The Cost of Misinterpretation.

I work in a group of 10 people with a 1 manager above us. We all perform the same job duties day to day. All of us have a working knowledge of the job and its workings. I myself am a senior engineer in my department of work and there is one other senior as well. Keep following, it will come together here I promise. My manager, the other senior engineer and myself were talking about an email that was sent out by the other senior engineer on what happened at a particular job site the other day. Two of us interpreted the email one way and the other another. Both interpretations made sense when explained by each of us, and the text was written in proper English, yet it can be taken to mean two very different things. We all stood there admitting that both interpretations made sense. This email without further clarification could have possibly cost our company money. What is my point?

My point is, I find it very interesting that 3 people all working closely day in and day out, all very well versed in the job and its terms and applications all had different interpretations of the email. If find it difficult to buy into the Protestant notion that we can all interpret the Sacred Scriptures for ourselves and understand it completely without any authority to clarify what it means. You see if my manager and I were unable to go back and ask the other senior what he really meant, then we would have no way of knowing what he meant. It could have been taken two completely different ways. This text was only a few hours removed from us, yet Sacred Scripture is removed from us over many centuries with no one to ask for clarification on its meaning. Or is there someone to ask? Yes, you guessed it, you can ask the Church.

The Catholic Church has lived the Sacred Scriptures day in and day out faithfully and is a living source of the Written Gospel. If something as simple as an email containing one paragraph can be interpreted two ways by 3 people removed only a few hours from the text, what is the likelihood of being able to interpret the Sacred Scriptures without error when it is translated from many languages, and are many centuries removed from us? The answer is very clear. What is the cost of misinterpretation? We have hundreds of Protestant denominations all telling us that they have the correct interpretation of Sacred Scripture, yet all disagreeing on what the text means. They disagree on the sacraments of marriage, baptism, the Eucharist, justification, sanctification and list goes on and on. Yes the Catholic Church clearly defines each of these core theological teachings very clearly.

Of course we will have hecklers who will demand that the Church produce an infallible interpretation on each verse. These hecklers miss the point. The point is we know what justification is, we know what baptism is, we know what the Eucharist is. How do we know? Because we as Catholics are in a very real sense living with those who wrote those texts. We are living and abiding in the Holy Spirit which transmits to us the living Gospel, the living Word Jesus Christ to us in both written and oral form. The Sacred Scriptures are what is known as Holy Writ, the living Word in written form. We can go back and examine passages of Sacred Scripture with the voice of the living Church, and not with a personal interpretation far removed and incapable of asking the original writer what they intended to communicate.

We as Catholics have a living connection back to that original source. It is Jesus Christ himself and the Church that He works through, infallibly. Until one comes to that realization they are reading something that they have no way of knowing for sure what the true meaning is. The Sacred Scriptures become a written connection to Jesus Christ when they are kept in the bosom of the Church that Jesus gave them to us through. When they are removed from that sacred entity then interpretation is up for grabs to each person who reads it. Even though the interpretations may sound good and even make sense to them and others, it does not mean that their interpretation is what God intended to communicate to them in that Holy Writ. Even understanding the language and its grammatical usages does not guarantee correct interpretation.

What is the cost of misinterpretation? It is ultimately the loss of souls. Those who think that they are capable of infallibly interpreting Jesus, the Sacred Scriptures and Tradition for themselves, rather than going to Jesus Himself to ask Him what He intends to communicate to them are indeed lost. Although it is common for Scripture to have many meanings, dogmas and doctrines that are communicated through them are not up for negotiation. This is why the Church has always been the entity that Jesus intended to give us, just as He told us in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. This verse is infallibly interpreted by the Church, "And I say to thee, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Matthew 16:18.