Discussion ping!
It will be pretty clear in the end who the smart ones were.
"This is my Body."
OK, freely admit I’m not a Catholic. I don’t mean to interject myself in a philosophical discussion amongst Catholics. But as a Christian I don’t have any problem with the story in Samuel being true. Samuel is an historical book meant to be an historical accounting.
“ Now the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, Rechab and Baanah, set out, and about the heat of the day they came to the house of Ishbosheth, as he was taking his noonday rest. And behold, the doorkeeper of the house had been cleaning wheat, but she grew drowsy and slept; so Rechab and Baanah his brother slipped in.”
“When they came into the house, as he lay on his bed in his bedchamber, they smote him, and slew him, and beheaded him. They took his head, and went by the way of the Arabah all night, and brought the head of Ishbosheth to David at Hebron. And they said to the king, ‘Here is the head of Ishbosheth, the son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life; the LORD has avenged my lord the king this day on Saul and on his offspring’” (2 Sam 4:5-8 RSV).
There’s all kinds of things that could be left out here. The king may have had an attendant they killed, for instance. The only thing that is really clear is they came in by stealth, that they slipped past a female doorkeeper as she slept. They may have had a bunch of men with them and these men were just the leaders.
Now if you ask me if the streets in heaven are really paved with actual gold, I would consider those verses not so literal.
Where's the lucrative RELIGION in !?THAT?!
Everyone knows ya gotta have endless ranks of bureaucratic power-mongering magicsterical RELIGIOUS PROFESSIONALS to DO RELIGION RIGHT! Goodness! Any self-respecting pharisee could tell you that!
That old Biblical business about the priest-hood of all authentic Believers is sooooo low class, serf-like and all. How do ya make money off of THAT?
NOPE--gotta have ranks upon ranks upon ranks of PROFESSIONAL RELIGIONISTS to DO RELIGION remotely right.
And it's always better to dress em up in funny costumes. Can't allow the sheeple to think that THEY the unwashed and kept-ignorant could easily be part of the RELIGIOUS ELITE.
And the funny costumes MUST have endless ranks clearly distinguishable as well. It's nice to have the super elite magicsterical types to run around quasi-loose in red hats and gowns. Make abundantly clear who's boss.
And make sure there's lots of rituals and special 'prayers' to special personages. That sucks em in a lot. Each sniveling peasant gets to feel that special warm 'mummy glow' fantasizing sitting on mummy's lap--praying to their special personalized 'saint' as well--instead of wallowing in their hog-wallow of misery.
And all those plastic 'saints' and other trinkets are particularly helpful in leading the sheeple down the yellow brick road. Sheeple like earning their own salvation through lots of hoop jumping--all the better when they have their little idols to hold in their grubby little hands. Helps the coffers, too.
And the sheeple like to feel part of an IN-GROUP with LOTS OF ELEGANT, VISIBLE, CLASSY, GILDED PRANCING ABOUT by a RELIGIOUS ELITE. It helps the poverty stricken feel like they are at least connected to something substantial and worthwhile. They can at least aspire to kissing our rings.
Keep them desperate to suck up to our specialized knowledge and our filtered clarified, embellished, mangled truly truest true truth--of the magicsterical, of course. Who knows what God really meant. We have a right to make it up as we go along.
/sar
“For an interpretation of Scripture to be acceptable (which does not mean it is necessarily correct), it must at least conform to the basic dogmatic teachings of the Church.”
You lost me there totally. That is bassackwards.
This is one of the best posts on scriptural interpretation that I have seen in a long time.
YHvH's Word has to conform to man-made tradition ? That is why Yah'shua rebuked the Pharisees for their Yah'shua will rebuke the Roman "church" as well How blasphemous !
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
tradition which impugned the Holy Word of G-d.
for the same sin of PRIDE.
Beep! For later.
Is one willing to change their interpretation of scripture in response to reproducibly observed reality, or not?
The common error is when one pridefully places their own interpretation of the meaning of (most commonly) a translation of scripture above the observable reality that God has created.
Once one accepts that their interpretation is “God's word”, there is obviously no mechanism to correct that. Many Christians once interpreted “God's word” to mean that the Sun circled the Earth. Some posters here on FR still do.
Intellectual suicide indeed.
Get Cracking, Catholics![article at the National Catholic Register]Catholic and Protestant Bibles: What is the Difference?Ours get read?
