"The Church Is The Third Testament" | May 17, 2026

Someone stands up in a pulpit and says the quiet part out loud: parts of the Bible are “problematic,” so maybe we should rip those pages out and replace them with a brand-new “Third Testament.” The backlash makes sense, but we don’t want to stop at outrage. We want to ask the harder question: what are the Scriptures, and how are we supposed to read them when a passage feels confusing, offensive, or simply impossible to square with modern instincts?

Our conclusion is simple and challenging: the “Third Testament” people want already exists. It’s the Church, with her living tradition and authority to guide biblical interpretation so the Word of God becomes a gift we can actually receive. 

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Welcome And The Oakland Controversy

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This is Living Catholic faith with Father Donwolf. And now you're hoping Father Don Wolf.

Augustine On Hard Scriptures

The Risk Of Clever Interpretation

Guardrails And The Bible’s Purpose

The Plain Sense And Its Limits

The Literal Sense And Its Limits

The Church As Interpretive Authority

Poem To Belong And Closing

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm senior Donwolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. And we continue our cut our discussion from last week. As we mentioned last week, there's been a good deal of controversy stirred up by reports of a pastor in Oakland who dismissed the Bible as out of date. The leader of the City of Refuge, United Church of Christ, in Oakland, California, who's also the leading prelate of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, suggested in a sermon that parts of the Bible need to be removed because they're problematic to her. She also suggested there ought to be a quote-unquote Third Testament to the Scriptures that matches or at least provides some measure of inspiration for those like her, who don't find the answers they're looking for in the scriptures as they are. In addition, she suggested that when we encounter a problematic page in the Bible, it needs to be ripped out so as not to be a stumbling block for people who find them difficult and obstructive. As we discussed last week, those are fighting words. After all, the Bible is the prescriptive book for us Christians. Suggesting we need to set it aside because it insults us or doesn't conform to how we think today smacks a good measure of provincialism. Lots of people were upset at her suggestions and opined that she has no right to be occupying a pulpit in any church. Questioning the Bible's provenance in our world today is the same as throwing it out completely, they say. It's stirred a lot of people into action, which isn't all bad. In fact, if I think you could make the case that it makes us all think a little more deeply about what the scriptures are and what we make of them. At least for those of us who are tasked to think and to talk about such things, we have to be able to hear her words for what they are, and they are a challenge to the authority of the Bible, as well as to understand and to accept the scriptures for what they are. Both her suggestions and the authority of the Bible are truly provocations for us. Making sense of them is the work that we're all given. Not only does the whole Christian community have to struggle with the accusations she makes, it also has to examine itself concerning what it makes of the Bible in church belief and teaching. She's certainly not the first minister to suggest making accommodations to what the scriptures contain. Most of the 20th century was filled with just her kind of preaching. It's incumbent upon all of us to understand what her concerns are and how to address them. Certainly, her words are not new. She says from her pulpit what's been written a thousand times in 10,000 books published throughout the previous decades, which makes it all the more obvious we ought to listen and respond. It certainly is the case we shouldn't simply point at her or her position and mark her as somehow uniquely awful. This posture seems to be an irresistible temptation that the news reporters succumb to concerning her. But we all know, we ought to know, that there's nothing new here. After all, St. Augustine begins many of his sermons in the fifth century by asking, what are we to make of this scripture that seems to have so little to say to us? The best example I can think of is when he asked his people how to understand that in the creation story from Genesis chapter 1, God created all the trees and the grasses before he created the sun and the moon. You don't have to be a scientist to know there's something odd going on, to imagine you could place all the plants on earth before you provided a way for them to live. Even in those years, everyone knew the order described there was somehow backwards. What could it mean that God had done such a thing? By asking the question, St. Augustine was trying to get the people to think more deeply about what might be communicated there. And his answers were both unique to his intelligence and were mostly non-intuitive. That is to say, they were answers that the ordinary person wouldn't normally think of. Another biblical example for Augustine was the troubling command that God gave to King Saul. Saul was to respond to his enemies by wiping out their village, killing all of the men, women, children, and animals, not letting a single living thing escape the sword. This bloodletting was demanded by God both as the punishment for these renegades who didn't conform to God's will, as well as a test of Saul's resolution to obey God's command. Saul eventually didn't do as God had commanded, which was debited to him as