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Here at St. Paul’s, we love to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Here’s how we’re doing that this year!
Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin; Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit ever, one God, world without end. Amen.
Reflection: The Four Last Things - Hell
By Fr. Wesley Walker
“Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed.” -Abraham to the Rich Man in St. Luke 16:26
“Hell” in “The Last Judgment” by Fra Angelica (c. 1425)
The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once remarked that “Hell is other people.” From a Christian perspective, this couldn’t be more backwards. Hell isn’t other people; it’s isolation from community and a rejection of God’s continual offer of love. Today, we are talking about the third of the four last things: Hell. Much like last week’s topic of judgment, Hell is certainly not a popular doctrine in our modern context, but faithful Christians must grapple with its reality since it’s a common topic in Our Lord’s teachings. Hell is the ultimate deprivation that results from turning inward away from God and others. The fact that hell is real provides us an opportunity for reflection and prayer.
We often think of Heaven and Hell as eternal destinations. They are those; however, they’re also present realities. Being separated from God through sin is Hell, albeit in a foreshadowing of an ultimate reality that will be fully unveiled after the final judgment. What this means is that Hell as an eternal destination is the culmination of a present trajectory that refuses God’s love now. It’s true that people who aren’t Christians can often appear happy—they may have loving families, good jobs, lots of money, they might be productive members of society, etc.—but in the end those things will fall away and the misery that’s shrouded under a thin veneer of temporal success, materialism, and hedonistic indulgence will be experienced in full force. Still, when we see people who reject the Gospel—explicitly or implicitly—there is a sense in which they are experiencing Hell now. We experience Hell now when we reject God through sin.
What this means is that CS Lewis was right when he said that “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside.” God doesn’t arbitrarily send one group of his creatures to Hell while allowing the other group into Heaven; we choose Hell when we persist in rebellion and reject his love. God is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet 3:9). He “will have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). At the same time, God gives us what we want. Rejection of him calcifies our hearts and makes us increasingly resistant to the Truth. We choose Hell when we turn inward, away from God and away from others.
Ultimately, Hell is the anguish of rejecting God’s love. In Scripture, God’s presence is often depicted as a fire. In a positive sense, the fire of his presence burns away our impurities. He is the refiner’s fire. In a negative sense, however, this fire is a torment for those who spurn God’s love. There can be no greater torment than knowing than the intentional rejection of what is True, Good, and Beautiful.
As I mentioned above, the doctrine of Hell usually doesn’t play well in our modern context. For us, however, Hell offers a chance to reflect on our lives and to pray for others. Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar explains that the Church’s teaching on Hell “is to be contemplated strictly as a matter which concerns me alone.” In other words, our job is not to decide whether other people are going to Heaven or Hell. We should hope that the Gospel reaches and saves every soul. Still, we should heed St. Paul and “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). So the reality of Hell should be the ultimate impetus for us to reflect on our own lives by which we assess what trajectory we are traveling. Even more, the doctrine of Hell gives us a reason to pray by interceding for souls, recognizing that the sacrifice of Christ is “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world” (BCP 80).
Reflection: The Four Last Things - Judgment
“Christ painting the Four Last Things in the Christian Heart” (1585) by Anton Wierix
Judgment does not make for light conversation. This is especially true in our culture which carelessly throws around the phrase “Judge not lest ye be judged” as an avoidance tactic. Yet, the Scriptures assure us that judgment is coming. We confess this every week: “He shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead.” Judgment is one of the four last things that help us “number our days” so that we can “attend to wisdom” (Ps 90:12).
To rightly order ourselves in light of the coming judgment, it may help to inquire about the nature of that judgment. The first thing to recognize is that we will be judged on our disposition and actions toward Christ. The main criteria is the presence of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Faith trusts in God, hope expects God to be faithful, and love (also called charity) is friendship with God. These virtues are infused into us at baptism and must be cultivated and tended. We become increasingly like Christ as these virtues grow in us. They become a rubric against which we can assess ourselves. It is also important to remember that these virtues are not developed privately between us and God. These things work themselves out in social contexts with other people: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt 25:40).
