----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 11:51 AM
Subject: [TruthTalk] New pope holds
strong views about biblical scholarship
First, Ratszinger says
the bible is inerrent, then he says it shouldn't be taken literally. That's
typical rcd doublespeak.
Does it remind anyone else of the doublespeak
and bias we are confronted with on TT?
May 5, 2005
New pope holds strong views about biblical scholarship
FAITH
By RICHARD N. OSTLING
Associated Press Writer
Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in February 2005
when he was photographed reading from Pope John Paul II's last book, "Memoria
e Identia" ("Memory and Identity").
Pope Benedict XVI has quite a paper trail: a large body of writings under
his own name as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, plus numerous documents of Pope
John Paul II that he helped shape. What's left for Benedict to
address? Might this pianist write about beauty and the fine arts?
Another possibility is signaled by the title of his latest book: "Truth and
Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions" (Ignatius). A third pressing
issue of interest could be Catholicism's changes and confusions regarding the
Bible.
On that, Ratzinger isn't the right-winger being portrayed in the
media but rather a militant moderate who rejects rigid conservatism and
fashionable liberalism alike. He's the first pope from a nation with
many Protestants (Martin Luther's
Germany), the first with full fluency in
English and German, and the first in modern times who was an important
university theologian. So he knows his biblical scholarship.
Ratzinger felt the Vatican was too repressive in the early 20th
century. He recalls his beloved New Testament professor, Friedrich Wilhelm
Maier, who had suffered previous Vatican banishment for asserting that Mark
was the earliest Gospel, a view now widely taught on Catholic campuses. The
landmarks in papal teaching on the Bible are Leo XIII's "Providentissimus
Deus" (1893) and Pius XII's "Divino Afflante Spiritu" (1943).
Leo declared, "It is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow
(biblical) inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit
that the sacred writer has erred." Pius reaffirmed the Bible's total
inerrancy, but cautiously opened the
church to current techniques and study
of the context to better understand the sacred writers' intentions. Ratzinger
was a theological adviser for the Second Vatican Council's 1965 decree "Dei
Verbum," which reframed this by stating that the Bible teaches "faithfully,
and without error, that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings
for the sake of our salvation."
In a 1988 lecture at a Lutheran church in New York, Ratzinger chided
fundamentalism, saying it's "useless to take refuge in an allegedly pure,
literal understanding of the Bible." Ratzinger said a 1993 Pontifical Biblical
Commission statement on Bible interpretation was "very helpful" and "advances"
previous papal teaching "in a fruitful way." That paper denounced
fundamentalism as "dangerous" and "a kind of intellectual suicide." It said
fundamentalists place "undue stress upon
the inerrancy of certain details
in the biblical texts" and naively confuse the Gospels as finally edited with
"the words and deeds of the historical Jesus."
So, then, what did the biblical authors originally intend, and what
can we know about the actual historical events? As Ratzinger knows, many
Protestant scholars, especially in his own Germany, question the Bible's
credibility at many such points, and those ideas have percolated into Catholic
faculties. In a paper that criticized the Vatican's past clampdown on
biblical scholars, Ratzinger also underscored the importance of the historical
reality in Scripture. "A God who cannot intervene in history and reveal
himself in it is not the God of the Bible," he stated.
And in the New York lecture, titled "Biblical Interpretation in
Crisis," Ratzinger was less worried about fundamentalists than about liberals
who impose alien philosophies upon Scripture, rule out God's intervention in
history and reject the possibility of miracles. Many Bible scholars, he
complained, have too confidently made the "false claim" that
historical-critical study of the Bible produces results as certain as those in
natural science. Too often, he said, "this procedure leads to the sprouting of
ever more numerous hypotheses until finally they turn into a jungle of
contradictions. In the end, one no longer learns what the text says, but what
it should have said." Perhaps as pope, Ratzinger will explore the jungle
further.
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