According to a study released in September by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, evangelical Protestants are a whopping eight times more likely than Catholics to read the Bible on a weekly basis. Of course, the survey only looked at private Bible reading; it did not take into account the Scripture passages Catholics take in at every Mass. Still, we tip our hats to our separated brothers and sisters in Christ for their zeal for the Word of God.
Related threads:
Synod: Christianity not a 'Religion of the Book' [article from National Catholic Reporter]
Yesterday saw...a forceful plea from a key papal advisor [Bishop Salvatore Fisichella, the rector of the Lateran University and President of the Pontifical Academy for Life] to reject the idea of Christianity as a “Religion of the Book.”
Synod to Focus on Proper Use of Scripture [article from Catholic World News]
The Church should combat widespread "Biblical illiteracy" among the Catholic faithful, Archbishop Eterovic said
A Literate Church: The state of Catholic Bible study today [article from America: The National Catholic Weekly]
...while fewer believers know much about the Bible, one-third of Americans continue to believe that it is literally true, something organizers of the Synod on the Word of God called a dangerous form of fundamentalism that is “winning more and more adherents…even among Catholics.” Such literalism, the synod’s preparatory document said, “demands an unshakable adherence to rigid doctrinal points of view and imposes, as the only source of teaching for Christian life and salvation, a reading of the Bible which rejects all questioning and any kind of critical research”....
....The flip side of this embarrassment is the presumption among many Catholics that they “get” the Bible at Mass, along with everything else they need for their spiritual lives. The postconciliar revolution in liturgy greatly expanded the readings, with a three-year cycle in the vernacular that for the first time included Old Testament passages. Given that exposure, many think they do not need anything else. As Mr. McMahon put it, “The majority still say you go to Mass, you get your ticket punched, and that’s it for the week.”
"By doing nothing to practice his faith except attending Sunday weekly Mass (and the few Holy Days), in two years' time (after which the reading cycle ends), a Mass-attending Catholic will hear 3.7% of the Old Testament (932 verses), and in three years' time (after which the reading cycle ends) a Mass-attending Catholic will hear 40.8% of the New Testament (3247 verses). That all adds up to a total of 4179 out of 33001 verses mentioned in the chart, i.e. only 12.7% of the entire Bible (excluding Psalms) is heard by a weekly-Mass-attending Catholic."
-- Alex Murphy, November 1, 2009
on the thread Lectionary Statistics - How much of the Bible is included in the Lectionary for Mass? (Popquiz!)
I suspect most of you guys don't even know your pope just lied to you...But then I suspect that you don't even care...
Rom 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
Scripture is itself an ecclesial document, to be interpreted in and by the Church. It must be interpreted in such a way that dogmatic teachings about God (such as his unchanging goodness) are in accord with our understanding of Scriptural text. If reason suggests a disconnect between an interpretation and dogma, we must follow dogma and dismiss the interpretation. Richard Gaillardetz explains this well:
So the inspired, God breathed words of Holy Scripture must line up with your Church's theology and dogma, or the inspired, God breathed scripture is wrong...
I am almost speechless and I can imagine what God thinks about this...
“For an interpretation of Scripture to be acceptable (which does not mean it is necessarily correct), it must at least conform to the basic dogmatic teachings of the Church.”
Talk about narcissism. The (Catholic) church’s made-up tenets trump the inspired Scriptures? OMG! (And I mean that literally.) Gives new meaning to “the tail wagging the dog”.
There are some things that I find a little wobbly about the Catholic position espoused here, but let me start with a point of agreement, at least provisionally. If you take Scripture (especially the Old Testament, an oral tradition-cum-written text) as a cultural phenomenon — i.e., a product of x number of human authors within a particular linguistic/historical/cultural community — then fundamentalist methodolgy (specifically, the notion of biblical inerrancy) seems fairly problematic.
But, let’s start with the question of the Gospel. Let’s have the Catholics answer whether Jesus existed? Who was He? Who did He claim to be? What happened to Him, particularly was He crucified and resurrected? If so, what does this sacrifice mean for us? What are we to do? What is God doing in our lives? Tell me about justification, sanctification, perseverance of saints and the afterlife.
Okay, supposing I get the Catholic answers to those questions, and I am not even going to ask how they got the answers (i.e., I am not going to worry myself about allusions in this article that spice it with the Catholic idea that biblical truth is necessarily ecclesiastical and that the antidote to fundamentalist simplicity, fundamentalist error, fundamentalist idolatry and intellectual suicide (”you are so dumb that your brain is literally dead — and you killed it yourself”). Me no askie where the answers came from. Me just ask what the answers are.
