Periodically, folks ask about whether we are supposed to read the Bible literally.
The Church does require a literal interpretation of biblical texts. But that does not mean what most Americans imagine it means. It does not mean we have to believe, for instance, that the universe was made in six 24 hour days, or profess faith in talking snakes. Rather, by the "literal sense", the Church means we must read the text looking for what the author intended to say, the *way* he intended to say it, and distinguish from that what is incidental to what he was saying. That’s the literal interpretation. And getting at it is trickier than we might suppose, since the inspired authors were not, in fact, 3000 years stupider than us, but were endowed with brains and a genetic complement identical to ours and an *extremely* subtle and sophisticated manner of communicating theological and spiritual truths and a complex symbol system that we often misunderstand. That's why we need the Church. Therefore, the Church also says we are not at all bound to read it *literalistically* as though it was always a newspaper account. So, for instance, CCC 390 says:
The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
Note that: Genesis describes a real primeval event (the fall) but it uses figurative, not newspaper, language to do it. Other times, of course, Scripture does uses something like newspaper language ("David hid from Saul in a cave.") in order to tell the story. Common sense and the interpretive tradition of the Church help us discern what from what.
Likewise, the Church does not commit us to reading the account of Noah literalistically. But at the same time, the Church remains open to the findings of the sciences which help to inform our understanding of what may constitute the historical basis of the story. And, of course, what Jesus, the apostles, and the Fathers thought most important about the Old Testament were the various spiritual senses of interpretation (while always maintaining that the literal sense was the basis of all the other senses of Scripture). For a quick rundown on on the senses of Scripture, see CCC 115-119:
115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.
116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”83
117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
1. The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.84
2. The moral sense. The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.85
3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.86
118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:
The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.87 119 “It is the task of exegetes to work, according to these rules, towards a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture in order that their research may help the Church to form a firmer judgment. For, of course, all that has been said about the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgement of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God.”88
But I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me.
For much more detail on the senses of Scripture, see my book Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did.
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This was very helpful to me as I’m have a hard time even an aversion to the scriptures lately. It’s hard for me to really accept the scriptures as inspired when they seem to cause so so much contradiction and confusion. If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew Tradition existed before any scripture and all scripture came out of Hebrew and Christian Tradition, I don’t think I could believe. Scripture alone would never be something I could accept, I have a sort of admiration for people who can.
@Ashman618:
I would highly recommend reading the fourth book of Origen’s “On First Principles”, which explains in more detail the Church’s approach to exegesis as outlined by Mark Shea in this article. (The Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Origen includes that work and is easily available from most booksellers or libraries.) One of Origen’s key insights is that the contradictions and confusions in Scripture are intentional: they are stumbling blocks meant by the Holy Spirit to make us stop and think more deeply and pray more fervently over those passages. Contradictions at the surface level invite us to dig deeper, below the surface, to discover the spiritual harmony hidden beneath the letter (as St. Paul says).
Origen Adamantius (ca. 184–254) was posthumously excommunicated by the Council of Constantinople in 453 for heretical beliefs.
In the meantime, perhaps someone might help me interpret Matthew 1:25 And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name Jesus.
Thanks.
And people who actually know something about the history of Christianity know that the condemnation was issued against a technical point of Trinitarian theology based on later developments in the definition of the relationship between the persons of the Trinity that did not exist during Origen’s third-century lifetime. Origen’s methods of exegesis were never condemned.
Those same people who know something about the development of Christian exegesis know that Origen’s ideas were foundational to later developments. His ideas about exegesis were used by almost every subsequent Doctor of the Church, from St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great down to St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Thomas Aquinas.
I am aware of Origen’s methods of exegesis most notably Contra Celsus and the role his works have played in the history of Christianity. But that he was posthumously excommunicated is also an event in the history of Christianity—-and that’s all I reported.
