Mick Hartley

I’m no expert on theological matters, but this strikes me as significant:

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture. […]

As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing.

Similarly, they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb.

The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come.”

I realise that the Catholic Church made some sort of peace with evolution a while back, but it’s surely no coincidence that this is coming this out now, with the Intelligent Design debate hotting up. [But why (oh why) does the author of the piece have to come up with “they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation…” No they don’t. They “argue against”. Is there any other word that so regularly – and so annoyingly – gets misused? That it happens so often suggests that there’s a need for an English word meaning “to argue strongly against” without the implication of success that “refute” has.]

Interestingly, senior cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, a leading Catholic conservative who was taken to be saying back in July that the Church no longer accepted evolution, has 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.”