Okay, so, I am talking history now — like Dennis Hopper in Tarantino’s True Romance. Once we get the answer to the question of God in history and Jesus in history (however the Catholic gets there), there is now a question about what this living God does in history, especially with His Word. And, from that perspective (call it a Christian realist perspective in Dostoevsky’s sense), fundamentalist interpretation seems much less simplistic to me. Whether God wants us to approach Him through literalist interpretations of Scripture (and, if so, intellectual suicide starts sounding more like an Abrahamic trial that establishes man’s faith and Pauline foolishness that humbles the proud), that question becomes a question that we answer by asking — asking God. God, what will you have me do? And, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if the answer WAS NOT “take a college course on bible scholarship and modern literary technique.” It might be that the starting and ending point is Scripture.
Was there a burning bush? Did Moses exist and was there an Exodus to the promised land, with a parting of the Red Sea along the way? Was Jonah in the belly of a whale? Was Christ crucified and is He risen?
Let’s just stick to the question of Jesus, as I am happy to know that and nothing else. Shall we take the gospel accounts literally or not? Might they be wrong? If so, what does the Catholic say they are wrong about? The point being, don’t slam the notion of inerrancy and take some easy shots at the Old Testament. Let’s get to the heart of the matter. Tell me where the Gospels might be wrong in terms of Christology. Under Catholic/ecclesiastical methodology, tell me a piece of the Gospel story that is not or may not be true. And only then, can we have a proper discussion of methodology.
And, in that case, it might turn out that because we weren’t there, because we don’t know what happened, the best thing we have to go by is the accepted texts understood fairly literally. In that case, literalism may not seem like intellectual suicide, but rather a form of methodological humility for a believer who is hearing tell of what God Himself did for us, but only first hearing about it some 2000 after the fact.
Hi NYer,
It’s nice to have this dialogue with you. I’m a supporter of reading the Bible as it comes. If we can trust God for something as important as eternal salvation, we can absolutely trust him to deliver his word to us in a format we can all understand.
“Avoid Intellectual Suicide: Do Not Interpret the Bible Like a Fundamentalist”
Sooooo.....don’t take God at His word?
What the Pontifical Biblical Commission said, in total, about Fundamentalism is here:
F. Fundamentalist Interpretation
Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible, being the word of God, inspired and free from error, should be read and interpreted literally in all its details. But by "literal interpretation" it understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development. It is opposed, therefore, to the use of the historical-critical method, as indeed to the use of any other scientific method for the interpretation of Scripture.
The fundamentalist interpretation had its origin at the time of the Reformation, arising out of a concern for fidelity to the literal meaning of Scripture. After the century of the Enlightenment it emerged in Protestantism as a bulwark against liberal exegesis.
The actual term <fundamentalist> is connected directly with the American Biblical Congress held at Niagara, N.Y., in 1895. At this meeting, conservative Protestant exegetes defined "five points of fundamentalism": the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, his virginal birth, the doctrine of vicarious expiation and the bodily resurrection at the time of the second coming of Christ. As the fundamentalist way of reading the Bible spread to other parts of the world, it gave rise to other ways of interpretation, equally "literalist," in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. As the 20th century comes to an end, this kind of interpretation is winning more and more adherents, in religious groups and sects, as also among Catholics.
Fundamentalism is right to insist on the divine inspiration of the Bible, the inerrancy of the word of God and other biblical truths included in its five fundamental points. But its way of presenting these truths is rooted in an ideology which is not biblical, whatever the proponents of this approach might say. For it demands an unshakable adherence to rigid doctrinal points of view and imposes, as the only source of teaching for Christian life and salvation, a reading of the Bible which rejects all questioning and any kind of critical research.
The basic problem with fundamentalist interpretation of this kind is that, refusing to take into account the historical character of biblical revelation, it makes itself incapable of accepting the full truth of the incarnation itself. As regards relationships with God, fundamentalism seeks to escape any closeness of the divine and the human. It refuses to admit that the inspired word of God has been expressed in human language and that this word has been expressed, under divine inspiration, by human authors possessed of limited capacities and resources. For this reason, it tends to treat the biblical text as if it had been dictated word for word by the Spirit. It fails to recognize that the word of God has been formulated in language and expression conditioned by various periods. It pays no attention to the literary forms and to the human ways of thinking to be found in the biblical texts, many of which are the result of a process extending over long periods of time and bearing the mark of very diverse historical situations.