Scripture seems to speak of two judgments. On the one hand, we have passages like 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 where the judgment seems individual: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” This seems fairly straightforward: each of us will have to answer for everything we have done. We can expect to receive rewards for the good things while the “wood, hay, and stubble” get burnt off. There is a second aspect of judgment in the Scripture which seems corporate. The famous “sheep and goats” passage in Matthew 25:32-33 illustrates this: “before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” The sheep will be invited into the Kingdom while the goats will be turned away. These are not necessarily separate, but they do remind us that judgment is related both to what we do and who we are. Being a sheep means being under the Good Shepherd and if that is my identity, it should shape what I do.
It is quite possible that, when it comes to judgment, we are our own worst enemies. This is what is left unsaid in half-hearted quotations of Matthew 7: “with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Jesus’ words should not be prooftexted to avoid the tough tasks of discerning or evangelizing, as they often are. However, it is important that our judgment of other people should be tempered by these verses. First of all, we know that God works in unexpected ways and that, while he has the whole picture, we do not. Second, it’s helpful to remember St. Paul’s words in the Comfortable Words at Holy Communion from 1 Timothy 1:15: “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners;” and then the part we leave out: “of whom I am chief.” All of us can insert ourselves into St. Paul’s “I.” And this means that if there is no hope for someone else, there is no hope for me, the chief of sinners.
Just as we saw last week that the fact of death can bring comfort, so the reality of judgment can bring us comfort too. This is because, while we know we have a just judge, we also have a merciful judge. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1-2). Our judge is our advocate, our High Priest is our sacrifice. As St. Paul asks in Romans 8:31, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”
Reflection: The Four Last Things - Death
By Fr. Wesley Walker
“And it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” -Hebrews 9:27 (KJV)
"The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things" by Hieronymous Bosch (1500)
During the Advent season, it is common for Christians to reflect on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. It was common for the sermons during the Advent season to focus on them. As we wait in expectation during Advent, it benefits us to meditate on our mortality, on the fact that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead,” and the reality of hell and heaven. As a result, we will be focusing on the four last things in our Reflections the next few weeks as we inch closer to Christmas.
Today, we begin with death. Death has often been called the “Great Equalizer” because it does not discriminate: all of us will die. What we mean by death is that the soul and body are separated. For Christians, the soul is immortal and cannot die, but the physical body can fall into disrepair and ultimately decay away. The great promise of the resurrection is that our souls and bodies will be reunited! The fact that death is a universal for all humankind provides us three points for reflection: (1) death is a reminder that we inhabit a broken and fallen world; (2) death brings urgency to the now; and (3) death is an enemy overcome.
Death is a reminder that we inhabit a broken world because it is the result of sin. We see this very early in the Scriptures. Death is the result of sin. Things were not meant to be this way. It’s why, when we attend the funeral of a Christian, there is a sense of celebration because we know that person is with Christ, but also a sense of mourning, because we feel their loss. We know, in those moments that this is not natural, this is not the way things should be. Eastern Orthodox philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart beautifully expresses the tension a Christian feels when confronted with the dissonance of death:
“The Christian should see two realities at once, one world within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish: and the other world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply ‘nature’ but ‘creation,’ an endless sea of glory radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.”
In other words, we see in all things, by virtue of their createdness, a spark of the divine while at the same time recognizing that our vision is fleeting and dim because we live “in the shadow of death.” This peculiar dual vision causes us to yearn for a day when things will be restored and put aright, a day when death will not longer be.
This brings us to a second point of reflection: the reality of impending death brings significance to the now. A good illustration of this point comes from Jesus’ parable in Luke 12:16-21: “The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” If it is true that we will die, then what we do right now matters. Of course, most people, Christian or not, agree with this. However, what becomes significant is that if we maintain a Christian view of death, it gives a distinctively Christian shape to our lives: the now is not primarily about hedonistic pleasure, wealth acquisition, shoring up political power, or other, lesser pursuits. The now is about pursuing the things that matter. As we will see on Sunday, Isaiah urges the people of Israel to “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, Call ye upon him while he is near” (55:6). That we will die one day is a springboard for us to contemplate how we organize our lives in the present.
The beauty of the Gospel is that death is an enemy that has been overcome. St. Paul taunts death in his epistle to the Corinthians, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" So while death is a reminder of our fallen world and our own mortality, it is also a reminder that the grave could not hold our Lord. Just as the Cross is the great symbol of victory, so death becomes an insistence that this is not all there is, that this is not the end.
