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Peter_J
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That’s actually still true today. Heck, I think we’ve even had a thread about a Ukrainian Catholic (ICWR) bible that did not have the “standard” Roman Catholic canon. And no, I don’t mean that it just wasn’t complete, but that it actually had “extra” books in it! (Granted I’m relying on memory which isn’t perfect.)
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GKC
Guest
Well, yes. Though no one here should agree with that.Sheesh, what are you a Catholic or something?
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Contarini
Guest
Obviously, for an RC there is no distinction. There was one early Catholic Church, to which the modern “Catholics” and “Orthodox” both claim to be heirs. They don’t each claim to be heir only to part of it. For Orthodox, pre-schism Westerners were part of the Orthodox Church, and for Catholics, they were part of the Catholic Church.
So this is a very weak argument on your part.
Edwin
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Thorolfr
Guest
Except that Roman Catholics here in CAF often seem to completely forget about the Orthodox Church and pretend that all positions held by the RCC/Western church were always held by the whole early church. Also, I’ve seen Catholic members of CAF say numerous times that only the RCC has validly ordained clergy and valid sacraments so that Orthodox church members have had to gently remind them that they also have validly ordained clergy and sacraments.
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Peter_J
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I hate to admit it, but that’s a good point. I think you may have just shaken my belief in web forum infallibility.Except that Roman Catholics here in CAF often seem to completely forget about the Orthodox Church and pretend that all positions held by the RCC/Western church were always held by the whole early church. Also, I’ve seen Catholic members of CAF say numerous times that only the RCC has validly ordained clergy and valid sacraments so that Orthodox church members have had to gently remind them that they also have validly ordained clergy and sacraments.
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rcwitness
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I hate to admit it, but that’s a good point. I think you may have just shaken my belief in web forum infallibility.
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Tom_Baum
Guest
You wrote, “It’s interesting, though, that you permitted yourself to ponder the above”.
The “above” that I pondered concerns the “fact” that God Is a Being of Love rather than Love merely being an attribute of God and one of the “tools” of my pondering concerning this is the fact that I met God the Father in my heart, probably my spiritual heart who knows, and it was interesting that God slowly allowed me to come to know that It was Him and then in less than an instant “I knew” that what I was taught in second grade, that God Is Love, is quite literal.
You also wrote, “instead of saying, “I simply accept my beliefs and don’t need to explain them to you.””
Jesus said, “I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life and no one comes to the Father except thru Me”.
I happen to believe this statement and I don’t have a clue how, but I believe that it was somehow thru Jesus that I met Dad and all of the pondering in the world can not explain it to me or for me to explain it to anyone else.
I used to believe that God Is Love but had no idea that it was/is literal but now I “know” that God Is Love and that it is quite literal so there is no way that I could say, ““I simply accept my beliefs and don’t need to explain them to you.””, as you wrote since it is no longer a belief.
I have said many times that it is good to ponder.
I have also said that it is good to realize, at least for me, that there are some things that are beyond my comprehension and to simply accept that as a fact of life and it could very well be that I came to that conclusion from attempting to ponder.
A lot of the things that I ponder, I ponder through the eyes of “knowing” that God Is a Being of Love rather than Love being a mere attribute of God.
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Abu
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That I have never seen coming from any real Catholic. Where is the evidence for your assertion?
Real Catholics know the errors of the Orthodox. That while having the priesthood and thus the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and sacraments, they fell into error by jettisoning Christ’s Magisterium and the infallible teaching against contraception, deny the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and permit divorce and remarriage.
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Tom_Baum
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On “My post here”, you wrote, “Hey Edwin, The way I have come to understand it, is that when an ordained priest of the Catholic Church gives blessing over the gifts of bread and wine, God (through the Holy Spirit and words of the priest) no longer regards the bread and wine as such, but as our Father in heaven (remembering His Son’s physical sacrifice) considers it to be this sacrifice.”
You can believe whatever you want but that is not even close to what Jesus said, don’t you believe what Jesus simply said is true, even if you don’t understand it?
Jesus said, “This Is My Body…”.
Jesus did NOT say, “Dad will regard this bread and wine as My Body and Blood”, did He?
I repeat, Jesus did not say that the Eucharist would be regarded as His Body but that IT WOULD BE HIS BODY.
What you are actually saying is that the Eucharist will be a “symbol” to God the Father that the Eucharist Is Jesus rather that what Jesus so simply said but that is beyond our understanding.
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rcwitness
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I respect what you are saying, but the reality is that the accidents of bread and wine remain. It is not going against Catholic Teaching to believe that God the Father ‘regards’ this blessed bread and wine as His son’s body and blood.
When I say ‘regards’ it is in that deep mysterious unknown of the eternal God touching us in time and Sacrament. What God ‘regards’ is as relevant, tangible, and true as anything we know.
