Dangerous biblical study

[The_GreyPilgrim]

Why do Catholics read the bible?

Because its our book. It’s our family history. Its our salvation history.

If an unlearned person can twist scripture to ones own destruction and private interpretation leads to disaster wouldn’t one be better off simply going to mass and remaining ignorant.

Learned people do just as much, if not more, damage twisting scripture than any ignorant or unlearned ever did. The biggest heretics in Church history were all learned men.

But it wasn’t what they taught that made them heretics. It was their PRIDE, their refusal to be corrected by the authority of the Church, that made them heretics.

For many centuries the Church would not allow lay people to read the bible at all and if this is what they believe they did so consistently and wisely.

The “ignorant” heard the Bible daily at Mass. Within a three year span they would have heard the entire Bible just by going to Mass daily. They knew the Bible because of the Mass.

Your charge is based on a false claim out of Lorraine Boettner’s farce “Roman Catholicism”. Its a distortion of history.

Why now are Catholics allowed to study Gods word?

Becauase there is nothing in it that directly contradicts anything that the Church teaches.

Would the early church fathers such as Polycarp and Ignatious be for or against everyone having a bible? I do not understand the logic behind the change.

No, they would be more upset by so many protestants calling themselves “Christians” yet refusing to be in the Church and calling the Eucharist a “symbol”.

The “logic” has to do with St. Jerome, “Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.” The Church is going to remove this mistaken notion that the Church is somehow “afraid” of the Bible or that the charge from protestants that the Church is not Biblically based is in any way true.

It is also an acceptance that we are better served by addressing protestant charges by responding with the Bible than with a catechism. That the english translations currently used(and which are free from the hundreds of errors that were common at the advent of the printing press-hence the Church’s “ban”) are sure guides to the faithful.

A more interesting question is that why do protestants continue to study the Bible because, in so many ways, they get it wrong?

 

[Boywonder23k]

Yes William Tyndale was accused of these same “vernacular” errors. However, I have never met a Catholic who could give to me an example of one of his errors. Or perhaps you could site an error that the inquisition in Toulouse was battling? Strangely no one has any specifics.

 

[DJK100]

Yes William Tyndale was accused of these same “vernacular” errors. However, I have never met a Catholic who could give to me an example of one of his errors. Or perhaps you could site an error that the inquisition in Toulouse was battling? Strangely no one has any specifics.

The first is the link to the prologues the second is a link to the translations. They have different word choices throughout, which point to where errors might have been. This is Mario Valente’s free on-line version from the original Tyndale bible.

faithofgod.net/TyNT/Prologue.htm

faithofgod.net/TyNT/

Besides I think you are getting off topic. Aren’t you asking why it is bad for Catholics to read the bible.

Maybe you should get the book Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating.

 

[Boywonder23k]

Because its our book. It’s our family history. Its our salvation history.

All Christians say the same thing. You admit that the catholic church is nothing at all like the patristic father. Or at least as different as an acorn is from
An oak tree!!! Or a butterfly from a caterpillar. The catholic church has no more claim to church history than any protestant. If you can claim “doctrinal growth” so can we.

Learned people do just as much, if not more, damage twisting scripture than any ignorant or unlearned ever did. The biggest heretics in Church history were all learned men.

Your argument is with scripture not with me. The bible claims that unlearned men twist scripture to their own destruction. Apparently you disagree.

No, they would be more upset by so many protestants calling themselves “Christians” yet refusing to be in the Church and calling the Eucharist a “symbol”.

The catholic church calls Protestants “separated breatheren” so I’m not sure why you have Christians in quotations. Most Protestants including Lutherans believe in the real presence. Straw man argument. The current fad out of Rome is inclusivism so your condescension is halarious.

A more interesting question is that why do protestants continue to study the Bible because, in so many ways, they get it wrong?

Laughable.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

That is my point.

understand.

 

[SaintPatrick333]

Laughable.

Why are you on here my friend? You won’t listen to what anyone is saying. And when you think you have something to stump catholics (since you’re obviously such an intellectual) and then it gets refuted (easily at that since the Truth of Christ is on our side not yours) you instead try to change topics. Why not turn this around. What proof do you have that “your” church is correct? Hmm? You can’t say scriptures because you don’t have them all, presuming you use the kjv anyways.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Why are you on here my friend? You won’t listen to what anyone is saying. And when you think you have something to stump catholics (since you’re obviously such an intellectual) and then it gets refuted (easily at that since the Truth of Christ is on our side not yours) you instead try to change topics. Why not turn this around. What proof do you have that “your” church is correct? Hmm? You can’t say scriptures because you don’t have them all, presuming you use the kjv anyways.

