beg in the streets and yada yada, so on and so on. Yeah. The way I like to read, I mean, we’ll keep using Psalms as an example, the Maledictory Psalms, the cursing Psalms, is that what I like about the Psalms is, is it displays the entire range of human emotions. Yeah. Yeah. It’s written by, traditionally, most of it is written by David, King David, one guy who went through all sorts of good and bad in his life and being able to understand that it’s okay to have these feelings. But many times throughout the Old Testament and New, God condemns cursing, God condemns wishing evil on another. And I mean, David had to pay for a lot of it, for a lot of the sins of his life. He had to earn his wisdom. Anyway, my point is, the Psalms are great to say, I’m having this emotion, I’m feeling this way. David did too. God still loved David, made him a king and made him a hero of Israel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, boy, I don’t know who said it, but it’s really good to say, the Psalms are God teaching us how to pray, right? God giving us the words to pray to him. We’re stepping into the prayer life of another man, of King David. Yeah. Yeah. And say, this is what he was saying to God. And it’s okay for me to yell at God as well sometimes. My one companion is darkness. Exactly. One like that. What is that, 89, 88? 88. The psalm of a sick man who’s just, he’s been abandoned by all of his friends and he’s laying in his bed, dying, and then says, with his last breath, my one companion is darkness. Everybody else left. And sometimes it feels that way. And that’s okay. These are emotions in the spiritual life that David had and that we have. Just a reminder that any psalm written by David will have his name on it. So it’ll say, a psalm of David right at the beginning. Yeah. So I’m saying the psalm’s written by David for simplicity’s sake. It’s not always the case, but… Yeah. Because some of them are clearly not David, and that’s been understood since the beginning. But the point is we’re stepping into the prayer life of another human being. Yeah. Yeah. Whether or not we have a name to them. 89, my one companion is darkness. I don’t think that was a Davidic song. No. Okay. Well, let’s… There’s a lot of questions on if this is going to be able to be watched later if you’re recording this. Yeah, I’m recording it. I’m going to pop it up on YouTube and leave it on the same kind of block. Yeah. So same place on the website. Same place on the website. That’s what I meant by block. Oh. Okay. But you won’t be able to ask questions at that point. No, but feel free to ask Deacon Eric questions at any point. He’s always happy to answer them. And from what I understand, both him and Father Filler are a lot less busy lately. You don’t say, huh? You don’t say. Like the rest of the world. Well, good. I mean, that’s all the questions from the Discord here. Okay. Well, we are planning to do this next Wednesday. You can do it from the comfort and safety of your own home. If you think of a question or a particular passage of the Bible that you want to have me explain, you can find me. I’m in Langdon. You can call the parish. Yeah. So I can actually start off by answering your question next session. There would be no reason why I couldn’t do that. Yeah. If somebody has a question as they’re reading the scripture and says, I wonder if the church has a particular interpretation for this particular passage, is there a resource? Is there somewhere they could go? Oh, boy, you know, I could find. There’s not one. There’s not like a catechism for this. There’s not a single source. There’s no catechism on every single source of the Bible. And there’s a lot of academic texts. A lot of academic texts. The only thing that’s coming to mind that might be free would be some of the old glosses on scripture. So what a gloss is, is somebody would be copying out the Bible and then after every verse, they give an interpretation of the verse. These were produced since ancient times. And I know Thomas Quinas, when he was writing the Summa in the 13th century, he would frequently reference this gloss or that gloss, some of the more popular ones. And there’s a decent chance some of those would be free on the Internet if you need that level of detail. Otherwise, unless you’ve got a theological library, Andy, you could look at like the ancient Christian commentaries. That’s a commentary, a particular academic commentary of the Bible. Right, right. And so that’s, boy, I think there’s a volume for every book of the Bible, right? Yeah, it’s hefty. You wouldn’t want to buy that unless you just had cash to throw around. Right. But there are there are saints that have gone through the Bible and written their own their own commentaries. If you’re looking to get started with a commentary, I can highly recommend the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, New Testament. I do. I use that all the time. Oh, yeah. It’s like preaching everything, everything. You can get all of the New Testament in one volume. There’s also Old Testament volumes, but they’re packaged individually. And I just want to grab Scott Hahn by the tie and say, when are you going to put them all out? You know, three volumes, four volumes. Just take my money. Do you do you have the I don’t remember what’s called the Mary Healy commentary? I don’t have any of those. I don’t have any of those. Father Phil has one on his bookshelf that I’ve seen on Matthew. Because that’s good as well. That’s again a book for each particular book of the Bible. Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing is getting a good commentary will set you back five hundred bucks. You know, like there are some one volume things. I guess another one that’s been really useful research in here is that Catholic introduction to the Bible, Old Testament. Gosh, it’s like where was this when I was in seminary? You know, like it is so good. So good. Like if you want to know what my sources for just about everything I’ve. Talked about like 90 percent chance it came from here. What what do you usually use for preaching? What books? Well, either I just ask the Holy Spirit for a homily. That often works. Sometimes I need a little help. That’s important. Yes, right there. Start with the Holy Spirit, you know, like he wants me to give a homily to otherwise he would cancel masses. Too soon. Yeah, too soon. Sorry about that. Sorry. Sorry. That was tacky. A lot of times I’ll go straight for St. Thomas Aquinas because all his scripture commentaries are free on the Internet. That’s a hefty though. Don’t start there. Oh, yeah. Difficulty level Aquinas, you know, it wouldn’t be a good place to start. Bishop Baron, like one time I was just like, I have nothing. I listened to Bishop Baron’s homily and I’m like, he gave me just a little nugget and I made a homily out of it. You know, there’s lots of good preachers, the preachers on EWTN, you know, like there’s no shortage of resources really. To interpret the Bible. If someone finds a biblical commentary or interpretation somewhere and they’re not sure that if it’s Catholic or Protestant, is there a way, a good way to kind of tell? I don’t know. Google the person’s name and see if they’re Catholic or Protestant. There you go. I’m asking these questions kind of for myself as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could look to see if there’s an imprimatur on it. Is there an imprimatur? I’ll show people what an imprimatur looks like. So what that is, is it’s a it’s a official stamp from the Catholic Church that says there’s nothing in here that’s contrary to anything we teach. Yeah, so that’s what it would look like. A knee-hill abstat and an imprimatur from a bishop. You can always check those. Bishop Monfortin, he was my rector in the seminary. Of course, he’s used the Steubenville book. For a year. Yeah, for a year. Was never your rector. Never mind. Never met him. Well, good. Well, please pray for Deacon Eric and I as we hopefully prepare for ordination this June. Whatever that’s going to look like. We haven’t we haven’t heard anything either way. So right now we’re we’re living as though we’ll be ordained in June. Yeah, we’ll see. See what the Lord has for us. Yeah. So please pray for us. Yeah. And thank you. Thank you a lot, Deacon Riley, for taking the time out of your schedule and doing this really fantastic to have you on. As we were saying, probably before people jumped on as I’m quarantined here now at the St. Paul Seminary. Right. Anybody in or out? Yeah. So we we don’t have a lot. I don’t have a lot going on. OK, so I’d be happy if you’re doing this again next week. I’d be happy to join. All right. All right. Maybe we’ll get Deacon Tom Rausch on too. Yeah. However you want to do it. Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see. Yeah, yeah. I’ll talk to you later. All right. All right. We’re done. Thank you, everybody. Yes. Yes. Hello to everybody.