This bible study goes over the Four Senses of Scripture in depth.
https://www.qorbono.com/catalog/123
And in 1277, the Bishop of Paris, whose investigation was made at the behest of the Pope, condemned some of St. Thomas Aquinas’ ideas as heretical.
Origen did not teach ideas that were contrary to the faith of the Church. Rather, more than a century after his death, some of his writings were used by heretics to justify their position, and so were condemned. The excommunication was political more than it was theological. Origen lived at a time when the Church had not yet developed its more advanced and technical definitions of Trinitarian theology, so he can hardly be faulted for not following definitions that lay still a century in the future.
Sal Tamalpais, It merely emphasizes that Joseph was not the natural Father of Jesus. It does not demand that he knew her once she had brought forth Jesus any more than 2Sam 6:23 demands that Michal had a child after her death.
An important element in a literal reading of the text of Sacred Scripture, in addition to the context of the author’s intent, is to recover the distinction between fact and truth when reading. Our modern, “scientific,” mentality is fixated on fact, while we have lost an appreciation of the reality that something need not be a fact in order for it to be the truth.
Jesus spoke of Noah as a real event with a warning for his followers (Matthew 24:37). Jesus and Paul speaks of Adam as real naming Adam’s son Abel ( Mark 10:6-9, Luke 11:48-51 1Cor 15:45). The Gnostics were the first to deny the historical events of the Gospels. Tradition confirms the faith of these teachings. Yes, I believe in talking Snakes…John 8:44.
CCC 274 “... Once our reason has grasped the idea of God’s almighty power, it will easily and without any hesitation admit everything that [the Creed] will afterwards propose for us to believe - even if they be great and marvelous things, far above the ordinary laws of nature.” (115 Roman Catechism I,2,13.)
Yes, God can make snakes talk, a stream of living water flow from a rock, etc. Even an atheist can admit that God could, theoretically, accomplish such things. But what is vastly more important than external signs of God’s omnipotence are the spiritual realities they are meant to signify or the truh of the message they are meant to confirm, which I think is what both the Catechism and Mr. Shea are trying to get at.
Pax,
Tim
The spiritual sense of scripture compels us to transcend the literal sense . . . to go beyond the literal sense, to seek the truth that God has revealed to us. While the literal sense of the text is the foundation for this understanding, it is the foundation to a deeper understanding of what God has revealed to us.
To fixate on the “fact” of talking snakes, to cite but one example, is to miss what God has revealed. God did not reveal a series of “facts,” he revealed the Truth. To hold this view is not to deny the historical events of the Gospels . . . it is to recognize that what God has revealed to us is ultimately meant to transform us spiritually, not inform us of the “facts.”
Augustine’s “On the literal meanings of Genesis” and his manual on Scriptural interpretation, “On Christian doctrine,” are instructive in this regard.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1202.htm
My current viewpoint of the well used line that the Bible “is not a book of facts but a book of truth” is double speak. The DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON DIVINE REVELATION Dei Verbum, 19 makes it very clear that the Scriptures as history is real and we can place our fath in these events that we might believe in what we could give our lives for (1Cor 15:14 John 20:32). This “not facts but truth” claim is what the Gnostics believed, and was addressed by the Church. My faith is not based on a Myth, but on events that confirm the power of our God through His Most Holy Church. As we apply the scriptures as God and the Writers intended, we are sure to be blessed in our holy work ofthe Gospel (2Timothy 3:16).
James Hitchcock’s History of the Catholic Church is a great read to address the ongoing watering down of God’s Word.
This “not facts but truth” claim is what the Gnostics believed
Not really.
+ + +
“Fact” is from factum est, “that which has the property of having been fabricated.”
“Truth” is Anglo Saxon and means “trust” or (in Latin) fides or “faith.”
Example, in Daniel, there is a reference to a Babylonian king. The names escape me. There is no such king in the Babylonian king-lists, so the claim is not factual. However, the person named acted as regent for the king’s underage successor, and so the claim is true in the sense that so far as the subject Jews were concerned, he was king in all but fact.
