Respecting Symbolic Language

I'm no expert on theological matters, but this strikes me as significant:

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture. [...]

As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing.

Similarly, they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb.

The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come.”

I realise that the Catholic Church made some sort of peace with evolution a while back, but it's surely no coincidence that this is coming this out now, with the Intelligent Design debate hotting up. [But why (oh why) does the author of the piece have to come up with "they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation..." No they don't. They "argue against". Is there any other word that so regularly - and so annoyingly - gets misused? That it happens so often suggests that there's a need for an English word meaning "to argue strongly against" without the implication of success that "refute" has.]

Interestingly, senior cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, a leading Catholic conservative who was taken to be saying back in July that the Church no longer accepted evolution, has now stated that the theory of evolution is "one of the very great works of intellectual history." As a commenter at The Loom remarks, perhaps the cardinal was politely informed by a higher authority that he'd "misread the tea leaves... One may not like Mr. Ratzinger much, but he's not stupid."

Comments

[Backword Dave]

I think it's less significant than you do. The Catholic Church believes that the authors of the Bible were real people, who were "divinely inspired." The smart ones know that any text can be written hundreds of ways, and almost all leave some details out. The zealots among Baptists appear to believe that God wrote the Bible directly, and hence it contains prophesies and even acrostics. You have to be pretty ignorant not to know that the Bible is a collection of accounts, and that some were intentionally left out of the book in its present form. It is interesting that the books of most interest to fundamentalists are those largely rejected by Rome.

[Mick H]

Yes OK, I wouldn't want to make too much of it. I just thought it was interesting timing - plus I like that phrase "Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally" Well exactly, and it's good to see that being spelled out by some senior religious figures. It'd be good if some of the fundamentalists could acknowledge that (but then I suppose they wouldn't be fundamentalists, would they?)

[Jimmy Doyle]

This is even less news than The Backword One makes out. The view that Genesis is not literally true goes back at least to Augustine of Hippo (fourth-fifth century). Catholicism has never been inerrantist. Fundamentalists are mentalists.

[Bruce]

Mick you need to understand the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The latter tend to cling to the Bible because they reject other forms of authority such as tradition and ecclesiastical precedent.

Another howler in the article was the assertion that Galileo was censured for opposing Biblical in-errancy. So the Bible insists that the earth revolves around the sun? (I don't know enough to say but I doubt it). In fact the Church's authority at that time was Aristotle. Hardly fundamentalist.

If the Reformation led to the Enlightenment, then how come Protestant's main gripe is the Church's dependence on Greek ideas, and the 'Reformers' thus created Bible fundamentalism which didn't exist before?