disobedience. St. Augustine wondered out loud just what such an example meant for his people. And in both cases, he was willing to approach them, these scriptures, by describing them as analogs of how we are to understand God. Rather than appealing to these examples as obvious descriptions or repeatable history, he was willing to approach them as themes for reflection. In the case of Genesis, it was a lesson in the illumination of our understanding, rather than some sort of scientific description of how the light from the sun gets to the earth and what light is for. In the case of King Saul, his failure to follow God's command is analogous to our unwillingness to be pitiless in scouring our lives of skin of sin. In neither case did Augustine simply look at the scriptures and choose to be bound by only one manner of seeing and understanding them. At the same time, he didn't choose to ignore them or push them off to the side or cast them out of the Bible. His question to his people was sincere. What do we make of these scriptures that are hard to interpret? And his creative preaching response was to take the questions seriously. Asking how to make sense of what seems to be stumbling stones in the scriptures is in fact par for the course in Christian preaching. The Oakland pastor is doing nothing original as she lays down the challenge of figuring out what the words of the Bible are supposed to mean to us readers. Her questions are in every way conventional. Who of us hasn't asked, what does this mean as we go through the scriptures, whether we're studying them closely or just glancing at the missalette on Sunday morning? Of course, it's not so obvious where to go with what we read once we become create once we begin to become creative about the meaning of the scriptures. If you listen to a gifted preacher who's able to carry his audience along with his soaring rhetoric and delightful stories, you can easily be led to convictions that you would never have imagined before he began to speak. Given enough time and exposure, given enough time and exposure to the lilting words, the sincere listener could easily come to believe that black is white and white is black and defend those conclusions with all sincerity. We see those shenanigans over and over again in advertising and politics. They're brazen and shameless. A clever speaker can be dangerous in what he can bring to the pulpit. If it's only a matter of being creative and inventive with the words we receive, then let's face it, the sky's the limit when it comes to interpretation. There has to be some boundaries, or we're liable to keep, we're asked, we're liable to be asked to believe almost anything. This is actually what she's appealing to when she talks about her Third Testament. She wants to put in place another body of teaching and understanding that will act as a guide to the first two testaments, a way of providing a sort of lens through which the jumble of texts and teachings can be focused and understood. That way, they become a coherent body of teaching and belief, rather than a mere collection of documents not readily understood and appreciated. If only there were other ways to get to these words, ways that would direct our thinking and settle our concerns, those would stand us in good stead and enable us to go forward. That's her point of view. Of course, she has in mind exactly what kind of lens she wants to place over the writings we have. And if she wants to add additional documents, I'm sure she has them in mind already as well. People don't approach these questions and throw them out to others without having some answers themselves. Those interpretive lenses are not talked about or presented yet, since it would be impolitic to do so. She wants everyone to focus on the process rather than to fight about the results. If she were to propose the content of her Third Testament, let's face it, there'd be a mushroom cloud of explosive reaction. The project would go off the rails immediately. Rather than ruining the proposal at the beginning, she wants everyone to get used to the idea first, and then after that, begin the next phase. But actually, she's not proposing anything new. Such a process has been in place for centuries and has been a part of the interpretive process of all readers of the Bible from the beginning. Admittedly, it's a little more sophisticated and usually less brazen, but laying a framework over the scriptures and understanding them by fitting them under the themes and headings that the framework provides is very much the way biblical interpretation has been done. An interpretive lens is something we all carry into the process of reading and understanding. The only caveat to keep in mind is that every time that we look, and the words seem fuzzy and unclear, when we look through the lens, we never know if it's because they're going out of focus or whether they're coming into focus. When we reach for our lens, we're not always sure which way to move it. And since the scriptures come to us at great depth, not just great age, as we're moving our lenses, some parts are going out of focus at the same time other parts are coming into focus. When that happens, we have to begin working even harder to see what's there and what it means for us. It's a complicated process. And not just adding readings or tacking on additional authors to the scriptures, the Third Testament is what you keep in mind as you're reading. It's the way to make sense of what's there as you look for the answers to the questions, what does this mean for me? Scriptural interpretation isn't easy. Of course, everybody's known that for a long time. That's why from the beginning there have been guardrails placed around the scriptures. Faithful people have a right to read the gift of