When I write or preach, I don’t do commercials. I might tell parishioners that there are informative magazines or such in the vestibule. But here is one time I will cite the Jesuits’ America magazine. An article in the Sept. 12 issue said so many accurate things about the sad state of Catholic Bible understanding and the ruin that fundamentalist literalism does to it. I’d like to quote at length from Brian R. Pinter’s piece. His experience with Manhattan professionals in a parish Bible study reflects my own. He has academic credentials while his challengers do not, yet that makes so little difference. Neither does his invoking the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Commission or Vatican II’s Dei verbum, the council’s document on revelation.
Pinter: “According to many studies, Catholics are among the most biblically illiterate Americans. While teaching Bible basics remains a major task, a more pressing and troubling concern is the growth among Catholics of biblical literalism, also known as biblical fundamentalism. Fundamentalists assert that the Bible is without historical or scientific error and should be read literally in all its details. According to a 2007 Gallup survey, 21 percent of U.S. Catholics identify themselves as biblical literalists. Considering that the Pontifical Biblical Commission pointed out in 1993 that ‘fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide,’ this percentage is not insignificant.”
I have written here before where this starts. Martin Luther claimed a right of private interpretation as the solution to the many wrangles of interpreting disputed biblical texts. He said an interpreting person would be protected from religious error by the Holy Spirit. Yet when two contending people argue a text in contradictory ways, both could not have this protection since God cannot contradict Truth. So the only way out was to read the texts literally. Invest every sentence of Scripture with historical veracity. Claim that Adam and Eve enjoyed the same historical reality as did Jesus since all three are found in the Bible.
And since the first pages of Genesis assert that God made the world in six days, ignore solid science with its powerful evidence that the cosmos came about over billions of years and that humans evolved from simian life forms. Ignore that John Paul said we could subscribe to evolution as long as we posit God as its start. Perhaps you see how politicians could blunder into this field outside their competence and take authoritative positions.
Catholics today read any text as its human author intended us to read it. If he wrote and intended a historical narrative, as we find in the books of Kings, telling us who succeeded whom on the thrones of Israel and Judah, that is the way we interpret that part. If instead he intended and wrote a parable, with all the evidence of non-historical, allegorical writing, as with Noah and the ark, that is the way we read it. We respect the many different forms of literature available to him and we do not lump them altogether as the one and only form called historical narrative. To teach adults, Aesop in 300 B.C. used parabolic fables like the tortoise and the hare to teach the important need to persevere, as did writers all around the Mediterranean.
Some cautions: only the first 11 chapters of Genesis and a few other Old Testament accounts, like Daniel in the lion’s den, are non-historical allegories, not all the Old Testament. Unschooled Catholics fear that if they admit the above, they reduce all the Hebrew Scriptures to non-historicity. Also, before the ground-breaking progress of Vatican II, most of us learned a subject no longer taught called Bible history. We stiffen at the thought that we had learned a wrong thing. But with a little humility, we concede that science also has corrected itself many times, too.
Do we say God is not wise enough to instruct us within our intellectual limits over millennia by using stories when these were the usual means of learning? Is it a disgrace for humans to develop from other life forms? No to both. Since the human author’s intention determines so much, we can conclude that he had no intention of teaching physical science. He quite differently intended to firm up the faith of the people of God using speech and thought forms understandable to his immediate audience. This even meant borrowing from and improving on literature already extant to affirm that the God of Israel was the almighty creator and savior of his people.
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