[wideawake]

The fact is, ZC, that although the literal sense of Scripture is completely and unerringly true the literal sense is the foundation of Scriptural interpretation and not the entire building.

I know you know this because of your familiarity with rabbinical hermeneutics - a school of Scriptural interpretation that would appall the average Southern Christian fundamentalist.

While it is elitist and unChristian to mock and belittle the stereotypical "Bible Belt" Christian's approach to the Scriptures - and while it is entirely appropriate to take down the self-described "historical-critical school" of interpretation and its inherently godless asumptions - this is not an either/or proposition.

The Scriptures - precisely because they are not like any other book - cannot be constrained to any single, constricted school of interpretation.

As St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out, the words of a normal human book are merely descriptive but the words of Scripture do not merely describe - they accomplish with power what they describe, because they are the Word of God.

There is an approach to Scripture which kills the mind and there is an approach to Scripture which kills the soul.

Literalism is not the end of Scriptural exegesis - it is the necessary beginning.

[Quix]

Well put.

Thx.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Literalism is not the end of Scriptural exegesis - it is the necessary beginning.

You obviously didn't read the official statement of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in which they endorsed higher criticism, evolution, and the whole schmeer. And that's up at the Vatican's official web site.

The idea that any form of "orthodoxy" can be built on this blasphemous irreverence is ridiculous, and this hostility to the Bible dooms any and all "conservative" Catholic movements.

Can you imagine a mormon attacking the "book of mormon" as "mythology?" That would be insanity--as is the ancient liturgical churches' attack on the book which they claim is the "shadow" of their own beliefs.