Example, in Kings, there is a reference to a giant who peeks above the horizon far out to sea. That’s it. A peculiar event with no apparent consequences. The truth behind it is thought to be the eruption of Santorini and people in the Levant, seeing the plume of the gigantic eruption rise above the horizon saw a face in the billowing smoke.
It is the late modern secularist who confuses myth with falsehood.
Your argument regarding Bablyon is vague and unperswasive. The track record of the so called ” Higer Criticism ” as related to the Historical information is dismal when one looks at the claims presented in the last 70 years as facts, when seen in light of current new discoveries which confirm many of the Bible’s account. There are some problematic questions that have yet to be awnsered, but that may show our ignorance, not the Bible’s. I will continue to keep the faith on questions that have yet to be answered.
Gnosticism rejected the Hebrew Scriptures completely, and looked at the Christion Greek Scriptures only in a “Spiritual way”... History of the Chatloic Church
Sounds very familiar…
“Gnosticism categorically denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reason being, to the Gnostic, the world and the flesh are evil. The soul or spirit of man is good. Therefore, to attain ultimate good, the soul must be freed from the flesh. When faced with the belief among Christians that Jesus Christ was bodily and physically resurrected from the dead, the Gnostic sees the whole resurrection story as completely absurd. To their way of thinking a bodily resurrection would continue to confine the soul or spirit of man in a fleshly body”.
“New Age circles and are rooted in an ancient movement known as Gnosticism. The New Age portrait of Jesus reveals a completely different Jesus than the one found in the New Testament writings of the inspired apostles. For example, the current view of Jesus is that he is not the Son of God, as his followers claimed, nor was he born of a virgin, nor resurrected from the dead following his crucifixion. ” David Web
To contend that the spiritual sense of Scripture necessitates Gnosticism is to misunderstand the Church’s teaching. The four senses of Scripture are a traditional way of reading and interpreting Scripture, look at the Catechism.
The Gnostics misused the spiritual sense, giving it primacy, over the literal sense. Traditional Catholicism embraces both the spiritual sense and the literal sense, treating the literal sense as the foundational sense of Scripture. It is possible to believe in the Truth of Scripture, ultimately derived from the spiritual sense of the text, and still believe that the Gospels are historical. The point that is being made is that, ULTIMATELY, what is important to a faithful understanding of Scripture is the Truth that is revealed to us by God, not the “facts” in the text. The near-exclusive fixation on “fact” has led, in too many cases, to distractions from the ultimate meaning of the text. We must transcend this approach.
This position does not NECESSARILY mean that the Bible does not contain historical fact . . . the Church teaches, and faithful Catholics believe, that it does . . . it simply recognizes that God revealed himself to us in order for us to transform ourselves. This transcendence of reality is based on a spiritual reading of the text . . . but, unlike the Gnostics, does not mean that we reject the historicity or the factual nature of the text.
This from the Catechism:
115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.
Again, the spiritual sense does not require a Gnostic approach to the text, or a denial of the historicity of the text . . . the three spiritual senses are an integral part of the path to the deepest understanding of the text.
a) Gnosticism was not a Christian movement, but a general movement of the era. There were pagan gnostics and Jewish gnostics, as well. Most of them were syncretic, like modern vodun: they incorporated elements of any religion that struck them as kool and mysterioso. The heart of the matter was hidden knowledge revealed only to an inner circle; whereas Augustin, for example, wrote a manual that anyone could understand and use.
b) Metaphorical language is also literal. “You are the salt of the earth” depends on the precise meaning of “salt” for its metaphorical power. “You are the garlic of the earth” would not mean the same thing.
c) Augustine said we should not adhere to a reading so strongly that, if reason and fact later show it to be untenable, we should look ridiculous. The earth is not a flat blanket with a tent thrown over it. This was known to Augustine, who wrote that “it was evening and morning, the nth day” could not have a naively literal meaning, since on a sphere it was always morning and evening somewhere.
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