The Eucharist is Jesus, and that doesn’t negate the symbolism that exists also. Bread and wine have symbols. Eating has symbols.
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Peter_J
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Hi rcwitness. Can you give any evidence to show that past generations employed the language of God the Father ‘regarding’ the blessed bread and wine as His son’s body and blood?
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rcwitness
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Maybe not… What else would he regard it as?
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Peter_J
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I think you’re reading my mind.
It seems a triffle strange to me (granted, most things seem strange at first) to say “The Father regards them as”, since saying “They are” immediately implies that “The Father regards them as” anyhow.
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PRmerger
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I don’t understand. Is your paradigm “I don’t know and I don’t understand how”?
Or is your paradigm: “I believe. I seek to understand.”
Mine is the latter.
It certainly sounded like you were advocating the former.
I find the former to be just the recipe for a trip to atheism. In fact, I just heard a podcast of Catholic Answers Live in which a former Catholic said that very thing: “I believed but didn’t quite understand”. He is now an atheist.
catholic.com/audio-player/29959
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Randy_Carson
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Catholics interpret the Bible in a “literal” sense, while many fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and others interpret the Bible in a literalist sense.
The “literal” meaning of a passage of Scripture is the meaning that the author of that passage of Scripture intended to convey. The “literalist” interpretation of a passage of Scripture is: “that’s what it says, that’s what it means.”
Let me give you an example to illustrate the difference. If you were to read a passage in a book that said it was “raining cats and dogs outside”, how would you interpret that? As Americans, in the 21st Century, you would know that the author was intending to convey the idea that it was raining pretty doggone hard outside. That would be the “literal” interpretation…the interpretation the author intended to convey. On the other hand, what if you made a “literalist” interpretation of the phrase, “it’s raining cats and dogs”?
The “literalist” interpretation would be that, were you to walk outside, you would actually see cats and dogs falling from the sky like rain. No taking into account the popularly accepted meaning of this phrase. No taking into account the author’s intentions. The words say it was raining cats and dogs, so, by golly, it was raining cats and dogs! That is the literalist, or fundamentalist, way of interpretation.
If someone 2000 years in the future picked up that same book and read, “It was raining cats and dogs outside,” in order to properly understand that passage in the book, they would need a “literal” interpretation, not a “literalist” interpretation. Now, think about that in the context of interpreting the Bible 2000-3000 years after it was written.
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PRmerger
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I mean that they are the inspired Word of God.
How do you know that what was said in the Gospel of Matthew are inspired but what was said in the letters of Clement are not?
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Contarini
Guest
Well, you are entirely wrong in claiming that evangelicals do not interpret Scripture in the first sense you give. Surely, with your fondness for evangelical Biblical scholarship and apologetics, you should know that. Blomberg and Licona, for instance, build their interpretations of Scripture on a careful scholarly analysis of what the original authors meant.
The second meaning just isn’t clear. You are right that people who don’t think very carefully about the nature of language claim to interpret Scripture in this sense, but it isn’t a very coherent concept. In fact it’s circular. An act of interpretation is necessary before determining “what it says.” That’s what naive readers fail to recognize.
Right, so in what you’re calling the “literalist” interpretation the common usage of the specific words is accepted as the only possible one. In the sense I’ve been defending of the word “literal,” this is a literal reading at the level of individual words. It does not, however, take into account the common usage of the phrase as a whole.
Not only are you wrong to suggest that this is the standard approach of evangelical Protestants as a whole, but in the specific instance of the Eucharist the common Protestant approach is, in your sense, at least purportedly “literal,” while the popular Catholic line of argument is rather literalist (confusedly so, because transubstantiation is hardly a literal interpretation in any common sense of the term, but then all literalism is confused in my opinion). That is to say, Protestants typically argue that a contextual reading of “This is my Body” indicates a metaphorical or symbolic or spiritual sense for the phrase, while Catholics (and still more Lutherans) often speak as if the words themselves just automatically necessitate a “realist” interpretation.
So I don’t think the distinction you’re making, as a Catholic/Protestant contrast, is either accurate or helpful for apologetics purposes.
The problem of course is that we don’t have the same cues for interpreting such an ancient text that we do interpreting a contemporary one. Or rather, we do have a lot of cues taken from the Tradition, but what you’re describing as a “literal” interpretation (and are implying is the Catholic as opposed to evangelical approach) excludes the use of those cues if we are interpreting “author” as “human author” and if we don’t have good reasons to think that the traditions of interpretation go back to the era when the texts were originally written. That, rather than your “literal/literalist” distinction, is the major reason for Catholic/Protestant differences in interpretation, including on the Eucharist.
Edwin
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PRmerger
Guest
Firstly, no one was going around recording the words of Jesus. They were written decades later.
If someone on Fox news first reported today the words of Linus Pauling, would you think they were accurate?
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Thorolfr
Guest
Surely there must have been someone there taking notes on a piece of papyrus
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