The Rorate piece carried a picture of a book being consumed by flames with the caption: "Caution: 2,000-year-old book being 'developed.'" Pretty hard to miss his point. So what's the issue here?
Noir's email carried an excerpt from a Protestant blog exhibiting some significant slippage from the traditional idea of an inerrant Bible. But this was preceded by Noir's own comment: "Here is this PROTESTANT blog reflecting the regaining [sic] CATHOLIC mindset, coming perhaps to an official document near you ..."
Then come's Noir's ramble:“IS THE BIBLE INERRANT? | IS GOD VIOLENT?”
*Is it OK to question?*
-Is the Bible the “Word of God” and free from error? If so, how does one come to that conclusion?
-What role do assumptions and presuppositions have in our belief system?
-How does one reconcile the violent and retributive God of the Old Testament with the life and teachings of Jesus?
Whenever a “new” idea is proposed to a community, the questions one can ask are:
“WHAT IF?”
“IS IT POSSIBLE?”
Listen in as Joshua Tongol shares his heart and answers questions on this very subject. It might give you a different perspective on things.
Question: Is this not exactly the idea you would hear form most Catholics today, and is this not also exactly opposite of the ideas presented in Providentissimus Deus? To my ears it sounds lifted almost straight from one of any of several Joseph Ratzinger passages. And it all raises again the question of whether the Bible sits under the Church or the Church sits under the Bible, how so, and to what extent. Writing off Old Testament violence wholesale -- Wrath, The Flood, Judgement via Active Violence -- however, certainly seems to suggest the latter. "We don't like this, it can't be good, it seems anti-New Testament, so it most certainly is not inspired." Which would suggest we jettison the better part of the history of Israel, if we were honest. Not too mention the theologizing of 90 percent of the historical papacy.Well it's not hard to see how the followers of "Pope" Joshua Tongol reach such a pass, but what can we say of Catholics? Could more than a handful of Catholic Bible scholars today be said to endorse the view of Scripture found in Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical? Why is this?
5 comments:
The thing that dogs Protestants is their Perspicuity doctrine(i.e. Scripture is clear without Church or Tradition) combined with Sola Scriptura.
Ironically Gnu Atheists I have pimp slapped over the past few years presuppose these doctrines when they polemic the Bible. It's great fun to tweek them & cheese them off by pointing out the majority of their polemics are non-starters for a Catholic.
Some of the Problems that bug this Protestant can be solved with an appeal to tradition.
For example extra Biblical Jewish Tradition teaches the Canaanites where given a chance beforehand to flee or stay and embrace the Seven Laws of Noah.
When Moses told the Israelites to slaughter the Midianites including male infants but spare the female ones according to a Tradition passed on by Philo they did in fact spare the male infants.
OTOH according to both Jewish and Catholic traditiona unlike the concept of Jihad which seems open ended the command of Haraam can only be given by a public divine revelation to an authority appointed by God via divine revelation. Since the death of the last Apostle and the extinction of the Old Testament national commonwealth of Israel this command cannot be given today.
additionally:
I just had a thought no doubt you all smelled the smoke.
What we see here is modern Evangelicalism going the way of the mainstream Protestant denominations before them into liberalism.
At the risk of sounding triumphalist, a hundred years from now when the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God are ordaining Lesbian ministers the Catholic Church will still have an all male Priesthood and still won't allow "gay marriage".
A week or so ago, M.J. was speaking with the just retired 70 y.o. Pastor of Holy Redeemer Church in Bar Harbor, Maine and he asked M.J. if he wanted to take any books from his personal library - accumulated while at Seminary etc.
The collection deserved burning; from Schillebeeckx (sp?) to Kung to Rahner, it was a mephitic wall of modernism.
This is the sort of spiritual indoctrination that has been visited upon seminarians for the past one-half century and more; it's a surprise things are not even worse than they are.
When M.J talks to priests and cites, say, a Lapide, he may as well being speaking to them about a scout for the Montreal Allouettes; they have never even heard of Lapide to say nothing about reading him whereas not so long ago, his collection of biblical exegesis was as common a source for priests preparing their sermons as the presence of some fat ignorant liberal broad working as Chancellor in some dead diocese is now.
Have you read the trilogy about Jesus written by he who abdicated? Look at the source citations; a preponderance of prots.
It is as though the Oakland Raiders Game Program was filled with information about the Kansas City Chiefs; nah, just kidding, the Raiders take pride in their past.
Read the Catechism; read the recent Encyclicals (since 1962) and see the dearth or references to the Doctors of the Church and that which preceded the revolution.
We have cut ourselves off from the past and sold Tradition for the pottage of professional protestant approval and we have made our seminarians stupid so as to keep them more easily manipulated into going along with the revolution for IF seminarians had been educated as they once were, then the task of concretising the revolution would have been that much more difficult.
It is institutional indoctrination into the brave new world of indifferentism where Buddhists and Protestants and Mahometans will all take their place in the one world religious unity of service to man where diversity (heresy) will be welcome but not Tradition.
If one is not an autodidact who finds his own way to Tradition with its innumerable GREAT sources, one will soon awaken happy in the new day of universal salvation; a day where the Bishop of Rome tells his Bishops he wants them to smell like the sheep they have led to the door of the abattoir of Indifferentism.
Still, there are some good deals to be had on quality cabernet so one learns to take the good with the bad.
A couple of observations: some of the more mainline Protestants do appeal to more than the Bible to support their doctrine -- I think these would include the Methodist and Lutheran as well as, preeminently, the Anglicans. But the problem that continues to hound them is that they have no magisterium to settle the question of how their traditions should be interpreted, no less than their Scripture.
Still, I would not quite want to be "triumphalist" about any of this in our day and age. True, in one way or other, the Church will weather its current storms as she has weathered the multitude of others that pepper her history. However, we can hardly be triumphalist about the fact that many of the highest prelates in the Church have drunk the cultural Kool Aid and are proposing "pastoral solutions" to various issues that fly in the face of our own Sacred Tradition.
That's where MJY's suggestion about "cabernet" begins to look good, along with a call to fervent prayer.
Ben writes, "What we see here is modern Evangelicalism going the way of the mainstream Protestant denominations before them into liberalism." I have to agree!
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