divine revelation and to receive the gift of God's word, but they also have the responsibility to receive from it the blessings God has for them. And that blessing is provided by the gift of the words and the context that are there to be seen and understood. That sounds complicated, but it's necessary for us to know and to make sense of. Words, after all, are always embedded in a matrix. We have to understand what the matrix is if we're going to understand what the words mean. This is where the controversy arises in the proposals that this pastor has made. When you simply stand up and demand a new interpretation, or do you want to provoke a different way of making sense of the words you read, and you aren't specific about how you read and understand, then you're headed for difficulty. Suddenly, it's not so easy to specify exactly how to make sense of what's in front of you. When this happens, the Bible becomes a puzzle book rather than a precise guide. When we propose that the Bible is the measure of all things in the church, for example, we're left trying to make of the Bible what it's not able to achieve. The Bible, after all, is a product of the church, not its blueprint. Finding a church from the biblical witnesses, like we said last week, as if we were trying to find out how to build an engine by looking at the maintenance manual. Even if you can make some sense out of what's going on under the hood, the schedule for oil changes and the measure of the spark plug gaps were never intended to provide a picture of what an engine does or how it works. So when a portion of the Christian world decided they wanted to get beyond the church and make their own way, they left the guardrails around the scriptures behind. After that was gone, it made interpretation something more difficult. There were a couple of attempts, some more successful than others. The first is the one that's most obvious, and that is to read the scriptures in their quote unquote plain sense. That's always been popular. We might call it the suburban sense of interpretation. In this way of reading, things are just the way they seem in the texts. So when we read that Jesus was crucified, died, and rose, things happen just that way. Or when Jesus named Peter to be head of the church, it happened, just as reported. The plain sense is just what makes sense, as the words plainly say. It also protects us from going off the deep end in their persuasion and interpretation. But sometimes, of course, it's not so plain just what's intended or what the purpose is. What are we supposed to make, for example, of the rich young man who came to Jesus asking how to inherit eternal life? Jesus told him to go, sell everything, give the money to the poor, and then come and follow him. In the text, it seems clear what he was supposed to do. The author of the gospel reinforces Jesus' command by noting how tragic it was that the young man didn't believe Jesus' words because he was very wealthy. It couldn't be clearer. Jesus' words are directed to everyone who desires eternal life. At least it seems to be so, doesn't it? Are we ready to go and do just this? Isn't that the plain sense of things? And yet, not many Christians do that, or at least not many I know of. When was the last time you heard one of the famous preachers on television quote that verse as an answer to the question about whether you're going to heaven or not? My guess is that you've never heard it as a response to the question, and yet it's what Jesus himself said as the direct response to the direct question. It would seem that the suburban sense has some limits. Or how about when the young man came in from the defeat of King Saul and reported to David that Saul and his army had been defeated by the Philistines? As the battle was raging, Saul, the king, when he looked around at what was happening to him and his army, begged the young man to kill him rather than to leave him to be captured or killed himself by his enemies. And the young soldier did as the king begged him. He took out his sword and dispatched Saul with a blow to the heart. Now, when he reported this to David, and David heard it from the young man's own description, he then had the young man killed because, quote, he had raised his hand against the Lord's anointed, unquote. What are we to make of what the scriptures say? Was David good, true, and a favorite of the Lord when he acted more like Saddam Hussein than Winston Churchill? Or are we to excuse the savagery of annihilative battle that was more in line with the practice of the plains Indians than with European chivalry? It's not at all clear from the Bible. The plain interpretation doesn't offer us much help to understand and to make sense of what we read there. So to get beyond this, the second sense was the literal sense. This refines the plain sense by reminding everyone to read things in the context of the literal truth of the words in the most direct and substantive way. There's no waffling or wondering. Just take the words for what they say and go with them. That way, there'll be no anxiety about what's right and wrong when it comes to interpreting. If the Bible says the world was created in six days, then it was, six days and it wasn't anything else or in any way else. If Jonah was swallowed by a whale and was in his belly for three days, then it happened just that way, and there's no questioning the truth or nuance. After all, if you start waffling on the days of Jonah, then you'll end up denying that Jesus spent three days in the tomb the way Jonah spent three days of in the belly of the whale. Or if you start believing there may have been some other way of God creating the world, apart from the detailed description that we've been given in Genesis, then you might begin to