And so as Christians, we situate ourselves within two overlapping realities. Death is inevitable and we will die. In the same breath, we insist that death has been trampled under foot by our Lord who has conquered death by death. It is important that we engage in the practice of momento mori because it helps bring significance to what we do now. To avoid despair and the risk of nihilism that sees life as an absurdity, we also reflect on the resurrection, knowing that death does not have the final word. And the beauty of the Gospel is that the same God who destroyed death is working to finish the good work he began in us (Phil 1:6).
Reflection: Tips for a Good Advent
In our popular culture, we jump straight from Thanksgiving to Christmas. We are thrust directly into a season of consumeristic decadence through Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. The Christmas music begins to play, “12 Days of Christmas” is used as a marketing ploy to countdown to Christmas. In all this hustle and bustle, where did the Advent season go?
Advent is the beginning of the Church Year. It is important to remember that the Christian Kalendar is set up in such a way that our seasons of feasting is typically preceded by seasons of fasting and penance. The Kalendar is instructive for us, teaching us about the necessity of repentance and self-discipline and the necessity of responsibly enjoying God’s good creation. Advent, then, is a season of somber and sobering reflection that prepares us to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity.
How should we prepare? What are some practical tips to maximize the benefit of this season?
Tip #1: Mediate on the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the Impending Return of Christ
In Advent, we look to the historical coming of the Christ Child, we more intensely fixate on his sacramental coming in the Host and Chalice during Holy Communion, and we anticipate his return on the last day to “judge the quick and the dead.” These provide tangible events for us to focus on.
When we think about the Nativity, we consider that “When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst humble thyself to be born of a Virgin” (Te Deum; BCP 10). Christ has united human nature to his divine person, re-establishing communion between humanity and God while showing us what it means for us to be fully human.
When we go to Communion, we can further reflect on the idea that Christ is fully present with us in the Host and the Chalice. Remember the name Jesus is given in Matthew 1:23? Immanuel which means “God with us.” God is with us and the Eucharist is a sure and objective reminder of that. We are not alone! Further, when we go to receive, we can more profoundly consider the mystery that Christ is in us and we are in Christ.
Finally, we anticipate the “Return of the King.” What the Scriptures tell us is that the purpose of his Second Coming is to “judge the quick and the dead.” This reality gives us an impetus for serious self-reflection about the state of our own lives. Are we doing the things we ought to do and avoiding the things we ought not to do? This season is a great time for intentional examination, a time to audit our spiritual progress. There are many ways to do this, including using the Decalogue or the Seven Deadly Sin as a springboard.
Tip #2: Resist the Urge to Reduce this Season to a Consumerist Holiday
It’s very easy for us as Christians to mimic the larger culture. This is especially true when it comes to consumerism. Consumerism tells us taht the more good we acquire, the happier we will be. While it is certainly true that things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, this idea that happiness can be found in material goods, many of which are not necessary or particularly helpful, is a materialistic lie. Embracing this worldview is to be the man who built his house on the shifting sand (Matthew 7:24-27). In response to this temptation, one helpful discipline to develop this season is that of restraint. Be intentional about buying less for yourself, purchasing only those things that are necessary. Avoid retail therapy or binge spending. Remember that true happiness is not found in things. Those who die with the most toys do not win. True happiness is found in relationship with God, the source of all goodness and happiness.
Tip #3: Commit to Spending More Time in Prayer
Being a new year, Advent is a wonderful time to make a resolution to be intentional about prayer. It is important to remember that spiritual progress does not happen by accident; we have to be intentional about becoming more proficient Christians. Each person is different and our levels of consistency and piety may vary. If you take stock of your own progress through self-examination, then you can establish realistic goals for yourself. Maybe that means trying to pray the Daily Office a few more times during the week, coming to Sunday services more regularly, or trying out a new devotional exercise. If you want some help in coming up with achievable goals, talk to me! I’d love to work with you in developing these habits.
Advent is a beautiful season filled with hope and expectation. It’s a time for us to prepare ourselves for the great feast of Christmas. “Be sober, be vigilant” (1 Pet 5:8a). Now is the time for us to prepare for Christ’s coming. We can do that through meditation, self-discipline, and working to develop more robust prayer lives. “Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” (Rom 13:11-12).
