The author is playing extremely manipulative word games in order to not be 'wrong'. The author is an A Not surprising as the author is a priest. Thanks for this article explaining what you understand to be the Catholic tradition of interpreting the Bible. You mentioned that the Bible draws you more deeply into the drama of salvation history. Can you explain what the other sources of faith and tradition are? Could you also explain why what Jesus did only abolishes your original sin and not your actual sin?
Post a Comment. Saturday, January 30, Literal or Literalist? Over the last few weeks, I've begun to notice a common refrain from my Hebrew Scripture and New Testament students. Very often, they will say things like, "Yeah, Mr. Duns, Catholics don't take the Bible literally.
You see, the trouble is that the students are not making a very important distinction If they did this already, I'd be out of a job! The distinction is between a literal and a literal ist reading of Scripture. Allow me to put on my teacher hat and help to bring out the importance of this distinction. Catholics associate a literal ist approach to the Bible with fundamentalists. On this view, if the Bible says that the world was created in six days then it was created in hours.
If the Bible says that humans were present at the very beginning of Creation, then the entire fossil record that shows no presence of human life for millions of years must be false. One might summarize the literalist position by saying: "The Bible says it, I believe it, case closed. It is, I fear, the literalist approach to the Scriptures that provides such rich ground for debates between science and religion, particularly in certain places where Bible-wielding Christians want evolution taught as "only a theory" and demand due attention to Creationist accounts of life on earth.
Evolution, which posits a very long, slow process of ever-greater complexity in living organisms, surely did not take place over the course of six days. The literalist is thus forced to choose between science and religion and to advocate that religious faith be taught as science.
So I'm glad to report that the Catholic Church chooses a different path, one that does not have to pit science against religion. What, then, is the Catholic approach to the Scriptures? We take it literally! But literal must be distinguished from literalistic. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:. The literal interpretation will try to understand what it is that the author wishes to convey the wide assortment of ways used to communicate its message to its readers.
Typically, we are quite adept at making the distinction between literal and literalistic speech. But with a literalist, these scriptures, even metaphoric scriptures, have only one meaning. Take the sower and the seed parable for example.
They are intended as a comparison. The seed is a representation of the Word of God. The weeds are a representation of our hearts. The weeds are things Satan plants in our hearts. But should we go to the extreme opposite and take the entire bible as subjective? Or are we to use logic while we study the Word? Even a literalist needs to use context in order to decipher what is being said. A logical contextualist knows a majority of the bible must be taken literally.
Otherwise the bible would have no real truth and would change in meaning every time you read it. If a person goes purely by the belief the bible is only context or metaphor, this removes all biblical truth. Morality would be different for each person. Our country was founded on freedom. You are commenting using your WordPress. Kids Definition of literal.
Is the Bible an allegory? Allegorical interpretation of the Bible is an interpretive method exegesis that assumes that the Bible has various levels of meaning and tends to focus on the spiritual sense, which includes the allegorical sense, the moral or tropological sense, and the anagogical sense, as opposed to the literal sense.
What is the definition of figurative language? Figurative language is when a writer describes something by comparing it with something else. It is writing that goes from the actual meaning of words at face value to get a special meaning.
Non-literal or figurative language refers to words, and groups of words, that change the normal meanings of the words. What is contextual interpretation? Contextual interpretation is a form of statutory interpretation widely used by the ECJ to override these types of problems. In other words according to the Contextual interpretation a statute should not be perceived as a single abstract but as an integral part of an organic whole.
What does non literal language mean? Non - literal or figurative language is language that goes beyond the dictionary meaning of words or phrases — not. How do literalists interpret the Genesis story? The Church interprets the Genesis account alongside science and reason to try and understand the key message — that God is responsible for the creation of the world.
Science may be able to explain how the universe was created, but Christians believe that religion explains the reason it was created.
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