Does the Catholic Church recognize the story of Noah and the flood as being literally true?

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buffalo said:
In each and every case God gave them warnings and the people basically said - “up yours.”
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That’s the myth, of course. We don’t know that everyone in the world except the eight guys on the Ark said this. Besides, they didn’t speak English.
 
The problem I have Is I see a flat one- dimensional take on Genesis and not the layers of meaning that is there. Genesis is not a simple cute story involving all these images that are fed to the little uns’. No . It is much deeper, more incisive about the follies and triumphs of humanity. The people act and do things that are very real and that we can relate to if we don’t dismiss it as a nice comfortable feeling story. One of the things the Bible is supposed to do is see yourself in the vast array of characters portrayed. if we don’t see the positive and the negative side of ourselves therein we are not looking hard enough.
God’s love is there.
as well as His Justice but written in the theology ,language and style of the time which is different then ours and which we must seek out to fully understand what , in all it’s depth, is being said and not just stare into the shallows.
 
buffalo said:
If an elevator appeared right in front of you right now that would take you to God would you get on it?
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That depends on whether there was ID that proved he was God. Also it would depend on what time I could return, as I have to pick up my young son at 6:30m and I don’t want to leave my sister hanging. If I could get out of jury duty in January I might consider it.
 
StAnastasia said:
That depends on whether there was ID that proved he was God. Also it would depend on what time I could return, as I have to pick up my young son at 6:30m and I don’t want to leave my sister hanging. If I could get out of jury duty in January I might consider it.
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Don’t try to use satire. Remember they are literalists!🙂
 
StAnastasia said:
That depends on whether there was ID that proved he was God. Also it would depend on what time I could return, as I have to pick up my young son at 6:30m and I don’t want to leave my sister hanging. If I could get out of jury duty in January I might consider it.
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Interesting answer - yes duty to your children is important, but jury duty?

You would not return. If God came calling and said “StA I wish you to be with me now, your children will be taken care of” would you go?
 
juliamajor said:
Don’t try to use satire. Remember they are literalists!🙂
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Yes indeed - I read scripture as the Church has taught and understood for a millenia being what the author intended to convey. Don’t you? Or are you more of a Protestant - giving it your own meaning?
 
buffalo said:
How bout you julia - would you go?
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Where ? on the fundamentalist express? No thank you. 🙂
Since I learned scripture in My Diocesan Seminary by diocesan teachers and being certified by the Diocese I think it’s safe to say Catholic after the spirit of “Divino Spiritu Afflante” and “Dei Verbum”. with a bit of “Fide et Ratio”!
 
juliamajor said:
Where ? on the fundamentalist express? No thank you. 🙂
Since I learned scripture in My Diocesan Seminary by diocesan teachers and being certified by the Diocese I think it’s safe to say Catholic after the spirit of “Divino Spiritu Afflante” and “Dei Verbum”. with a bit of “Fide et Ratio”!
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Huh?

The question is - if God called you to be with Him this very minute would you go?
 
buffalo said:
Itinerant1 - with all these links you posted the next question is - how did the flood narrative stay in the Bible? Why didn’t the Catholic Church find it non-canonical? This simple step would have saved us all a bunch of posts.🙂

Was the Holy Spirit sleeping on the job again?

Was there a man named Noah at all? What about the genealogies and his offspring?
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The very nature of your question reveals your misunderstanding about the Bible. The articles from the Catholic Encyclopedia are indicative of the views, generally speaking, of a majority of Catholic Biblical scholars. You are seeing a problem where one does not exist, and clearly the Biblical Commission and the Vatican see no problem here.

Digression:
There are biblical scholars that have gone liberal and cannot be trusted. An example, is Raymond Brown’s later works. Raymond Brown and his ilk even lost a sense for how language, inspiration, composition, and various literary genres work. This is evidenced by the article in the Jerome Biblical Commentary that concludes that a word in Scripture cannot have more than one intended meaning. LOL

The Bible is, in regard to authorship, both Divine and human. The sacred writers used the literary genres most appropriate to conveying God’s message. The sacred writers composed under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Divine influence was such that whatever the sacred writer intended to teach would be inerrant.

