I object to the Christian Community Bible (CCB) because some of the commentary is, implicitly or not-so-subtly, anti-Catholic. I know for a fact that evangelicals participated in this translation and in the writing of some of the notes, and some of the notes can only be described as below-the-belt attacks on the Catholic Church. I hope that somebody can expunge these attacks from the CCB.
Much of the CCB commentary is very good and useful, but the anti-Church statements scattered here and there ought to be dealt with.
The introduction to Romans is particularly perverse. It has a reproduction of a medieval engraving of a papal Mass juxtaposed with a picture of a man carrying a wounded person, accompanied by a commentary that denounces the medieval Catholic Church in an utterly inaccurate manner, even attributing to the medieval
Catholic Church the belief in salvation by works (an odious lie.) The medieval Church is even described as “looking at itself instead of turning towards God… a Church whose whole system --political, doctrinal and repressive, blocked the horizon.”
Anybody with an unbiased and more than superficial knowledge of
medieval Church history will recognize this as a lie.
The late medieval Church was a Church in great mystical and spiritual ferment, where the hierarchy lived in constant tension with the growing national states, the pretensions of the Sorbonne, the effects of the birth of Rhineland, English and Lowland mysticism and the Florentine Renaissance, and the power of the Devotio Moderna. Luther’s work would not have been possible without this ferment, especially that of German mysticism.
In the CCB commentary on Rev 18, the following bewildering
statement is made: “The plan of salvation however, is constantly in danger: the greatest obstacles and delays often come from the Church herself, so often blind to the demands of the Gospel while she intends to conquer the world. Why these heavy and alienating
structures which finally make the Church a benefit mainly for the clerics and learned people while closing it to the poor or to the masses?”
One wonders how a Church that is “blind to the Gospel” can be the true Church, or what the anonymous commentator means by “heavy and alienating structures.” It is true that many clergy have forgotten the Gospel, but to attribute this blindness
to the Catholic Church itself is to confess that the gates of
hell have indeed prevailed over the Church. I do not even know what to make of the statement that the Church intends to “conquer the world”. That sounds more like something written by the Adventists or the INC about the Pope. To find it in a supposedly “Catholic” Bible is scandalous, to say the least.
There are other statements in CCB that have no place in a
“Catholic” Bible.
