Greetings,
Thanks for this valuable thread.
covenant and communion by Scott Hahn does a very nice job discussung Benidicts biblical scholarship.
Here is a link for more information on that book, and the text of Chapter 1.
christendom-awake.org/pages/book-promotions/politicizing-the-bible/politicizing-the-bible.htm
Father Thomas McGovern writes:
Yet in spite of this clear teaching that a Catholic hermeneutic of Scripture can only be achieved within the context of the Church, [27] authoritative voices speak of a crisis of biblical exegesis at the present time because of a widespread sola Scriptura mentality and the resulting cleavage between the Bible and the Church. Perhaps the most significant critique of biblical exegesis as it has developed since Vatican II is to be found in the writings of the current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. One of the most compelling statements of this situation is to be found in The Ratzinger Report; it deserves to be quoted in full because of its clarity and precision, penetrating, as it does, to the very roots of the problem: “The bond between the Bible and the Church has been broken… The historico-critical interpretation has certainly opened many and momentous possibilities for a better understanding of the biblical text. But, by its very nature, it can illumine it only in the historical dimension and not explain it in its present-day claim on us. Where it forgets this limit it becomes illogical and therefore also unscientific. But then one also forgets that the Bible as present and future can be understood only in vital association with the Church. The upshot is that one no longer reads it from the tradition of the Church as a point of departure, and with the Church, but, instead, one starts from the newest method that presents itself as ‘scientific.’ With some scholars this independence has become an outright opposition - so much so that for many the traditional faith of the Church no longer seems justified by critical exegesis but appears only as an obstacle to the authentic ‘modern’ understanding of Christianity. . . The separation of Church and Scripture tends to erode both from within. In fact, a church without a credible biblical foundation is only a chance historical product, one organization among others . . . But the Bible without the Church is also no longer the powerfully effective Word of God, but an assemblage of various historical sources, a collection of heterogeneous books from which one tries to draw, from the perspective of the present moment, whatever one considers useful. An exegesis in which the Bible no longer lives and is understood within the living organism of the Church becomes archeology: the dead bury their dead. in any case, the last word about the Word of God as Word of God does not in this conception belong to the legitimate pastors, the Magisterium, but to the expert, the professor with his ever-provisional results always subject to revisions.”
Read whole article here at Mark Alder’s site:
christendom-awake.org/pages/mcgovern/exegesis.htm
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