Early in his slide into heresy, Martin Luther commissioned the printing of a Latin Bible without the ‘Gloss’, a commentary that at the time was usually printed in the margins. He wanted to interpret the text without preconceptions.
It is true that commentary comes, in a certain sense, between the reader and the original text, and influences the reader’s understanding of the text, often decisively — indeed, that’s the whole point. This is a good thing if you have a degree of confidence in the tradition of interpretation that the commentary represents.
Then again, an attempt to read Scripture without any guidance at all has to grapple with the problem that no text is self-interpreting: if you reject one interpretation, you are going to need another.
The contrast between the naked words of Scripture and Scripture plus the Gloss has a parallel in the debate about faith and culture. Just as, over the centuries, the Catholic Church fostered a rich tradition of scriptural commentary, so it has fostered a tropical growth of religious culture, comprising devotional art, music, architecture, schools of spirituality, methods of prayer, religious dress, festivals, and customs of all kinds.
Like the Gloss, one Protestant critique would have it that these things “come between” the believer and the simple principles of the Faith, and limit the ways an individual can respond to Scripture or the other fundamentals of the Faith. Again, it is sometimes objected that the existence of these extra things adds unnecessarily to what a person has to accept, in practice if not in theory, when he accepts the Catholic Faith. Again, it is said that these things are not inspired or infallible, so they can be wrong or lead one in the wrong direction.
How should Catholics reply to such objections?
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