Q. If God wants as many people as possible to know and love Him, why are parts of the Bible so difficult to understand? Couldn’t God have given us a perfectly clear and easy-to-understand book to read?
A. It seems reasonable to assume that a loving God who wants to have a relationship with us would speak in a language all of us can understand. Why then does the Bible contain so many dark, difficult, and obscure passages?
Many Christians struggle with this question, especially if they’ve been taught, as I was in my Protestant past, that the Bible is “perspicuous,” that is, clear, or at least sufficiently clear for anyone to understand what is necessary for us to know. This was a key belief among the reformers and their followers, who used it against the Catholic Magisterium. There are manifest problems with this view, not least St. Peter’s acknowledgment that some of the things written by St. Paul “are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Pet 3:15-16).
It is not possible here to address this topic in detail or to resolve the various challenges Bible readers encounter. Entire books are written on this topic, among which I especially recommend Trent Horn, “Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties.” But let me respond generally to the kinds of problems that exist, and more directly to the attitude and approach we ought to have towards them.
Some of the Bible’s difficulties arise from the contents of the Bible itself, and some from our own deficiencies as readers and hearers of the Bible. The Bible’s own difficulties fall into categories of internal (e.g., when the Bible appears to give conflicting details about names and numbers and places and events); external (e.g., when the Bible seems to clash with known facts of science or history); moral (e.g., when the Bible contains bad role models or commends people who lie); and theological (e.g., when the Bible presents God as changeless [immutable] yet changing his mind, or as authorizing campaigns of genocide). It is popularly assumed that most of these difficulties lie in the Bible’s origin in a different time and place, that if we just bridge the historical-cultural gap between there-and-then and here-and-now, then most of the distance factor will disappear. This explanation confuses the people, places, and events of the past with what the Bible is saying about those people, places, and events (a common reading error, and the topic for a much larger discussion).
Often the problem of Bible difficulties arises from our own deficiencies as readers and hearers. These might be literary (e.g., unfamiliarity with how to read the Bible on its own wavelength, including its rich variety of genres); historical (e.g., ignorance about how the Bible shapes and tells its own story [His-story] and how this relates to other accounts of ancient history); spiritual (e.g., the theology professor who once warmly admonished me that God might be withholding understanding of a certain difficult passage until I am obedient to what I already understand!); or ideological (e.g., when the Bible challenges prevailing currents in the present culture in which we ourselves have imbibed, resulting in a clash over who is Lord in our lives). Or––let’s be honest about this––sometimes our problem is simply one of laziness. We expect God to put his cookies on the lowest shelf; and when he doesn’t, we excuse our indolence by complaining that “it’s over my head,” forgetting that learning thrives on encountering the unfamiliar, and that most things of value, including knowing God, come with time and effort and discipline. (See Pss 119; Prov 2:1-4; 4:1-9; Rom 12:1-2; 1 Tim 4:6-10; Heb 5:11-14; 2 Pet 1:5-7.)
We might be encouraged in knowing that interpreters like Origen and St. Augustine wrestled with the Bible’s difficulties and obscurities long before we did. St. Augustine’s conclusion is particularly helpful and instructive: “I have no doubt that this is all divinely predetermined, so that pride may be subdued by hard work and intellects which tend to despise things that are easily discovered may be rescued from boredom and reinvigorated.... It is a wonderful and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organized the holy scripture so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages and remove boredom by means of its obscure ones” (De doctrina christiana, II, 10, 13-15).
What Augustine is getting at is that Bible difficulties are divinely purposed to overcome pride and to remind us that Scripture exists to do more than to inform us of what we already know. The Bible exists and is written the way it is to engender faith, patience, worship, humility—to make us virtuous Christians, not just smarter ones.
Seen in this light, there can be a certain joy in encountering Bible difficulties; in fact, obscure or even unsettling portions can draw us to God if we let them. They can deliver us from thinking that we know more than we do. They can remind us that the more we know of God, the more we see how much there is to know. They can help us to delight in holding God’s hand without knowing where the path is leading.
For decades I have taught my students that furrowed brows can be a really good thing; we don’t have to resolve every problem passage. At the same time, faith always seeks understanding; and so we press on to comprehend whatever it is God wants us to grasp, remembering that we do not believe the Bible simply because it makes sense to us, but because the Church confesses it to be true and truly the word of God.
This question was answered by Dr. Vern Steiner, president of the Emmaus Institute for Biblical Studies. For more information, visit www.emmausinstitute.net.
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