Knowing the Mind of God

For someone who lived in the second century A.D. it was not difficult to understand things that the Apostles and others in the early Church said. They lived in the same culture, and had many of the same presuppositions. As time went on, it became harder and harder to connect with what they said. Do not get me wrong, it was not entirely foreign, but a gap formed between what the world was like in the first century and what it was like centuries later.

By the middle ages there were enough changes in the world that it could be said that the people living in A.D. 600 were vastly different from those living in A.D. 60. In the first century people largely spoke either Latin or Greek (or both). Neither of those languages was used by any of the common people by the sixth century. Of the few nations that existed in the first century and were still around in the sixth, none looked exactly like they did back then. It was a different "world".

Move down a few more centuries, and it widens the gap of understanding even more. The changes of industry, politics, and scientific endeavors (both the good ones and the horrifically bad ones), made the people of, let us say, the fifteenth century a whole different people from the first century. Yes, there would be some similarities, but not enough where someone from the fifteenth century would feel at home in the first century, and visa versa.

Now we live in the twenty-first century. Do we really think that we can easily have a grasp on what people of the first century thought? There are so many different experiences and assumptions that I cannot possibly list them here. We presume certain things about life and the world, which the Apostles would not have been able to grasp in the slightest way. With all of these differences, how is it possible that the Catholic Church today can know, definitively, what the Apostles meant by their words? It is called the Holy Ghost.

Only through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and preserved Tradition of the Church can we know truth. Our Lord Jesus promised that He would make sure that we would have the truth, and that is the ministry of the Holy Ghost; He makes all that Jesus said known to us by speaking to the Popes and Bishops who communicate it to us. If anyone (anyone at all!) says that he can sit down with just a Bible, a Lexicon, and a Greek dictionary and (without the divine inspiration of the Holy Ghost which was promised only to the Apostles and their successors) actually know the mind of God, then he is greatly blinded by a devilish pride in his own abilities.

We, today, can know the mind of God, because it has been interpreted by God Himself through the Church and she has explained it to us. Without the inspiration of the Holy Ghost that is promised and given to the Apostles and their successors, we would all end up in error. The Bible itself says that it is "hard to understand" and it warns us that the best of us can make serious mistakes when trying to figure it out. It even goes so far as to tell us that nothing is understood by "private interpretation". It does not call us idiots, but who are we to think that we can know the mind of God without God's own help?

Yes, those who have confidence in their own wisdom might get a few things correct, but then if I shoot at a target enough times I will eventually hit something. Even a broken (analog) clock is correct twice a day. What a great grace it is that Jesus does not leave us to our own knowledge and tell us to figure it out on our own. If that were the case we would end up with massive division and every person thinking he alone knew the truth (kind of like we see right now outside the Church!). Thank the Lord for the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church.