"We are long past the days of believing that the world was created in six 24-hour days."
I don't think the Catholic Church believes in a word for word literal interpretation of the scriptures...certainly you don't get that from augustine, aquinas, francis, etc.
The Bible is inerrant. That is what the Church teaches. But it is not literally true. This is a constant teaching of the Church. The Bible does not have to be literal to be true.
That is correct. I also told one of my Protestant friends that the Catholic Bible contains more books than the King James version. He cracked up when I told him that's where all the good stuff is!
A literal interpretation of the New Testament is hard to justify, since there are a number of outright contradictions even in different Gospel passages that are supposed to describe the same event (the discrepancies between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke regarding the two thieves who were crucified next to Christ, for example).
I suppose a lot depends on how long God worked on each phase before He "called it a day"...
A day to the Lord is like a thousand years.
>>"We are long past the days of believing that the world was created in six 24-hour days."
>I don't think the Catholic Church believes in a word for word literal interpretation of the scriptures...certainly you don't get that from augustine, aquinas, francis, etc.
I think, however, it is accurate to say that the Bible is Scripturally true (as opposed to, for example, scientifically true). That is, we may take the Bible as God's teaching device to reveal his eternal truths to us.
I certainly didn't get that sort of indoctrination from the Christian Brothers or the Jesuits.
Hyperbole is a necessary tool of charlatans.
This is absolutely true... The Catholic faith does not believe in word for word literal interpretation of the Scripture. Never has... This isn't news folks. The only folks this is news to are folks who are for whatever reason wholey ignorant of the Catholic faith.
God created the heavens and the earth.. but he didn't do it in 6 human days. We were cast out of paradise due to original sin, God created a perfect world for us to live in, and we messed it up by our sin.. but was there a literal garden of eden? no. Etc etc etc..
You cannot read the writings of any of Catholicism and find anyone advocating a literal interpretation of every word of the Bible... going back the entire 2000 or so years of the Roman Catholic faith.
Catholicims is not rabbid evangelicalism.
"I don't think the Catholic Church believes in a word for word literal interpretation of the scriptures...certainly you don't get that from augustine, aquinas, francis, etc."
The Roman Catholic Church cannot possibly teach either literal or contextual interpreation of the Scriptures.