It seems to me that when a poster attacks another, it is because the attacker needed to experience attacking. It is not because the receiver needed to be attacked. If we disagree with a position, that’s fine; we can disagree all day without attacking.

Attack can be indirect and subtle (implicit) and can depend on the exact word choice and emoticons.

The words are mightier than swords – and they can cut “both” ways. :knight2: :knight1:

Alan

 

[The_GreyPilgrim]

Because its our book. It’s our family history. Its our salvation history.

I admitted no such thing. The Church is our mother, not father.

Or at least as different as an acorn is from
An oak tree!!! Or a butterfly from a caterpillar.

Boywonder, and acorn IS an oak tree. It is an oak tree in its potentiality. The same as a caterpillar IS a butterfly in its potentiality. Your example doesn’t make sense.

The catholic church has no more claim to church history than any protestant. If you can claim “doctrinal growth” so can we.

Then you don’t know the history. The Catholic Church’s teachings are comparitive as to branches coming from roots-leaves coming from branches, etc.

Protestantism’s teachings would have us suppose that from the pont of branches all of a sudden instead of leaves you have rocks or birds or even money growing from them.

Its like that song goes, “one of these things is not like the other…”

Furthermore, your “doctrinal growth” would have to agree with the Apostolic, post-Apostolic, and patristic periods as well. Which when you actually examine protestant doctrine against those of the Chruch fathers protetsantism falls apart. Those certain movements that the Church condemned as heretical, that you may look to as “proto-protestants” when further examined are all gnostic aberrations that you would find appalling and are in no way “christian”.

You really shouldn’t get your “history” from Lorraine Boettner.

Learned people do just as much, if not more, damage twisting scripture than any ignorant or unlearned ever did. The biggest heretics in Church history were all learned men.

No, your argument was vague as is your premise and terms. You never cited a verse from Scripture, you simply made an assertion seemingly based on history. My response was based on your assertion.

My use of “learned” was a relative term in response to your term of “ignorant”. Of course those who think of themselves as such yet twist Scripture are in fact “unlearned” or foolish in doing so.

So no, my argument IS with you and your lack of clarity, not with the Bible.

No, they would be more upset by so many protestants calling themselves “Christians” yet refusing to be in the Church and calling the Eucharist a “symbol”.

Lutherans do NOT believe in the Real Presence as the Catholic Church does. Their theology is “consubstantiation”, not “transubstantiation”. You DO know the difference, don’t you?

Nor does every Lutheran believe that Jesus remains with the Eucharist once the service over, so on and so forth. So no, they are not even close to being the same.

The “fad” is tolerance for the sake of ecumenism which in no way sacrifices our faith, not “inclusivism” which like in non-denominational protestantism relativizes sound doctrine to a watered-down lowest-common-denominator feel-good subjective moralist religion.

As far as “condescension” you get what you give.

And BTW a “Straw Man” is when someone re-presents your argument in a distorted way based upon a false understanding of your views. You simply asked the question of what would Polycarp or Ignatius would say about the laity reading the Bible. And I answered it. That’s not a strawman, that’s answering a foolish speculative question with a speculative answer.

You should get your informal fallacies straight before you start pulling them out.

Protestants in general reject the Eucharist as the Catholic Church has known it and refer to it often as merely a “symbol”. That is a fact, not a strawman.

A more interesting question is that why do protestants continue to study the Bible because, in so many ways, they get it wrong?

They why is it that the word “alone” never appears in the Bible after “faith” that is unless to say that we are NOT saved by “faith alone”?

Why doesn’t “scripture alone” appear in the Bible at all?

Lets begin with these shall we?

 

[AlanFromWichita]

What does this mean?

Rev 22:18-19
I warn everyone who hears the prophetic words in this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words in this prophetic book, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city described in this book.

Does that apply just to Revelation? “Prophetic book?” Were the original writings even broken up into separate books? What book are we talking about?

Alan

 

[Tony_the_mad]

It seems to me that when a poster attacks another, it is because the attacker needed to experience attacking. It is not because the receiver needed to be attacked. If we disagree with a position, that’s fine; we can disagree all day without attacking.

Attack can be indirect and subtle (implicit) and can depend on the exact word choice and emoticons.

The words are mightier than swords – and they can cut “both” ways. :knight2: :knight1:

Alan

I agree that attacks can be indirect and subtle; care must be taken though not to be too subtle in that it is easy to see attacks that simply are not there.

