If Christians consider Scripture Sacred, is there any room to interpret the Bible?

[stjuderocks]

I am currently taking a philosophy class at a secular college. My professor is an agnostic and very critical of Christians. Today he asked us this question: “If Christians consider Scripture Sacred, is there any room to interpret the Bible?” I know that the answer is yes but I didn’t know how to explain this in a convincing way.

 

[Heuchler]

How would scripture being Sacred (coming from God and being a truthful thing) prevent any room for interpretation. The Word made flesh used parables and deeper meanings all the time to illustrate points, why shouldn’t scriptures, also the Word of god, follow this same pattern. Just because something is Sacred doesn’t mean it is simplistic. Our God is complex and defies our expectations of what a God would be like, should not His scriptures be the same?

 

[jochoa]

I am currently taking a philosophy class at a secular college. My professor is an agnostic and very critical of Christians. Today he asked us this question: “If Christians consider Scripture Sacred, is there any room to interpret the Bible?” I know that the answer is yes but I didn’t know how to explain this in a convincing way.

To better assist, please ask him:
What is his definition of interpret?

 

[Abu]

The “Bible” was given to the world by the Catholic Church. The New Testament was written by Catholics, the Gospels before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
The books that actually are declared the inspired Word of God was decided by Pope Damasus at a Council of Rome in 382, confirmed at the Councils of Hippo, 393, Carthage III 397, Carthage IV in 419 and canonised at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) – 46 books in the Old Testament, 27 books in the New Testament.

As Christ gave His first Supreme Vicar, St Peter, His authority to bind and loose, the keys of the Kingdom of heaven, and on whom, as the rock, He built His Church, only She has the authority to interpret the Sacred Scriptures. It is the individual private interpretation of uncounted thousands which has spawned some 40,000 sects using Bibles, all differing in great and small ways in their own ideas.

See scripturecatholic.com/

 

[Crumpy]

We always have to interpret scripture, in the sense of applying to ourselves.

“Do good and avoid evil.”

we have to interpret that in the various situations that we find ourselves.

If you were to delve into Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), you would see that they are very serious. People were earnestly trying to obey God’s commands.

But, to do that, you have to understand what the commands are. And then there are situations where the commands seem to run into each other. Jewish experts reason that God gave us these commands and left it up to us to understand them and carry them out.

We’re much more committed to them when we have to think about them all the time. The Jews were walking around trying to juggle 613 commands that they found in scripture and to do this all the time.

Well, if you do such a thing, then you have God constantly on your mind which is what we are supposed to do anyway.

All this is based on our covenant with God – He is our God and we are his people 24/7 you might say. So, we don’t want to offend God. And, we should want to use our God-given intellect to extend the commands to situations that are not explicitly spelled out in the Bible.

And, we don’t have a rabbi or a priest to advise us every minute of the day. So, we must always be diligent --like being charitable in writing a comment here–to honor God and each other.

 

[stjuderocks]

As Christ gave His first Supreme Vicar, St Peter, His authority to bind and loose, the keys of the Kingdom of heaven, and on whom, as the rock, He built His Church, only She has the authority to interpret the Sacred Scriptures. It is the individual private interpretation of uncounted thousands which has spawned some 40,000 sects using Bibles, all differing in great and small ways in their own ideas.

See scripturecatholic.com/

So are you saying that the Pope (or the Magisterium) Is the only one who can interpret the Bible?
I think that my professor was referring to books like Genesis. I personally believe that it was a true story but doesn’t the Catholic Church teach that we can believe it literally or just as a story?

 

[fhansen]

I am currently taking a philosophy class at a secular college. My professor is an agnostic and very critical of Christians. Today he asked us this question: “If Christians consider Scripture Sacred, is there any room to interpret the Bible?” I know that the answer is yes but I didn’t know how to explain this in a convincing way.

He’s probably reacting more to a non-Catholic, strictly literal type of exegesis. I’d read the Catechism beginning at para 101 to get a better understating of the Church’s position.

 

[Lisa44]

I am currently taking a philosophy class at a secular college. My professor is an agnostic and very critical of Christians. Today he asked us this question: “If Christians consider Scripture Sacred, is there any room to interpret the Bible?” I know that the answer is yes but I didn’t know how to explain this in a convincing way.

That question doesn’t make sense to me.

 

[Jim_Roberts]

I am currently taking a philosophy class at a secular college. My professor is an agnostic and very critical of Christians. Today he asked us this question: “If Christians consider Scripture Sacred, is there any room to interpret the Bible?” I know that the answer is yes but I didn’t know how to explain this in a convincing way.

---

When in a group discussion about the Bible. where two or three arde with me, I am present. The Holy Spirit will always givw the right answer.

JESUS I TRUST IN YOU

jr

 

[Abu]

stjuderocks
I personally believe that it was a true story [Genesis] but doesn’t the Catholic Church teach that we can believe it literally or just as a story?

You might care to look at the following:
LIVING TRADITION – ORGAN OF THE ROMAN THEOLOGICAL FORUM
rtforum.org/lt/index.html
All viewers will find a wealth of good information at this website.

If you put Senses of Scripture in Genesis into the search engine you will get several articles on Genesis to peruse, including LT120 - Is the Genesis Account of Creation Literally True?

rtforum.org/study/lesson2.html
“We are going to look for three different kinds of spiritual sense, namely, the allegorical sense, the tropological, or moral, sense, and the anagogical, or final, sense. The typical sense will be considered as an expression of the allegorical sense.”

rtforum.org/lt/lt41.html
"FOUR DISTINCT SENSES. St. Thomas answers affirmatively to the question "whether there ought to be distinguished four senses of Sacred Scripture,"34 basing his response upon the authority of St. Augustine of Hippo and of Venerable Bede. St. Augustine observed: "In all the holy books it is behooving to discern the eternal things to be seen there, the deeds that are there narrated, the future things that are predicted, the things that are commanded to be done.“35 St. Thomas sees these four things to refer respectively to the anagogical, the historical, the allegorical, and the tropological senses of Sacred Scripture.”