The Catholic Church and the Bible

Over at Pandagon, there has been a lot of misunderstanding as to how Catholics regard the Bible.

I'm here to clear those up. the Catholic Church believes the Bible is the inerrant word of God. However, not everything in it is literalistically true. It contains poetry, allegory, metaphor, etc.

It is historically true, but not necessarily historically accurate. The writer's weren't ther to write a history text, but to relay events from their perspective as these events relate to our salvation and our relationship with God.

The moment the evangelicals admit that the bible is not the inerrant truth and infallable is the moment they have no way of sticking their head in the sands and refusing to hear our stories of how the earth is not flat and that we all evolved from primates. It is the moment that doubt enters their minds.

Actually, protestants often say that the the Bible is a "fallible collection of infallible books". Catholics believe that the Bible is infallible, in matters of faith morals and salvation. However, we do recagnize different types of literary devices.

If you think the inerrantists are nuts[*] you'll just love the "King James Only" crowd. Ayup - there are people who honestly believe that the King James bible is the sole true scripture. I shit you not.

Yup. And not only that, some people think only the 1611 version in acceptable. It's like somehow this particular version was dropped out of sky by God himself, and that Jesus and his apostles went around speaking King James English.

I remember having a conversation with a woman who was studying to be a nun, and who had a very cynical view of human nature, in which she was explaining why she thought the authority of the Catholic Church was necessary. In her view, Protestants simply tried to substitute the authority of the Bible for the authority of the Church, which she felt was naive, since individuals couldn't really interpret the Bible properly.

If that's anything like an accurate presentation of the Catholic position, then it would make perfect sense that the Catholic Church would reject any notion of Biblical inerrancy -- if it was flawless, there'd be no need for the authority of the Church.

First of all, the Catholic Church does believe that the Bible is inerrant. However, if all we needed was the Bible, and we were all able to interpret it properly all by ourselves, there wouldn't be 30,000 different Protestant sects out there, all using the Bible as their guide. And part of the authority of the Church Magisterium is the authority to coerrectly interpret the Bible. Hell-they compiled the New Testement. They look at Tradition and the writings of the early church fathers to understand how the earliest Christians understood something, which is how we understand it.

If the Pope says the bible isn't exactly true, the bible isn't exactly true.

You really need to get a better grasp on Papal infallibility. Try here .