What is the best way to introduce the topic of the Bible and how Catholics interpret the Bible to a small group of 11-13 year old non-Catholic boys?
It seems to me that going through the rubrics of “literal,” “anagogical,” etc. is a bit too much, so what’s a practical way of describing how Catholics use and interpret the Bible, much less what the Bible is?
I’d appreciate any help since I’m giving a talk on this on Saturday!
A good way to simplify the senses of Scripture is to explain that, just as Jesus Christ is God and Man, so the Bible is written by God and men. So whatever you’re reading has two senses: the literal sense is what the men were trying to say, and the spiritual sense is what the Holy Spirit says through them.
Reading the spiritual sense is more fun because you get to see all the symbols and prefigure-ments of everything and the interconnections between all of the books and passages that were written over thousands of years (at least,
I think that’s fun). Like, the writer of Genesis wasn’t trying to say
literally that Noah being saved through the water lifting up his ark, was a symbol for baptism being the saving waters of the Church. That’s what the
Spirit says through that passage – the spiritual sense.
The literal of Scripture is also important, though, because these events through which the Spirit speaks are all real and true history. It’d be hard to say an allegory was a symbol for a future event: that’d be a disanalogous (and hence, a bad) symbol since something that didn’t actually happen is supposed to prefigure something that did actually happen. So you have to presume the literal sense in order to see the spiritual sense.
That’s how I’d present it, anyway. Perhaps somebody else knows a better way.
If you wanna talk about the Bible itself, you could always try the saying made famous by Southern Baptists:
BIBLE =
Basic
Instructions
Before
Leaving
Earth.
It’s God’s purest way to talk to us. It’s got two parts: the Old Testament records God’s preparation for Christianity, and the New Testament records God’s institution of Christianity. You could either start with Genesis since it leaves us the first promise of Christianity, or with the Psalms because of all the prophecies there that’d help springboard you to the “spiritual vs. literal sense” interpretation stuff while still showing that it was in the time of preparation. Then continue from there to the Gospels because that’s where we are told of the story: the Gospel of Mark is the shortest and simplest presentation, but my favorite happens to be Luke because of his clarity and precision (as he tells us in his introduction). Probably don’t read any from the Letters or the Acts or the Book of Revelation, but just give a brief overview that Acts tells the story of how the apostles first formed the Catholic Church, and explain that all the letters (except Revelation) were probably written at various points during the Book of Acts when Paul was trying to instruct the churches he had visited. That’ll give the New Testament a cohesive sense to them, help them see that it’s one big whole.
