www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall The Scotsman has it a bit backward....

Many people are slow to recognize this, but it is time again for a good Bible primer.

Infallible does not mean literal. Inerrant doesn't mean literal. Only literal means literal. Truth doesn't mean literal, either. Myth is a way to convey truth (as for example, in Genesis) without having to be a scientific-way of expressing the truth.

Just let's go back to the Church Fathers and you will find they taught Genesis could not be literal (light before the sun? Origen said this with many other events in the creation story were clues to the reader that it's not literal).

So to say it is mythic, for example, is to say it's not a literal history -- then again no one wrote histories as we do now, and even now most historians have discovered history is actually not as rigid as people think. It's mostly a reconstruction based upon the bias of the one writing the history. But people have a notion of "history=literal=truth" which is the problem that needs to be worked on.

As DJS said, we have the Church on this matter and not some "nun" who doesn't know how to obey the Church and calls people heretics when they quote Trent! More importantly a study of Patristics shows how rich this issue was --- people get too caught up in a very modern mode of thinking which Genesis (and much of Scripture) was not written in, and try to make it fit into our categories instead of taking the time to fit in its to understand the message according to its categories.

A catholic literal interpretation differs from a fundamentalist literal interpretation. While a fundementalist interpretation will read the text and apply it literaly to their life, belief structure, ect, a catholic literal interpretation will look at the context in which the text was written, ie who was the writer adressing, what is the historical context of the writer/text. An example that my teacher of a Sacred Scripture class attended was "At the Superbowl we ate buffalo wings at halftime." We all understood what he meant because we understood the context, but if in 3000 years someone was to stumble across this statement and did not try to understand the context what conclusions would they make? What is a Superbowl? What/When is halftime? Did buffalos have wings?

Jim

Perhaps not taking the Bible literally is where some of our Episcopalian/Anglican brothers decided that Christ did not actually resurrect from the dead?

Dear Logos Teen you said:

"Now, I too thought it was incorrect to interpret all of the Bible literally. After all, we are not fundamentalists who must believe in seven days of Creation, etc."

I think this would be of interest:

I recall listening to a Jewish scientist that had written a book about creation, (and of course I can't remember either his name or the book). What he had calculated was that when we separate the creation of the world into seven different era's, it conforms exactly to the story of creation in the Bible.

Once man was created though, time changed and became as we know it now.

Zenovia

More fundamentally, it was their departure from the Church and its teachings.

Hi DJS,

Yes, I would tend to agree with you...
However I am sure that a certain rationale as to how to interpret what the Bible was saying was used in their ever evolving heretical beliefs.

Going back to my first post on this thread, I felt quite uneasy with my daugher's religion teacher planting seeds of unbelief to her class in the miracles of our Lord, etc.

In Christ our Lord and Saviour,
Alice

Dear Alice,
I don't know exactly what your daughter was told, and don't doubt that, as you recount it, it could have been dreadful and just plain wrong.

On the other hand, I think it is important for kids to learn our particular perspective, with the emphasis on the teaching authority of the church, on the understanding scripture. To fail to do so can also plant seeds of disbelief.

What happens, for example, to kids who are taught that the Bible teaches a 6000 year old earth when they are confronted with an enormity of physical evidence contrary to that perspective?

Only a Catholic can afford not to take the Bible literally; for others it opens to a slippery slope, but as djs says, having the Magisterium we know the limits...
-Daniel

Well, my comment was intentionally placid because I hoped that those who were arguing for Biblical literalism would be reminded through my comments that, in fact, Catholics do not and have never taken the Bible literally.

Since that doesn't seem to have worked, I'll try to be clearer. Of course, the entire Bible is true. But not all of the books of the Bible were written in the same literary style; Genesis isn't like the Apostle's letter to the Romans which isn't like the Book of Wisdom, etc.

We really need RayK in here to give us some of his words of wisdom, but I suggest doing some searches in the Scripture Forum on this subject.

Pretty much the only people in Christianity who take all of the Bible literally are fundamentalist Protestants, and it gets them into a hell of a lot of trouble.

We, as Catholics, have a completely different approach. What we do not necessarily believe to be literal (such as the seven 24 hour days of creation), fundamentalists do, and what we believe to be quite literal ("This is My Body...This is My Blood"), fundies don't.

We have the Magisterium of the Church to rely on.

Logos Teen

We really need to read Dei Verbum [vatican.va] and The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church [ewtn.com] to know the mind of the Church as it relates to Sacred Scripture.

The following is from The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, as Fr. Dcn. suggests using:

Now, even I'm confused as to exactly how any part of the Bible is "imaginative fiction," because fiction implies a lack of truth, but I think this small excerpt serves my general purpose, which is to show that the Bible is not all literal.

Logos Teen