As far as receiver needing to be attacked, it depends. If someone goes into an ethnic neighborhood and yells at the top of his lungs ethnic slurs against the people in that neighborhood, then I am inclined to think that person gets what he deserves. Someone that walks into a tough bar and sporting for a fight should not be surprised and indignant when someone gives it to him.

That being said, bullies are the worst at saying someone else started it or that the bullied deserves it. So I don’t want to side with the attackers either.

As far as to the original question about what benefit do Catholics get out of reading the Bible. Catholics, as a general rule, don’t read the Bible because the have to or some cost vs benefits analysis. They read it because they want to. The freedom from scripture as the only source of inspiration allows us to enjoy and appreciated the Bible in a way that a protestant cannot truly understand. The Bible isn’t a constitution to try to find hidden meaning in and to make dry legal cases over. It is a time capsule into beliefs and thoughts of the earliest Church. Like all time capsules it is both amazing in some details and completely lacking in others. Catholics study the Bible in the way that someone might study a family tree; we try to find out who we are now by studying our past and who we were.

When Christ says “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood you shall not have life within you” We take Him at his word without the need to think him as a vampire or without having to resort to strained symbolism. We don’t need to do any Bible code or to take short passages out of context to make the Bible make sense. When Romans seems to contradict some portions of Church teaching, we can remain confident from the words of Christ that support them in addition to portions Corinthians, James, etc.

I apologize for the rambling. And I cannot truly speak for all Catholics.But I truly believe, that most Catholics who study and try to practice their faith will to a large extent agree at least with the direction of my analysis even if they differ in detail.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

I agree that attacks can be indirect and subtle; care must be taken though not to be too subtle in that it is easy to see attacks that simply are not there.

As far as receiver needing to be attacked, it depends. If someone goes into an ethnic neighborhood and yells at the top of his lungs ethnic slurs against the people in that neighborhood, then I am inclined to think that person gets what he deserves. Someone that walks into a tough bar and sporting for a fight should not be surprised and indignant when someone gives it to him.

That being said, bullies are the worst at saying someone else started it or that the bullied deserves it. So I don’t want to side with the attackers either.

I agree with you; I meant my comments to apply only to posting at CAF. If there is serious abuse, it’s up to the mods. If these isn’t, there is no reason a poster has to be nasty, no matter what the provocation. They may be nasty, but not because they didn’t have a choice.

Alan

 

[Boywonder23k]

Thank you all very much for your replies. This is not meant to be an inflammatory post and I appreciate the response. For the record I have never read boetner. If tyndale was killed for spelling errors and minor hermeneutical errors in my humble opinion that is repressing the bible. That is absolutely NOT on par with “Jehovah witness” heresies. Also as I have already stated no one can ever show what horrible heresies in Toulouse were being fought. Catholics just simply assert that if the church brutally murdered someone for trying to translate the bible it’s because these people made gigantic jehovah witness type errors in translation. I have never seen evidence to support this assertion. Catholics would have more cred by just simply saying “yes we shouldn’t have done that but it wasn’t an official doctrine to suppress the bible” or some such thing. Also it is odd that all of these countries went through all the risk to defy the Church and translate the bible of there was literally no one that could read? Seems like there must surely have been SOME audience for these martyrs.

Be that as it may that is not the primary reason for this thread and I am not the one who took it off topic. I was really Hoping for a logical cohesive response to why a catholic would risk reading the bible In light of 2 Peter 3:16 which states that unlearned men twist scriptures to their own destruction. If I was a catholic who had an “infallible” church to teach me why take the risk?

Fun fact saint Jerome also rejected the deuterocanonical books.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

When men are born of the spirit, they don’t have that problem again.

 

[Shannon9791]

Be that as it may that is not the primary reason for this thread and I am not the one who took it off topic. I was really Hoping for a logical cohesive response to why a catholic would risk reading the bible In light of 2 Peter 3:16 which states that unlearned men twist scriptures to their own destruction. If I was a catholic who had an “infallible” church to teach me why take the risk?

Fun fact saint Jerome also rejected the deuterocanonical books.

I’ll give this a crack, but I have to answer your question with a question. Why wouldn’t a Catholic read scripture? When we go to mass, we have 3 readings, plus a Psalm, and the Eucharistic prayer is taken almost word for word from Scripture. Why wouldn’t a Catholic want to go and read where those words came from? The Church has really only interpreted a few verses of the Bible infallibly, so a lot of it is still open for interpretation, as long as how the interpreter sees it is in line with Church teaching.

