Mark Shea highlights Roman Catholicism’s low regard for Scripture

Roman Catholicism claims to have a high regard for Scripture, but the behavior of Roman Catholics betrays their true attitude.

Par for the course, the Roman Catholic writer Mark Shea has spread some urban legends that denigrate the Scriptures (HT: James Swan). And because of the nature of Shea’s readership, such myths spread among other Roman Catholics who take him at his word. But an analysis of what he says shows the bankruptcy of what he says.

The Church has always had the habit of taking the best of whatever we humans come up with and pressing it into the worship of God. … St. John cribbed the idea of the Logos from Greco-Roman platonic philosophy to describe Jesus. St. Paul turned gnosticism on its head by stealing a gnostic code word to describe Jesus as the “fulness” of God.

He is talking about the words ὁ λόγος (the logos or “the Word”) from John 1:1, 14, and also the concept of πλήρωμα (“fullness”), Col 1:19 and other references. Neither of Shea’s statements is true. In fact, both of these concepts have deep roots in the Old Testament, which led the Biblical writers John and Paul to embrace these concepts.

As an aside, first of all, John did not “crib” anything – and nor did Paul “steal” anything. As writers of Scriptures, these men “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). But such is the low Roman Catholic view of the Scriptures.

Even so, while the λόγος concept was present in Greek culture, John’s usage of it has its roots in the concept of God’s “Word” in the Old Testament. Carson says:

However the Greek term [“logos”] is understood, there is a more readily available background than that provided by Philo or the Greek philosophical schools. Considering how frequently John quotes or alludes to the Old Testament, that is the place to begin. There, the ‘word’ (Heb. dabar) of God is connected with God’s powerful activity in creation (cf. Gn 1:3ff.; Ps. 33:6), revelation (Je. 1:4; Is. 9:8; Ezk. 33:7; Am 3:1, 8) and deliverance (Ps. 107:20; Is. 55:1). If the Lord is said to speak to the prophet Isaiah (e.g. Is 7:3), elsewhere we read that ‘the word of the Lord came to Isaiah’ (Is. 38:4; cf. Je. 1:4; Ezk 1:6). It was by ‘the word of the Lord’ that the heavens were made (Ps.33:6): in Gn. 1:3, 6, 9 etc. God simply speaks, and his powerful word creates…. In short, God’s ‘Word” in the Old Testament is his powerful self-expression in creation, revelation and salvation, and the personification of that ‘Word’ makes it suitable for John to apply it as a title God’s ultimate self-disclosure, the person of his own Son.

… the ‘Word’ he is talking about is a person, with God and therefore distinguishable from God, and enjoying a personal relationship with him. More, the Word was God. That is the translation demanded by the Greek structure. … Here then are some of the crucial constituents of a full-blown doctrine of the Trinity. [By placing this concept at the beginning of the Gospel], ‘John intends that the whole of his gospel shall be read in the light of this verse’ (Carson, “The Gospel of John,” 115-117).

The concept of “fullness”, too, appears in multiple places, notably in Col 1: For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

There are two problems with Shea’s comment (that Paul “stole” a “Gnostic code word”) to indicate the concept of “fulness”:

1. Gnosticism didn’t yet exist at the time that Paul wrote Colossians. In fact, this particular “hymn” from within Colossians, Col 1:15-22, is most likely a pre-Pauline confessional formula that existed and was used by the church in honor of Christ long before Paul wrote this letter. (Many such hymns exist throughout the New Testament). Gnosticism was a second- and third-century force, and Paul wrote Colossians around 60 AD. So this pre-Pauline hymn was from much earlier than that.

2. In fact, the language used in verse 19, “God in all his fullness” is a reflection of Isaiah 6:1 and 6:4, in which God himself “fills the temple”. The verse (a part of a pre-Pauline hymn) in fact is almost a direct pick-up of the temple language from Psalm 67 17-18: “God was well-pleased to dwell in [the temple in Zion]…The Lord will dwell [there] forever … in the holy place”. Beale (“A New Testament Biblical Theology”, pg 544) notes, “In particular, here God’s dwelling in the architectural temple on Zion now finds its fuller expression in God’s dwelling in Jesus as his end-time temple. Jesus, as an individual, eschatologically instantiates and typologically fulfills all that the OT temple represented”.

Of course, Shea’s low regard for Scripture is what causes him to miss the genuine riches and “fullness” that God has prepared for his people in Christ, in Christ alone for that matter, which he misses because his happy Roman Catholic world is genuinely littered with Pagan accretions which he must buy into as “the total deposit of the Faith”.