Recommendation and Review: Making Senses Out of Scripture by Mark P. Shea

A large part of my ministry is involved in teaching Bible survey to high school students. Last year, I expanded that ministry to teaching an adult Bible survey course. Along the way, I’ve been on the lookout for resources that accomplish some of the important tasks involved in teaching an overview and basic understanding of the Bible. In the past, I’ve recommended books like the Ryken Bible Handbook as helpful to anyone wanting a basic Bible textbook. I’ve also endorsed the ESV Literary Study Bible, which contributes much of the same material in a no-headings Biblical text format.

I’ve been on the lookout for a book that embodies my own approach to the Bible as a whole, resolves some of the important misconceptions and problems people bring to the Bible and, most importantly, containing a basic, readable, thematic overview of the Bible in approximately a hundred pages. Many of you will be surprised to hear that I’ve found an excellent book covering those areas and others in Mark Shea’s Making Senses Out of Scripture.

Yes, Shea is a Roman Catholic writer and apologist. He’s the senior content editor at Catholic Exchange, a well-known podcaster and a popular Catholic writer. If you need your Biblical resources laundered at the Reformation laundry, then you probably should pass. If, however, you can admit that some excellent Biblical scholarship resides among Roman Catholics, you’ll appreciate resources like Making Senses Out of Scripture.

The strongest suit of this book is the first 150 pages, where Shea introduces the concept of revelation, and then moves through the Biblical history in one of the most well-written, short format summaries I’ve ever read. Along the way, Shea pays attention to the covenants and themes of the Old Testament and their fulfillment in the New. This is practicing the Christ-centered approach to the entire Bible in a helpful, easy to follow way.

Shea uses outstanding illustrations to convey what we have in Biblical revelation and how that revelation interprets itself through the “key” of Jesus Christ. The Christ-centeredness of Shea’s summary builds off his understanding of the tensions and unanswered promises of the older Testament. He gives the proper emphasis to Christ as the interpretative answer to various themes raised in the Hebrew Bible.

For the Bible survey teacher who wants his/her students to have the “big picture,” Shea’s book does a good job in a brief and well-written effort. Other books, like The Drama of Scripture, give a book length Biblical overview with far more theological depth. Shea’s overview could be assigned on one day and discussed the next.

The second half of the book deals with the four “senses” of scripture commonly used in Catholic Biblical interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. This discussion, far from being a rehash of St. Thomas Aquinas, teaches the kind of broad and richly suggestive approach to the scriptures we often read in the New Testament itself, as well as in the early church fathers.

If I were to make a list of introductory and interpretative issues that I personally want to deal with in Bible survey, from how the Bible compares to science to how to interpret the boring parts, Shea has been immensely helpful. If you are prepared to read with an awareness of how Roman Catholics approach and use the Bible differently than Protestants, this book will be useful.

I would like to mention some points of interest to Protestants who may read this book.

1) Shea isn’t a bashful Catholic. He sojourned with evangelicals for a while and he knows where to address issues of evangelical weakness. Rarely is he off base about evangelicalism, though there is a tendency to resort to shorthand that can approach caricature. Still, I give him high marks for fairness. I wouldn’t recommend the book if it weren’t fair and helpful. Still, the book occasionally shows that misperceptions persist in Protestant-Catholic discussions.

2) Shea’s own story, contained in the introduction, features a Biblical authority crisis caused by his initial encounter with the Biblical claims of assertive Calvinism. The “lockup” that occurs between sovereign election and the universals of the Gospel drove him toward the Roman Catholic church.

It would be important to say that much of the Protestant world has found it possible to be Christian without resorting to Calvinism. The answer Shea endorses- that no person is left out of the meaning and purpose of Christ’s sufferings- is an answer millions of Protestants would affirm as well. The relentless logic of Calvinist Biblical interpretation does resolve what scripture refuses to resolve, but one doesn’t need to go to the Roman Church to survive that dilemma.

3) Two of Shea’s sections on covenant fulfillment will cause some Protestant disagreement in specifics and in principle (as Protestant Biblical interpretation often does on its own.)

The first is Shea’s section on Jesus as the second Adam, which is accompanied by an equal section on Mary as the new Eve. Shea says, without blinking, that the New Testament strongly emphasizes Mary as the icon of the new Eve.

I certainly believe there are parallels between Mary and Eve that can be drawn from within Catholic theology, but at no point in the New Testament is Mary held up as the bride of Jesus. For example, Mary’s presence at the wedding in Cana is never used to hint that she is the “bride” to the Messiah.

Even the frequently cited and errant identification of the woman in Revelation 12 as Mary- an identification not universally held even among Catholic scholar- doesn’t lead to the conclusions of the woman being the bride of Christ. And none of the New Testament passages that explicitly speak of the “second” or “new” Adam ever mentions the “second” or the “new” Eve. That is a significant omission, especially if one is going to claim the New Testament routinely portrays Mary as the “bride” icon of Christ.

That the Roman interpretation of Eve as the mother of Christians and an icon of the church can be constructed or justified from Roman interpretations of scripture is obvious. But to say that Paul, Luke and the author of the fourth Gospel saw Mary as the new Eve goes outside of what scripture plainly says and into what tradition supplies.

The second section of some likely disagreement is the fulfillment of the covenant with Noah. Shea suggests that the heart of the Noahic covenant was the prohibition on eating blood. Of course, in the new covenant this prohibition is lifted for the Eucharistic celebration.

Discussions of the meanings of Eucharistic language in scripture has been going on for 500 years with no sign of much progress between differing interpretations. I won’t enter that discussion, though I have addressed the subject in two previous essays. (Here and here.) I will suggest that the primary meaning of the covenant with Noah is probably not the prohibition on eating blood, which is a preview of Levitical law, but the repetition of the covenant language of Genesis 1-2.

4) I agree with Shea in believing it is the light of Jesus Christ that illuminates the older Testament, but I would caution anyone who may tend to say that we can find all Christian beliefs TAUGHT in the Old Testament to know the difference between what is explicitly taught in a literal sense and what is construed, concluded, supported, hinted at, prefigured, implied or illustrated.

I’ll be a real Protestant here: the plain language of scripture (or the silence of scripture) should be held in higher regard than any other source of teaching. Many of us are prepared to articulate the place of tradition in our understanding of scripture, and to say that evangelicalism has too long erred in a kind of “nuda scriptura” mode. But it remains the case that our separation from our Roman friends seldom involves an acceptance of what scripture says, but an insistence that we much accept an approach to tradition that renders scripture too pliable.

I want to thank Mark Shea for penning a superb introduction to the Bible, and I recommend this book highly. We can all rejoice in the renewed emphasis on scripture since Vatican II. One can now hear more scripture in the average mass than in the average evangelical worship service.

Shea’s book is well-written, engaging, extraordinarily helpful at the most important points of a practical use of the Bible and a fine book that should help Protestants understand the Roman Catholic approach to the Bible.