Dogmatic Reading of the Bible
I am not the foremost expert on apologetics for Bible difficulties, but as a Christian, it is a dogma of the faith that the Sacred Scriptures are inspired by God and are thus inerrant in the teaching of faith and morals. When we read passages about Jesus healing the sick or offering the forgiveness of sins, it makes us feel great! Our God is a great God! But sometimes we read passages that are difficult, especially in the Old Testament. When we read those sorts of passages, it may cause us to shirk away from our belief in their inerrancy, especially regarding morals.
Some people will fall into the trap of saying, “Well, that was the Old Testament! God was different back then!” This trap is very gnostic or dispensational. Both deny the continuity of God's salvific plan (and this belief has a lot of other consequences we won't get into here). The one thing we need to know for sure, in our assent by faith, is that regardless of the manifest difficulty on the page, there must be a resolution.
A skeptic may hear me say that and suggest that this inquiry is already doomed from the start because it presupposes a conclusion. I'd counter that this approach is not unique to theology at all - naturalistic worldviews also begin with dogmatic assumptions!
First, let's distinguish between a dogmatic assumption and just a regular assumption. A dogmatic assumption is an assumption that is beyond questioning. A quote below from the catechism elucidates this (emphasis mine):
The Church's magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes, in a form obliging the Christian people to an irrevocable adherence of faith, truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes, in a definitive way, truths having a necessary connection with these.1
It requires irrevocable adherence of faith, which is to say it is beyond questioning. Most purely naturalistic scientists have a similar belief that they hold beyond questioning: that the supernatural does not exist. This means when they study any phenomenon, they will go forward with an infallible assumption that there is a natural explanation for whatever they're studying - whether it is knowable to them right now or not. But this assumption has not been (and in fact, can never be decisively) proven.
The most aggressive of skeptics would consider the existence of the supernatural at best unfalsifiable, which means it cannot be definitively proven false. Since the skeptic also believes it cannot be proven true, it may as well be discarded entirely as a possibility (which is called positivism). Obviously, as a Catholic, I'd say the supernatural is quite evident in many areas of life and in a huge amount of human testimony. G.K. Chesterton puts it well in Orthodoxy:
If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.2
The obvious difference between the skeptic and the Christian's use of dogmatic assumptions is that we believe these dogmas on the Christian faith. But before I'm accused of burying the lead here, that faith is not in itself unreasonable. To assent to something by faith means through the trust of an authority whose will you put above your own intellect. This is contrary to the basis on which the skeptic holds the dogmatic view that the supernatural does not exist.
This reminds me of the story of Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist and historian at Queen's University in Canada, who is also the author of “Medical Miracles.” She was called to examine a case of intercession by St. Marguerite D'Youville. The person for whom St. Marguerite interceded had very aggressive leukemia and was miraculously healed. When Dr. Duffin examined the blood samples, she determined that there was no natural explanation known to her that could have saved the woman given the state of her prior samples. Even still, when asked in an interview if she remained an atheist, she answered affirmatively. She suggested that just because she could not currently understand how this could have happened, does not mean we will never be able to do so. She claimed her faith in the future of science was at least as reasonable as faith in the divine. The skeptic must believe, on a totally unreasonable basis, that because they themselves have not had a direct experience of the supernatural, there is therefore no usable evidence that such a thing does exist, and therefore it must affirmatively not exist.
How much more reasonable is it to believe in the dogma on the basis of authority? I'd say a lot, depending on the nature of that authority! Imagine a 3-year-old has never had the misfortune of touching a hot stove, and they are motivated and curious to do so. Their parent steps into the room and says, “Don't do that, it will burn you.” From the small child's perspective, there is no evidence that, in this matter, the parent is correct. They have no data, and while data does exist, they do not understand it because their understanding is lacking. But rather than use this lack of understanding in the matter or lack of information to prove otherwise as evidence to the contrary, the child intellectually assents to the proposition which has been willed by the parent. They operate on the near dogmatic truth of the words that their parents say, even when they have no evidence to the contrary. They do this out of a radical trust of their parents which has been earned in superabundance!
How much more trust do we have in our Blessed Lord, who has earned it through the testimony of His identity, His Apostolic Church, the witness of the martyrs, the intervention of miracles, and His life, death, and resurrection?
At first glance, it may seem circular because it seems like we learn about these feats from the Bible, but it is the Bible that is the dogmatic source of this faith. But this is totally untrue. I believe the Bible dogmatically because I have faith in Christ through the evidence of the endurance of His church and the saints who have been formed by it. From there, I assent by faith in the dogmas of the Church, which includes the infallibility of the Bible in the area of faith and morals.
Now… in the above example, we are still talking about young children. Eventually, they begin to test the waters and try to prove things out for themselves, often to their own peril. But that isn't exactly dissimilar to the way we operate, especially in the realm of supernatural revelation. How many of us dissent from the infallible declarations of the Church like Mary's Immaculate Conception because we ourselves can't see it as clearly as we'd like in Scripture? How many of us do not grant the Church the obedience she is due when we have personal disagreements?
When these difficulties arise, we need to stay in the boat and out of the turbulent waters which will toss you around and have no qualms about dashing you into the rocky shores. The same thing applies to conspiratorial scientists who try to prove through natural phenomena that the earth is flat. When we do this, we sever our connection to the logical procession of scientific investigation, just as when we deny the dogmas of the Church, we sever ourselves from her apostolic roots.
So when you are presented with a difficulty, humble yourself in faith. Search for the resolution and don't become fixated on the difficulty. And if you can't resolve the difficulty yourself, trust that the Church and her doctors and fathers have seen this same difficulty you are reading now and were not deterred. Open yourself up to the wealth of knowledge that preexisted you and read these texts with a humble and faithful heart.