Fundamentalism also places undue stress upon the inerrancy of certain details in the biblical texts, especially in what concerns historical events or supposedly scientific truth. It often historicizes material which from the start never claimed to be historical. It considers historical everything that is reported or recounted with verbs in the past tense, failing to take the necessary account of the possibility of symbolic or figurative meaning.
Fundamentalism often shows a tendency to ignore or to deny the problems presented by the biblical text in its original Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek form. It is often narrowly bound to one fixed translation, whether old or present-day. By the same token it fails to take account of the "re-readings" (<re-lectures>) of certain texts which are found within the Bible itself.
In what concerns the Gospels, fundamentalism does not take into account the development of the Gospel tradition, but naively confuses the final stage of this tradition (what the evangelists have written) with the initial (the words and deeds of the historical Jesus). At the same time fundamentalism neglects an important fact: The way in which the first Christian communities themselves understood the impact produced by Jesus of Nazareth and his message. But it is precisely there that we find a witness to the apostolic origin of the Christian faith and its direct expression. Fundamentalism thus misrepresents the call voiced by the Gospel itself.
Fundamentalism likewise tends to adopt very narrow points of view. It accepts the literal reality of an ancient, out-of-date cosmology simply because it is found expressed in the Bible; this blocks any dialogue with a broader way of seeing the relationship between culture and faith. Its relying upon a non-critical reading of certain texts of the Bible serves to reinforce political ideas and social attitudes that are marked by prejudices—racism, for example—quite contrary to the Christian Gospel.
Finally, in its attachment to the principle "Scripture alone," fundamentalism separates the interpretation of the Bible from the tradition, which, guided by the Spirit, has authentically developed in union with Scripture in the heart of the community of faith. It fails to realize that the New Testament took form within the Christian church and that it is the Holy Scripture of this church, the existence of which preceded the composition of the texts. Because of this, fundamentalism is often anti-church, it considers of little importance the creeds, the doctrines and liturgical practices which have become part of church tradition, as well as the teaching function of the church itself. It presents itself as a form of private interpretation which does not acknowledge that the church is founded on the Bible and draws its life and inspiration from Scripture.
The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. Without saying as much in so many words, fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.
This is not to say that the PBC quote, in full, is any more complimentary, but, at least it lays out the objections in an appropriate context.
Likewise, the quote from Neilos. Taken utterly out of context. The full quote is:
The story of Ish-bosheth also teaches us not to be over-anxious about bodily things, and not to rely on the senses to protect us. He was a king who went to rest in his chamber, leaving a woman as door-keeper. When the men of Rechab came, they found her dozing off as she was winnowing wheat; so, escaping her notice, they slipped in and slew Ish-bosheth while he was asleep (cf. 2 Sam. 4:5-8). Now when bodily concerns predominate, everything in man is asleep: th eintellect, the soul and the senses. For teh woman at the door winnowing wheat indicates the state of one whose reason is closely absorbed in physical things and trying with persistent efforts to purify them. It is clear that this story in Scripture should not be taken literally. For how could a king have a woman as door-keeper, when he ought properly to be guarded by a troop of soldiers, and to have round him a large body of attendants? Or how could he be so poor as to use her to winnow the wheat? But improbable details are often included in a story because of the deeper truths they signify. Thus the intellect in each of us resides within like a king, while the reason acts as door-keeper of the senses. When the reason occupies itself with bodily things – and to winnow wheat is something bodily – he enemy without difficulty slips past unnoticed and slays the intellect. This is why Abraham did not entrust the guarding of the door to a woman, knowing that the senses are easily deceived; for they take pleasure in the sight of sensory things, and so divide the intellect and persuade it to share in the sensual delights, although this is clearly dangerous. But Abraham himself sat by the door (cf. Gen 18:1), allowing free entry to divine thoughts, while barring the way to worldly cares.
And why bother quoting this monk anyway in an article about exegesis? Especially when the monk was writing about developing as an aesthetic!
A far better method for the author to use would have been to make the assertions about the defects in Fundamentalist exegesis and then to take an example of it and demonstrate why the technique is flawed.
But, as with many intellectuals, it sounds like a typical liberal telling us plebes why we should leave it to them. (thus producing modernism which is only now ripping apart the Church)
Argh...where to begin? “Interpretation must adhere to dogma”??? and not the other way around?