Take Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. Many think it’s about a guy who squanders his dad’s money, then realizes his mistake and asks forgiveness. Some might think it’s about a dad who is there waiting for his son to realize his mistake and throw forgiveness at him. Still others might think it’s about a brother who did all the stuff he was supposed to and felt out of place when his filandering little brother decided to buck up and do what’s right. All three interpretations of that story follow Church teaching in one way or another. How one can’t interpret it though, is that Jesus is saying “Hey guys, take half your pop’s property, and go spend in on booze and women because it’s cool to live that way.” Does that make any sense?

Reading the Bible is like reading any other book. You have to view it in light of the teachings that surround it. You’re not ever going to open a physics book and read about Newton’s laws of motion and decide to interpret them in a way that is not consistent with the way they’ve been taught for the past 500 years. It’s the same thing with Catholics reading the Bible.

 

[itullian]

because when you read it through Catholic eyes whole new dimensions and depths become apparent. the real Christ and glory shine through.
you need to watch Scott Hahns youtubes.

 

[robwar]

Thank you all very much for your replies. This is not meant to be an inflammatory post and I appreciate the response. For the record I have never read boetner. If tyndale was killed for spelling errors and minor hermeneutical errors in my humble opinion that is repressing the bible. That is absolutely NOT on par with “Jehovah witness” heresies. Also as I have already stated no one can ever show what horrible heresies in Toulouse were being fought. Catholics just simply assert that if the church brutally murdered someone for trying to translate the bible it’s because these people made gigantic jehovah witness type errors in translation. I have never seen evidence to support this assertion. Catholics would have more cred by just simply saying “yes we shouldn’t have done that but it wasn’t an official doctrine to suppress the bible” or some such thing. Also it is odd that all of these countries went through all the risk to defy the Church and translate the bible of there was literally no one that could read? Seems like there must surely have been SOME audience for these martyrs.

Be that as it may that is not the primary reason for this thread and I am not the one who took it off topic. I was really Hoping for a logical cohesive response to why a catholic would risk reading the bible In light of 2 Peter 3:16 which states that unlearned men twist scriptures to their own destruction. If I was a catholic who had an “infallible” church to teach me why take the risk?

Fun fact saint Jerome also rejected the deuterocanonical books.

But St jerome later did translate the deuterocanonical books in submission to the church. he expressed his concern but still obeyed. Have you ever been to a Catholic Mass?
The Catholic Mass has more scripture in it than any protestant service. Not only the 3 readings (OT, NT and Gospels) but a reading from Psalms in-between the first two, plus most of our prayers are directly from scripture as well as the creeds, responses etc.
The Bible is a Catholic Book, it was never banned from anyone and to brings up what happen to old heretics from the middle ages doesn’t prove your point. I am surprised you did not bring up Wycliff who also was jailed. What is commonly said by Protestants is that he was jailed for trying to translate the Bible into English but in actuality he was jailed because he taught a heresy that the Eucharist is just a memorial not the real presence, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ.

 

[robwar]

Be that as it may that is not the primary reason for this thread and I am not the one who took it off topic. I was really Hoping for a logical cohesive response to why a catholic would risk reading the bible In light of 2 Peter 3:16 which states that unlearned men twist scriptures to their own destruction. If I was a catholic who had an “infallible” church to teach me why take the risk?

Fun fact saint Jerome also rejected the deuterocanonical books.

So your point is that us unlearned Catholics should not read their own book? Your logic here is very poor and insulting

 

[AlanFromWichita]

The only thing dangerous about studying the Bible is to be sure you understand any particular part of it. You don’t analyze the Bible, you experience it.

Protestants love to say “personal relationship with Jesus” but does that mean you’re a doctor of His Body and understand how it all works? No. Just like ingesting His Word through scripture. Take it and eat it; that is His Body. Taste and see the goodness; don’t try to reduce it to a verbal description. For best results, that is. Share ideas, but never argue. Arguing is stupid, and it does take two. It takes one to be a fool, but two to have a foolish argument.

 

[pablope]

Thank you all very much for your replies.

Fun fact saint Jerome also rejected the deuterocanonical books.

Fun fact correction…Jerome did not reject the Deutero books. He had an opinion or concerns about the books which he expressed rightly so to the Pope. But the pope overruled him…and he obeyed and placed these his Vulgate.

He obeyed…and also, he did not rebel or establish his own religion or denomination after the pope decided.

 

[The_Patriarch]

Laughable.

What is laughable?