In Internet discussion forums on religion, anti-Christian critics put forward a large number of objections against the truth of the Bible. Answering all their objections in detail would take a great deal of space and time, so here we shall try only to give an overall answer. This is possible because those objections typically fall within a well-known set of problems that came to be called the “biblical question” and was much debated among biblical scholars from the seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth. After a period of maturation, the general principles for resolving the “biblical question” were officially accepted by the Catholic Church in the 1940s, through Pope Pius XII’s encyclical “Divino Afflante Spiritu”. Thus the least that can be said of these anti-Christian objections is that they are somewhat “out of date”.
The vast majority of these critical arguments can be set out as a syllogism:
Major premise: If the Bible is the Word of God, then it cannot teach any error.
Minor premise: But the Bible contains many texts that teach things contradictory either among themselves or to truths demonstrated by the natural or historical sciences.
Conclusion: Therefore the Bible is not the Word of God.
The Catholic Church accepts the major premise, but rejects the minor one; therefore she is not forced to arrive at this conclusion.
Let us examine the minor premise more closely. It implicitly assumes a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, that is, something very different from the Catholic interpretation of the Bible. Fundamentalist Christians (who are numerous in some ecclesial communities of Protestant origin and in semi-Christian groups) reject the historical-critical study of the Bible and give Sacred Scripture a simplistic and superficial interpretation, tied to the apparent meaning of the texts. Catholic exegesis, by contrast, uses faith and reason: the results of the scientific study of the Bible illuminated by Christian faith.
Let us illustrate this with an example. Chapter 1 of Genesis recounts the creation of the universe by God. According to this account, God used six days to create all things visible and invisible; on the sixth day God created the human being, and on the seventh day he rested. A fundamentalist interpretation of this chapter leads one to reject scientific discoveries that presuppose a cosmic evolution of billions of years before the appearance of man on earth. The Catholic interpretation, by contrast, is based on the following two principles:
- “Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error teach that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, n. 11).
- “The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, n. 12).
That is to say, the Catholic interpretation of the Bible distinguishes the salvific truth transmitted by the Bible from the “literary clothing” used as the vehicle for transmitting that truth. In the example just cited, it is clear that the salvific truths God transmits to us through Genesis 1 are very different from an archaic cosmology; I am referring to truths such as the following:
- Everything that exists has been created by God.
- Everything God has created is good.
- The human being is the summit of the material universe.
- Man and woman have been created in the image and likeness of God.
- etc.
The importance of literary genres for a rational interpretation is very clear. One cannot interpret an epic narrative in the same way as a poem, a drama, or a philosophical essay. It would obviously be absurd to reject the truth of the parable of the prodigal son on the grounds that, historically speaking, that “father who had two sons” did not exist. This error is similar to the one committed in the sort of arguments we are discussing.
The Bible is not a science manual and not even, strictly speaking, a history book, but a book that transmits a salvific religious truth. It often does this by narrating history, but then it is a “theological history”, or rather a “historical theology”, a prophetic discovery of the Word of God through historical events.
As Saint Augustine wrote at the beginning of the fifth century, “the Bible does not teach how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven”. If critics wish to make a judgment about the truth of the Bible, they must lift their gaze and aim at the true object of biblical teaching, a properly religious truth.
Author: Daniel Iglesias Grèzes
Source: revistafeyrazon.wordpress.com
