As I lay in bed, drinking water with my Tylenol, I read. I just read about a teaching document published by the Roman Catholic Church that instructs "that some parts of the Bible are not actually true." That is according to this article at Times Online.
What I find interesting about this is that as someone who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, I always felt that my church urged me to believe that the Bible was truth. I could never wrap my head around that notion. I always had trouble finding the Bible to be anything more than a book of stories that lacked application to modern life.
During my senior year at Illinois Wesleyan, I took a Religion course called Sexuality and Christianity, taught by Dr. April DeConick. This course opened me up to religious studies. It helped me understand how to resolve the stories in the Bible with reality: view them as literature and guides, rather than as fact. This is how I resolve the Bible and its teachings with my faith in science and its teachings.
I believe this is what the Roman Catholic Church hopes to accomplish with their new publication. With the rise of the religious Right, Christian fundamentalists looking to interpret the Bible as fact may cause more harm than good. For example, opponents of gay rights citing the Bible as evidence that God opposes homosexuals continue to drive a wedge between people who believe in strict interpretations of the Bible and people who find looser interpretations of the Bible more appropriate for our changing times. Rather than using the Bible as a unifying force, some are using it as a divisor.
I know a great many people who are religious, some of whom attended parochial schools, and they cannot find reason in the Bible or in their hearts to hate anyone simply because of race, religion or sexual orientation. These are people who, like me, are at risk to be driven further from their faith by the antics of the Christian fundamentalists. In addition to the fundamentalists, I belive it is these people whom the Roman Catholic Church hopes to affect with their new teaching document.
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."
In their foreword to the teaching document, the two most senior Catholics of [England, Wales and Scotland], Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh, explain its context.
They say people today are searching for what is worthwhile, what has real value, what can be trusted and what is really true.
With this document, I find that there is still hope in the Roman Catholic Church. I am relieved that there remain forward thinkers in the clergy, and I am glad that high-ranking members of the Church allow for non-literal interpretation of the Bible.
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