This report shows the changing faces of religion.

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

Read: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1811332,00.html

[PASSAGES SAID TO BE LITERALLY] UNTRUE [BY THE BISHOPS}
Genesis ii, 21-22
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man

Genesis iii, 16
God said to the woman [after she was beguiled by the serpent]: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

Matthew xxvii, 25
The words of the crowd: “His blood be on us and on our children.”

Revelation xix,20
And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshipped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with brimstone.”

So what do you think about this amendment?

Is the book The GIft of Scripture in which these views were proposed actually sanctioned by the Pope? Because, you know, in a large church like the Catholic church it is possible for some top-ranking leaders to have opinions that differ from that of the main man.

Can anyone here shed light on the Catholic publication, "The Gift of Scripture"?

The Bible: Inerrant, Inspired, or Just a Good Read?

1)Early Christians firmly believed that the Word of God was eternal, divine, and living.
2)They were not referring to the Bible, but Jesus, the Word (logos) of God (John 1:1-18).
3)The Bible is the testimony of God-inspired writers to God's saving action throughout history, culminating in God the Word becoming human.
4)Thus, Jesus is the true Word of God, and the Bible is the word of God in that it points to him and contains God's revelation throughout history.
5)While this realization may seem to lower the status of the Bible, it is simply giving the credit for all Truth, contained in the Bible or any place else, to Jesus.

Remember, most early churches didn't have complete copies of the Bible. Copying a book was expensive and time-consuming, so churches usually had only a few books. An individual possessing a copy of the Bible would have been rare, except perhaps the very wealthy. Nonetheless, through the oral preaching and teaching of the apostolic faith, worship, and the Scriptures they had in their possession, they knew Jesus, the eternal Word, quite well.

What might come as a shock to many modern-day Christians, the early Church also placed more emphasis on the message of scripture over actual words on pages. The early Church was not so much concerned with the words, but rather with what the text tells us about Jesus and the Christian faith. Thus, they often found multiple layers of meaning in the text, which of course included, but was not limited to, the literal one. Nonetheless, they had a high view of scripture as uniquely divinely inspired and accurate writings. However, the Bible was never officially declared inerrant to the letter before the Reformation. No early creed says one must believe the Bible is inerrant to the letter to be a true Christian.

The early Fathers seemed to have held that the Bible was, in a way, inerrant. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches affirm this as well. However, this is the case only when the Bible is properly understood. This is inerrancy by ancient standards and not modern, fundamentalist standards.

The early Fathers did not think that minor contradictions rendered the Bible errant, nor did they insist all stories were meant to be interpreted literally. For instance, the creation stories were often allegorized, interpreted in ways so as to prefigure Christ, or interpreted through the lens of the science of the day (or all three!). Thus St. Augustine could say each day in the Genesis creation story was equal to a thousand years, or that the science of the day should shape our understanding of the creation stories, without ever denying the divine inspiration of the scriptures. So when a Catholic affirms the inerrancy of Scripture, the term has far less baggage than the more fundamentalist understanding.
Interestingly, many early Christian writers were well aware of contradictions within the scriptures, even in the gospels, and did not seem too bothered by it. Tertullian (AD 200) said, "Never mind if there does occur some variation in the order of the [gospel] narratives. What matters is that there is agreement in the essential doctrine of the Faith" (Against Marcion, IV:2). St. John Chrysostom (AD 390) was even bolder (at least to modern ears) to suggest that contradictions in the gospels actually strengthen the conviction that Christianity is true. If the gospel authors agreed in every small detail, then it was obvious that the stories were forgeries by a group of dishonest early Christians in collusion with one another. He even says, "the discord which seems to be present in little matters shields [the authors] from every suspicion and vindicates the character of the writers" (Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, I:6).

Even today, we Christians are far more credible if we admit to minor Biblical contradictions rather than trying come up with absurd, non-realistic stories designed to make the gospel accounts completely harmonize. So without denying the Bible's inspiration or essential accuracy, many Church Fathers recognized minor contradictions and variants in the text.

Thus the view of the early Church is that the Bible is an accurate, God-inspired testimony, the written document accurately reporting the foundations of the faith, but not necessarily inerrant as defined by modern criteria, and the Old Testament is certainly not inerrant when exclusively interpreted literally.

