The Basics: Prayer and Study

There are countless ways to pray with sacred scripture, and there many ways to study sacred scripture. And honestly, for people of faith breaking opent the Word of God, the acts of praying and studying melt into one another. On this page, we give you some of the basics of praying with and studying scripture from the Catholic tradition.

The first theologians to apply scientific principles to the study of sacred scripture were the Lutherans in the 17th century. Today, most Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, and mainline Protestant scripture scholars use the methodologies developed by the Lutherans, and together, these communities have developed additional techniques. The Catholic Church’s definitive document on the proper methods of biblical criticism is Dei Verbum, the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation issued at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. A copy of Dei Verbum is included as a preface to many Catholic editions of the Bible.

While the scope of Dei Verbum is beyond the needs of this web page, we summarize four general principles that inform the work of biblical textual criticism.

While we believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, we believe that humans used their God-given gifts to write, edit, and pass on the Bible to us in its current form. In other words, we do not believe that the Holy Spirit dictated to Isaiah—or any biblical author—the exact words to write. Instead, we believe that each author had an experience of the divine, and then they expressed this experience in their own words, in the context of their cultural experience and values. For example, Genesis 1 envisions that the dry land of the earth is protected from the upper waters by a dome called “the firmament” on which the stars are painted. That was the cosmological understanding of the earth at the time Genesis 1 was written, but today, we do not believe that the earth ever had such a form.

While many events recorded in the Bible probably happened as they are reported, the main point of the Bible is not an exact recollection of historical events. The Bible is a collection of individuals’ experiences of the divine, which the larger Judeo-Christian community has affirmed are experiences that illustrate how each of us can experience the divine.

As we pray with any passage in the Bible, we should continually ask ourselves, “How does this passage affect MY life?” For example, whether or not the Israelites reaffirmed their covenant with God exactly as recorded in Joshua 22 - 24, it is more important that we reflect on how we must continually reaffirm our commitment to God, rather than we read these chapters as a mere historical event.

Each book passed through many hands before taking the form in which we know it today. We believe that each step of this process was divinely inspired, but that each contributor brought their gifts, limitations, perspectives, and cultural context to the process. Together, over many generations, these contributors have woven a tapestry more complex, more beautiful, and more insightful than any one person or generation could have created alone.

The Bible is filled with differing perspectives on the same themes. At first, this may seem frustrating, but like a story told by multiple family members at a reunion, each thread adds to the overall richness of the tapestry. For example, the four canonical gospels cannot be combined into a single story with a consistent timeline, and yet each gospel gives us additional insights into the life and ministry of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and into how Jesus’ message was received and understood by his contemporaries. For another example, consider the contrasting perspectives of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes.

Most passages of the Bible were originally oral traditions that were written down only generations afterwards, and many passages, once recorded, then underwent a long process of editing, sifting, and re-combining before they reached their present form. For example, Leviticus and Deuteronomy cover much of the same material, yet they have different tones, and they occasionally contradict one another. The more we understand the contexts and purposes of the various writers and editors involved in the creation of those two books, the more likely we are to appreciate the differences in their content.