Reflection: "Give Thanks to the Lord for He is Good"
There are so many great things about Thanksgiving: food, family and friends, the Dallas Cowboys, Black Friday sales (I’m not actually sure these are good), and food. Most of all, however, Thanksgiving is a day for us to meditate on the many gifts God gives us: “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee” (1 Chron 29:14).
In a world that praises self-sufficiency, the practice of giving thanks to God is a way we resist the the cultural zeitgeist. For Christians, the act of thanksgiving is a declaration of our complete dependence on God. When we thank him for all the gifts he gives us—our families, friends, health, homes, jobs, and whatever else we’re thankful for—we are saying that God is the ultimate reason that we have them. “We are his people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand” (BCP 9). This truth makes us vulnerable; we are fragile, contingent creatures who rely on God for our very existence. While the vulnerability and intimacy that come with that recognition may initially frighten us, God has proven himself over and over again to be a faithful provider who gives us exactly what we need. The Gospel reading for Thanksgiving Day from St. Matthew 6 emphasizes God as a good giver (BCP 266): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” God provides for all things and we can trust that he will continue.
It is for this reason that thanksgiving is a necessary spiritual discipline for all Christians. This is why we pray a Prayer of Thanksgiving every day at the end of Morning and Evening Prayer and after receiving the Eucharist. Yet beyond our corporate acts of thanksgiving, it is necessary for us to specifically recollect what we are thankful for on an individual level. Doing so has a wonderful effect on our imagination because it causes us to see reality in a new light as we recognize the ongoing redemption of all things. If we are truly thankful for all that God gives us, nothing is “common” or “mundane”; rather, everything becomes sacred because all is gift. The Thanksgiving holiday is a wonderful time to intentionally reflect on all that we’re thankful for. But we shouldn’t stop there! Thanksgiving should be a tool in our spiritual discipline tool belt that we regularly use.
The discipline of giving God thanks is not purely about remembering. Thanksgiving should be translated into praise “not only with our lips but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days” (BCP 19, 33). We recognize our dependence on God, seeing him at work in all our circumstances. In response, we offer God praise, not merely through words but through lives that properly respond to the great gifts we receive from him.
Reflection: Allhallowtide
By Fr. Wesley Walker
O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys which thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-The Collect for All Saints’ Day (BCP 256)
Christianity is a religion built around the idea of memory. “Do this in remembrance of me.” When the past events of salvation-history are brought into the present, we place ourselves in the context of the Church: “with Angels, and Archangels, and all the Company of Heaven.” If we are “in Christ,” we are united to everyone else who is “in Christ.” This union exists not only among Christians here on earth (the Church Militant), but includes all Christians who have gone before us onto their heavenly reward (the Church Triumphant). There are two biblical images that highlight this unity. The first is Hebrews 12:1 (a passage that the BCP has us read at Morning Prayer on All Saints’ Day — see p. xlv) where the author says, “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us with patience the race that is set before us.” The “cloud of witnesses” here are likened to the audience at a sporting event. When I went to a Dallas Cowboys game a few weeks ago, the fans weren’t passive, but an active part of the game, cheering on our team. The same is true with the Church Triumphant: the Church Militant is not so cut off from our heavenly predecessors; quite the opposite. Those in heaven are cheering us on with their prayers. That they are involved is further evidenced by a second biblical example: the heavenly worship found in Revelation 5:8 and 7:9-10. As the Church, then, we are united to one another in Christ and one way we express this “mystical union” is in the Church Kalendar.
The Church Kalendar is a means of corporate and individual recollection of life in Christ. From Advent I until the end of Whitsuntide, we follow the earthly life of Christ. Throughout the Kalendar are a various Feast Days where we commemorate saints. The Kalendar transfigures our conception of time so that today is not just Friday, October 28, 2022; it is the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude. According to Anglican priest Martin Thornton, “The Office and Mass on that day, and therefore our private prayer as well, are no bare memorial to one of the Apostles, but the expression of this time-eternal, earth-heaven, nature-grace, link” (Christian Proficiency 68). Not only does the Kalendar afford us a new and redeemed view of time, it aids the development of our Christian imagination by placing before us exemplary Christians whose examples are worthy of emulation because they have lived holy lives in a variety of contexts. This week is an important week in the Church Kalendar because we have a triduum of Holy Days, often called Allhallowtide: Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve), All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day.