Yet infallibility in regard to the religious message is not by itself sufficient for a work to be considered canonical. For example, the letters of Clement to the Church at Rome were among the many writings circulated in the early Church as if they were Scripture. Many of these writings were theologically flawless. To be considered Canonical a work had to have something in addition. What that was, to make this brief, the work, whether OT or NT, possessed a special Divine mark or seal of approval. Even St. Jerome and St. Augustine had disagreements about which writings should be considered canonical. Yet, the Church finally decided, infallibly, on a Canonical list.

It was all well and good until Martin Luther came along. He was a genius in the area of literature but he had personal issues (psyche problems). Luther said Revelations was neither “apostolic nor prophetic” and that James’ epistle was an “epistle of straw,” and James was “raving mad with his zeal for good works”. In truth, it was Luther who was raving mad against any zeal for good works.

Digression over:
In a nutshell — Your literalism bias presumes that a biblical account needs to be historical in order for it to be true. You do not correctly realize how the human element works. With sacred writers, God does not do away with the usual human ways of writing or composition – rather He elevates and guides it in the same way grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
 
itinerant1 said:
The very nature of your question reveals your misunderstanding about the Bible. The articles from the Catholic Encyclopedia are indicative of the views, generally speaking, of a majority of Catholic Biblical scholars. You are seeing a problem where one does not exist, and clearly the Biblical Commission and the Vatican see no problem here.

Digression:
There are biblical scholars that have gone liberal and cannot be trusted. An example, is Raymond Brown’s later works. Raymond Brown and his ilk even lost a sense for how language, inspiration, composition, and various literary genres work. This is evidenced by the article in the Jerome Biblical Commentary that concludes that a word in Scripture cannot have more than one intended meaning. LOL

The Bible is, in regard to authorship, both Divine and human. The sacred writers used the literary genres most appropriate to conveying God’s message. The sacred writers composed under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Divine influence was such that whatever the sacred writer intended to teach would be inerrant.

Yet infallibility in regard to the religious message is not by itself sufficient for a work to be considered canonical. For example, the letters of Clement to the Church at Rome were among the many writings circulated in the early Church as if they were Scripture. Many of these writings were theologically flawless. To be considered Canonical a work had to have something in addition. What that was, to make this brief, the work, whether OT or NT, possessed a special Divine mark or seal of approval. Even St. Jerome and St. Augustine had disagreements about which writings should be considered canonical. Yet, the Church finally decided, infallibly, on a Canonical list.

It was all well and good until Martin Luther came along. He was a genius in the area of literature but he had personal issues (psyche problems). Luther said Revelations was neither “apostolic nor prophetic” and that James’ epistle was an “epistle of straw,” and James was “raving mad with his zeal for good works”. In truth, it was Luther who was raving mad against any zeal for good works.

Digression over:
In a nutshell — Your literalism bias presumes that a biblical account needs to be historical in order for it to be true. You do not correctly realize how the human element works. With sacred writers, God does not do away with the usual human ways of writing or composition – rather He elevates and guides it in the same way grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
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No there are many literary genres. You have seen me post many times as to how Catholics read Scripture, that is what the author intended to convey consistent with the long held teachings and understanding.

I very rarely have an issue with the CE, but the early 1900’s article on the flood was a reaction to Lyell.

Noah lived, He had offspring, they survived… Something happened - that much is clear.
 
buffalo said:
Interesting answer - yes duty to your children is important, but jury duty?

You would not return. If God came calling and said “StA I wish you to be with me now, your children will be taken care of” would you go?
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Buffalo, the bit about avoiding jury duty was a joke. If I were sure it were God, I might not be too thrilled about the consequences for my children, but I would not refuse such an invitation. The difficulty would be determining whether or not the elevator apparition was genuine. I don’t usually hop on elevators with strange men inviting me places.
 
The Catholic Encyclopedia indicates the world.

newadvent.org/cathen/11088a.htm

And from the Library of Catholic Answers: “Noah’s flood, once the butt of scholarly ridicule, finds support in the oral and pictorial record of primitive peoples.”

Peace,
Ed
 
From looking over the posts, it appears to me that the issues being brought up are pseudo-issues, artifacts of reading the Noah story out of context. The story needs to be understood in its context as a theological response to, or polemic against the Babylonian flood stories.

Otherwise, pseudo-problems will be endlessly multiplied and argued to no end until the end, the Parousia. I expect the next post to be an argument over whether Noah could have done any fishing since he only had two worms. 😛
 
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