Now let's examine some views of the Bible that tend to be inadequate. The first is the tendency to cut-up the canon of Scripture, or "find" the Word of God within the Bible. This is a tendency among liberal Christians and religious scholars. This is not new. A man by the name of Marcion did this in the 2nd century. He threw out the Old Testament and accepted only a mutilated gospel of Luke and 10 of Paul's letters. In response, the Church agreed that cutting up the (then developing) canon to suit one's theological suppositions is wrong. The early Fathers asserted that the entire Bible (which for most early Christians included what is now called the deuterocanon, universally accepted by Catholic and Orthodox Christians as Scripture) is God's word, not just the parts that we happen to find appealing.

Another inadequate view of Scripture is one that looks at Scripture primariily in a rationalistic and mechanistic manner, treating the Bible more as a scientific and historiclal textbook than the revelation of God. While some Christians from earlier periods held this view, it primarily developed during the modern period. The Reformation and Renaissance began the modern period. It was then that words became more important than symbol, sacrament, and mystery, probably because of the advancement of empirical science. At this point the accuracy of the message of the Bible became tied to the absolute inerrancy of the Bible to the letter. Also (again due to the study of empirical science), in many circles a literal reading became the only appropriate way to read the Bible, and finding other layers of meaning is condemned.
Recent writers (both conservative and liberal) teach that truth must be scientifically rational and provable by science.
Under these new criteria, if the Bible is not inerrant to the letter, the whole faith falls apart, a presupposition that the early Church did not share.
Contradictions can be found in the Bible, as well as areas that conflict with recent scientific observations.
So using the same presuppositions, the Bible's message is tied to its inerrancy and literal readings), some began to say that we must reject the Christian faith because the Bible is full of contradictions.
The extreme position today is that the Bible is either fully literally true, or else an outdated error-riddled product.

The Creation Genesis, chapters 1 and 2

There are two primary lessons taught in the creation story.

The natural universe and all things therein are a creation of God.

Human beings are a special and unique creation of God created for a very special purpose in God's plan

The primary focus of the Bible is God's revelation of Himself to mankind. The Bible is God's witness to help the human race know who God is.

Genesis is the book of beginnings. It tells of the beginning of the physical universe as we know it, including our earth and all things thereon. It appropriately begins with the declaration, "In the beginning God..."

The message from this first Bible verse through the last verse of Revelation is that God is the beginning, the end, and the fulfillment of all things.

There are many evidences that God does indeed exist. This is a topic we discuss in-depth later.

The creation account was not intended to be a treatise on science. Modern scientific discovery does not contradict the creation account. In fact, the more we learn through science the more we discover about the way God is. In our continuing studies we will look at some of those confirmations.

The final creation of God was His most impressive. God created a living human being "in His image". No other creature of God was so created.

''So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Genesis 26,27

Being made in the image of God separates human beings with certain abilities that no other creation has...such as the ability to love, to reason things out, to make plans and decisions. Man has the capacity to think, to feel and to make decisions, while the animal world functions only on instinct.

Humans were also given a living soul that will live forever. Humans were created as "eternal" beings who shall forever exist. This is a gift that no animal species has been given. The soul of man is the eternal part of our existence. It is that part of us that shall live forever even after the physical body is laid to rest at death.

Because of these special characteristics of being made in the image of God as an eternal being, every human being is distinguished to be a special creation. For this reason alone every single person on earth has infinite worth and equal value.

This is the Bible story of the creation. It reveals to us two important lessons.

It reveals from where all things have come, that God has made the entire universe and everything in it just as it currently exists.
It reveals to us that every human being is a unique and special creation of God, and that our lives have a special and important purpose.

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

It took them 2000 years to realise that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

Its really strange coming form those who boast about having created the canon. It also shows that having put the books together doesn't of itself indicate that those who did it are influenced by it. That has been the history of the Catholic organization from ever since.

I am not surprised to hear this.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

The bible is SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN LITERALLY. There is a lot of INNER meaning to the stories in the bible. The uninitiated keep taking these things literally and also keep running into crisis . . .

@ imhotep

But what does that have to do with the topic?

Bobbyaf:

@ imhotep

But what does that have to do with the topic?

EVERYTHING. Where is it written IN THE BIBLE that "the bible is INERRANT AND INTERNALLY CONSISTENT"