All Hallow’s Eve is a day to prepare for All Saints’ Day. Historically, this was done by a service in the church followed by festivities and visits to cemeteries so people could put out candles and flowers in preparation for All Saints’ and All Souls’. All Saints’ Day is a day for us to celebrate the fact that we are part of “the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people” (BCP 83). All Saints’ is a day of celebration —hence the white vestments—of Christ’s victory over death and the new life he brings to members of the Church. By recognizing all the saints, we worship Christ because “Christ will be glorified in his saints” (2 Thess 1:10).
The final day of Allhallowtide is All Souls’ Day. This is a special time for us to remember and honor the dearly departed, especially our family and friends. For this reason, it is often called “the Day of the Dead.” it is a good day for us to pray for the departed (see BCP pp. 598 and 332) and visit the graves of loved ones. As a corporate act of remembrance, churches often do a Requiem Mass where we name the dearly departed from the parish and those names requested by parishioners. On All Saints’ Day, we look to the Church Triumphant to honor and celebrate them, knowing that they are praying for us; on All Souls’ Day, we pray for those departed Christians we know and love that God may “open to them the gates of larger life” (BCP 598).
The Allhallowtide triduum is too often overlooked and neglected. Halloween is immensely popular In our culture, but, just like Christmas, its true purpose has been supplanted by mindless consumerism and empty hedonism. Put Christ back in Halloween! Stop the war on Allhallowtide! In all seriousness, these three days really are about the work of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the identity of his Church, and our place in it. So we use these three days to make acts of recollection, specifically by recalling the collective memory of the Mystical Body’s experience with the God who redeems.
Reflection: On Scripture and Tradition
By Dcn. David Hodil
In a recent Bible study, we had a great conversation about the role of tradition in the Church doctrinal views. This is a critical topic and so I want to briefly reflect about one of the Church’s most sacred traditions: Holy Scripture.
Within the history of the Church of England’s treatment of Scripture, there are two poles: Puritan and Anglican. The Puritan view of Scripture is that the Bible stands alone and is self-authenticating. That is to say that God superintended the writing and transmission of the Bible to us today, and that individual believers know the Bible to be the Word of God. The Westminster Confession of Faith which is a Presbyterian document that influenced some Puritans in England, states it this way: “The authority of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the Author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”
Let’s examine this statement. It presupposes that you know what is contained in the Holy Scriptures. In other words, it assumes a stable canon of authoritative books. I know most will roll their eyes and say, “W know what books are in the Bible!” but do we really? There are many books that vied for canonicity that are very old—some much older than most of the established New Testament. Yet Christians today do not consider these books canonical, even if they may clarify details about the life of the Early Church.
The Presbyterian theologians behind the Westminster Confession and their Puritan counterparts held to a 66-book canon, leaving out the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books (for a list of the Deuterocanonical books, see Article 6 of the 39 Articles). There isn’t enough space to deal with that topic except to say that our tradition states that we should read these books “for example of life and instruction of manners.” But this strikes at the heart of the issue: our Mother The Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, delivered to us the oracles of God. She wrote, edited, preserved, preached, and proclaimed the Word of God. Our Lord did not pen or even authorize a single book during His earthly ministry. He left that work to the Apostles and their successor Bishops to do. Paul tells us as much in I Timothy 3:15 when he states that “the church of the living God” is “the pillar and ground of the truth.”
What this means is that Anglicans, counter to the Puritans, do not come to the Bible in a vacuum. The Church teaches us that the Bible is the Word of God. The Scriptures, next to the sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism, is the greatest of all our traditions, at least in my opinion. My own personal testimony is that I was taught that the Bible was the Word of God by my mom, dad, and Rev. Phillips at Kent Island United Methodist church and I am deeply thankful for that.
The Scriptures are a powerful witness to God and his work in space and time (Heb. 4:12). While it may be that many writers are inspired to speak truth, the Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth, has spoken and authoritatively recognized these books as canonical for us. And so, we approach Scripture not in a vacuum but through the teachings of the Church.