So far, I have been taking this entirely too slow. Today’s post is brought to you buy my unhealthy relationship with caffeine. May Red Bull guide us all to Light and Truth.
I. Christ – The Unique Word of Sacred Scripture
The gist: This section sort of blurs the lines between the text of the bible and the physical body of Jesus.
- “In the condescension of his goodness, God speaks to [men] in human words.”
- The words seem a lot like human words, but like they’re God’s words so they’re different
- “Through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word” where “Word” means Jesus
- “The Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body.”
II. Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture
The gist: Even though Catholicism believes God is the author of scripture with no apparent caveats, Catholicism would like to remind us that the scriptures kinda suck (“written and mute…dead letter”) without the help of the Incarnate Word through the Holy Spirit to help our silly logical minds to understand them.
Other notes:
- The church is specifically down with all the parts of old and new testaments
- The authors of the bible were really just writing down exactly what god told them to write down “and no more.”
- “books of scripture…without error teach that truth which God…wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures”
- Do I detect a hint of biblical infallibility?
III. The Holy Spirit, Interpreter of Scripture
The gist: better not actually read the scriptures
- OK so there is an asterisk. God speaks in a human way in the scriptures.
- So if something seems off, it’s because you’re not looking at what God was really trying to reveal with these words, and not because God actually sent a bear to maul 40 children.
- You also need to interpret the words using the same light by which they were written, you dumb dumb. God wouldn’t send a bear. God likes kids. The spirit would tell you that.
- There are three rules you have to follow if you want to read the scriptures by the spirit:
- Pay attention to the unity of the whole scripture (what?)
- Remember that the scripture is mostly written in the Church’s heart, and that the Tradition is really where the sauce is at.
- Pay attention to the “analogy of faith” which means the coherence of the truths (is this different than number 1?)
- I think they quote St. Thomas Aquinas in verse 112 here to say “listen, before the Passion (definition pending) no one really understood the scriptures. We just had to wait thousands of years after the authors died to really make sense of what the authors were trying to say.”
- The scriptures can be read (1) literally (2) allegorically (3) morally and (4) anagogically
- literal is “following the rules of sound interpretation” (wow thanks for clarifying the word literal)
- allegorical is a word we know, but they mention the crazy claim that the crossing of the Red Sea is an allegory for Christian baptism and Christ’s victory
- when they say “moral sense” they mean the scriptures should lead us to act morally (and maybe not stone people to death)
- anagogical they actually do define, surprisingly enough, to mean “in terms of eternal significance”
- “But I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me”
- …wow.
The gist: there is a lot of lip service to the notion that the Old Testament totally doesn’t suck and is definitely still important you guys. They seem insecure about it tbh.
Some things stated as fact:
- the books to be kept in the canonized gospel were “discerned,” not determined, by the apostolic Tradition.
- the Old Covenant has never been revoked.
- new definition for the Word of God just dropped: “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.”
- they would really just say whatever the hell sounded right wouldn’t they
- sorry, sorry, I shouldn’t editorialize in the list of facts
- Four Gospels are historical and tell the honest truth about jesus
- Typology
- See look guys there’s typology
- the old and new testaments are totally compatible because the flood myth is like baptism
- and god killed all those firstborn children in the passover because he wanted to kill his own firstborn (wait is that how Catholics talk about christ? Or is that something only mormons or maybe protestants do?)
- The stories about the exodus and the calling of the patriarchs still matter guys don’t forget
Overall, I feel there’s a lot of acknowledging criticisms without actually addressing them. Like, we insist that the old testament stories are intrinsically important in addition to the typology thing, but we won’t tell you why.