deny that Jesus was truly the Messiah, or truly died on the cross, or truly was the Son of God. If you don't take the facts of the Bible as they're stated, then you set yourself up for trouble. But the literal interpretation runs into tough conundrums too. When John the Baptist sees Jesus, he informs his disciples that there goes the Lamb of God. So what are we to take of what he meant? Are we to presume the words indicate that Jesus is a lamb? That is, after all, the literal reading. Or if he's not like a lamb, is it as if he has the characteristics of the lamb of sacrifice in the Passover, slaughtered as a way to save the people? But the word says, the Lamb of God. Are do we presume the other lambs of God were not real lambs either? Just invoking literality doesn't always make things clear. Or how about the description of Israel when they left Egypt for the promised land? It says plainly there were 350,000 men in that group. Presume the number is double to include the women, and then double that number again to include two children per family, and you get 1,400,000 people making their way across the desert. That's about the population of the Oklahoma City metro area. If they were all gathered in one body as the army of Pharaoh advanced against them, would they have even noticed Pharaoh's chariots? And what are we to make of the fact that at the turn of the 20th century there were only two cities in the world that even had a million people in them? We're to trust that Israel struck out across the desert with more people that were present in the capital of the Roman Empire at the height of the empire? Or does that number, 350,000, does that mean something else? It's important to ask. Or are we distressed that the Bible means only one thing, and that number is simply a measure of the population, take it or leave it? All of which is simply goes to the point that once we leave the church behind and begin to look for a way to interpret the scriptures, we have to have some agency, some process by which we can make sense of what we're reading. If we don't, we're left to do the best we can with what we have. And that includes coming up with some ground rules and boundaries we need in order to make sense of what's going on. That, or we're simple simply vying to be the loudest voice or the most persuasive at any one point in time. When that happens, then there's only volume and nothing else. It's not a good way to have much confidence in the depth of faith. But establishing these things is just what an authority is for. It's the responsibility the church has as it aids everyone in understanding what God's word is and is for. That's the point that the Oakland preacher's trying to make. She wants an authority to be established that will enable her and everyone else to make sense in the right way of what she's reading. We can't just leave people off to themselves and give them no help. If we do, they're going to flounder and struggle. And worse, they're going to come up with a way from a pile of scriptural dictums and distributions with deformed notions of what's important and what matters. That's why she's calling for her Third Testament. But the Third Testament is what we already have. It's called the Church. This authority exists in order to direct the interpretation and the appreciation of the Scriptures. This same authority is responsible for honoring the presence and the importance of the scriptures in the life of the faithful. We can't just throw away the scriptures we don't like, nor can we exclusively quote the ones we do like, as if it were a game of all or nothing. The work of the church is to preserve and to enact, to engage and to measure the scriptures and their presence in the life of us all. It is the church that puts the protection around them and lays the interpretive framework over them so they can be read and understood fruitfully and well. Now the church really does very little to restrict interpretation. Innumerable preachers and teachers have proposed no end of ways to make sense of what the scriptures and their authors mean. But whatever Third Testament measures are employed, the Church retains the right to wait and measure the outcomes according to what will be the most accurate and the most faithful to what the Scriptures offer. So the Oakland pastor was right on target. She is correct in every way that we need some authority to help us make sense of what the Bible is trying to say to us. And there has to be guardrails, or we're left helpless in the face of scriptures that don't seem to speak reasonably to us. What she's calling for is a church authority to help her and all like her to live responsibly and to act decently. You might even say she wants some reasonable help to live biblically. Perhaps she might lift her head from her pulpit notes and look around. What she longs for is already here. It's called the church. Back in just a moment. We have a bon a poem today called To Belong. To Belong is a gift from God, energy, time, wood, and sod. Wherever we end up or move to, we truly long for a fair view, as well as knowing our reason for being in and out of season, where we fit in or not, what we have and who we've got, because the last thing we are in our galaxies of stars is solitary, unique alone, by silence shaped and honed. We are placed, our amid, in the world, dark and hid, to claim a status, our belonging, and satisfy all our deep longing. Which is why, at bottom, God's graces fills us, it fills us in our varied real places, and blesses us all with situation, our life, our name, our station. That's to belong. I hope that in the weeks to come, you can continue to join us as we go exploring and what it means to be living Catholic.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okr.org.