Monday, September 1, 2008

Honouring Scripture by finding it similar to ourselves?

The Sydney Catholic Weekly carried a rather confused C.N.S. article in yesterday’s edition. The ambiguous title, “Events that shaped the Catholic Bible”, gave some clue as to the confusion that was to follow. In the second paragraph the author makes the breathtakingly badly-worded assertion that

the Catholic version of the Bible is actually a library of books specifically chosen to reflect Catholic teaching
(my emphasis)
If taken at face value, this amounts to an assertion that the Church determined the canon of the Bible with a view to suiting her own teachings, rather than identifying the Bible as a source of the Word of God from which (along with Tradition) she derives her teaching. The author’s mistake is reiterated later in the piece when we read that

Over time, the Catholic hierarchy, too, chose Scriptures that best reflected their interpretation of the true word of God.
The “too” here is saying that the Church chose her canon like the Protestants chose theirs, as the article describes in the paragraph that preceded this one, and thus it compounded the error still further.

Furthermore, it is not clear how it can be said that

“Today, these differences [between Catholic and Protestant Scriptural teaching] are largely being overcome,” [Fr. Watson] continued, “since more and more editions of the Bible are being published in ‘ecumenical editions’, which incorporate all the books sacred to Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians
when this is a marginalising, not an overcoming, of the differences.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

the Catholic version of the Bible is actually a library of books specifically chosen to reflect Catholic teaching

Ooooooh, very very bad. Very badly done.

The Prots rebelled and threw books out - which they were not entitled to do.

Anonymous said...

(Well, I'm preaching to the choir, here).