=”http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2005-10-04T160725Z_01_DIT457969_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-RELIGION-EVOLUTION-CARDINAL-DC.XML”>now stated that the theory of evolution is “one of the very great works of intellectual history.” As a commenter at The Loom remarks, perhaps the cardinal was politely informed by a higher authority that he’d “misread the tea leaves… One may not like Mr. Ratzinger much, but he’s not stupid.”
Respecting Symbolic Language
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Comments
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I think it’s less significant than you do. The Catholic Church believes that the authors of the Bible were real people, who were “divinely inspired.” The smart ones know that any text can be written hundreds of ways, and almost all leave some details out. The zealots among Baptists appear to believe that God wrote the Bible directly, and hence it contains prophesies and even acrostics. You have to be pretty ignorant not to know that the Bible is a collection of accounts, and that some were intentionally left out of the book in its present form. It is interesting that the books of most interest to fundamentalists are those largely rejected by Rome.
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Yes OK, I wouldn’t want to make too much of it. I just thought it was interesting timing – plus I like that phrase “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally” Well exactly, and it’s good to see that being spelled out by some senior religious figures. It’d be good if some of the fundamentalists could acknowledge that (but then I suppose they wouldn’t be fundamentalists, would they?)
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This is even less news than The Backword One makes out. The view that Genesis is not literally true goes back at least to Augustine of Hippo (fourth-fifth century). Catholicism has never been inerrantist. Fundamentalists are mentalists.
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Mick you need to understand the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The latter tend to cling to the Bible because they reject other forms of authority such as tradition and ecclesiastical precedent.
Another howler in the article was the assertion that Galileo was censured for opposing Biblical in-errancy. So the Bible insists that the earth revolves around the sun? (I don’t know enough to say but I doubt it). In fact the Church’s authority at that time was Aristotle. Hardly fundamentalist.
If the Reformation led to the Enlightenment, then how come Protestant’s main gripe is the Church’s dependence on Greek ideas, and the ‘Reformers’ thus created Bible fundamentalism which didn’t exist before?
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