New American Bible

[crazzeto]

I’m not walking away.

Being a new Catholic, I guess I had the false expectation that all Catholic biblical scholarship agreed. I’m now seeing that there are liberal and conservative methods much like in Protestantism.

How naive I was…

I wouldn’t walk away with that impression either necessarly. The Church is “run” (if you will) by the Magisterium (Pope & all bishops in communion) under the guidence of the holy spirit. As such, the Church will never suffer the kind of flaws you’re talking about.

That said, it’s a world wide organization with lots of different personalities coming into play all over the place. As such, you’ll have some not so great publications coming out, sometimes even with Impramature. But one must understand properly what exactly an Impramature is, all it is is a statement that something doesn’t directly violate faith or morals. As I showed, with some knowlege of theology it’s possible to stay with in those bounds, and still be a little out there.

While that’s not a great thing, it certainly also isn’t protistantism. Certainly you still need to be vigilant, but you don’t have to worry about the Church taking a radical turn. More over, the Church is really encouraging and supporting communities of lay apologists and catichists (like you find here) to get the good word out and keep people straight.

So don’t worry about Orthodoxy going anywhere!

 

[Topaz1128]

Ah, okay.

Yes, the sooner you figure out that Catholic scholars disagree, the better. Hopefully you will never have to hear a homily at Mass where the priest claims that the real miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 was that everyone learned to share because, as we all know, multiplying loaves is physically impossible. Unfortunately, we individual Catholics (even priests and scholars) are not completely immune to the changing fashions and current trends. Fortunately, our Magisterium is.

Catholic biblical scholarship has followed much the same trend as that found among Protestant scholars, only the Catholics are often about 20 or 30 years behind the curve (because they got a later start as using the HCM had been greatly discouraged for Catholics in the beginning). I think the HCM has some great and wonderful things to offer the field of biblical scholarship, but unfortunatley we are currently experiencing much of the excesses. Once it gets put in its proper place in our arsenal of tools (instead of being used as the only tool), then I think we will be in better shape. Our wonderful pope has been working towards that for many years.

Thank you for that info, Joe. I actually thought the HCM was used only in Protestantism and that the Catholic Church “had its act together” with only one interpretation for each passage of Scripture.

But, as a neophyte, I’m learning as I go.

 

[crazzeto]

Thank you for that info, Joe. I actually thought the HCM was used only in Protestantism and that the Catholic Church “had its act together” with only one interpretation for each passage of Scripture.

But, as a neophyte, I’m learning as I go.

I wouldn’t be so hard on HCM, used properly I would say it’s actually a requirement for good interpretation… As fundamentally at it’s core it accepts as an axiom you have to know what the scripture meant to the people reading it “back in the day”… Now this process can (and has been) abused to essentually turn the bible into a work of fiction (at least in the minds of the offending theologians), but hey… Any process can be abused.

 

[NHInsider]

Thank you for that info, Joe. I actually thought the HCM was used only in Protestantism and that the Catholic Church “had its act together” with only one interpretation for each passage of Scripture.

But, as a neophyte, I’m learning as I go.

Just for the record, it is de fide that Scripture has multiple levels of meaning - literal and spiritual, with the spiritual futher broken down into moral, allegorical and anagogical - so for most passages there are multiple “correct” interpretations. And the Church seldom defines a single interpretation as “true” to the exclusion of all others (I would say “never” but I don’t pretend to have read everything ever declared by the Church!)

So for example, the John 6 “Bread of Life” discourse is Eucharistic - it does indeed mean that we are to eat His body and drink His precious blood. BUT - that does not mean that interpretations that draw upon the idea that God’s word is the bread of life (“Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”) are not also valid (in this case, Jesus is the Word (Jn. 1:1) as well as the Bread!)

Dr. Macellino d’Ambrosio’s website states that there have only been 7 definitive statements about Scripture interpretation. I don’t know that this is true but he’s generally reliable.

BTW-welcome to the family!