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We all hear individuals, preachers, ministers, priests interpret the same Scripture passage resulting in vastly different messages.
Whenever we read Scripture we are influenced by the world around us, where we are in that world, our life experiences, and where we are in our life's journey. So therefore reading a passage today could have a different personal message for me from the message I understand tomorrow.
Putting daily reading aside, the approach with which we understand Holy Scripture is basic to hearing God's message for us and humankind. Here is a thumbnail view of the different approaches and how they influence what we read.
| Fundamentalist (Literal Approach) | Historical (Catholic Approach) | |
| How God works | In communicating with people, God felt that it was necessary to set aside natural processes by a miracle in order to put divine thoughts in human words. | God doesn't set aside natural laws, convictions or limitations in order to communicate His saving word to humankind. |
| Meaning of "inspiration" | The Bible was written through a miracle which sets it apart from other written documents and renders it safe from historical or cultural limitations... it contains no historical, scientific, or any other kind of error. | Human limitations and processes were in effect while the Bible was being written. God worked through natural means. The Bible is theology ("God-talk") the record of believers' living and changing experience of God expressed in language and literary forms of their time. |
| Meaning of "error free" | Everything in the Bible is literally true, whether it has to do with faith, history, or science. | The Bible's teachings of faith, that is, God's relationship to His people, is true and free from error. "Error free" does not imply to matters cultural, scientific, or historical in the Bible. |
| When scientific, historical and cultural facts conflict with the Bible... | The Bible is right, other disciplines are mistaken. In time they will be corrected and come in line with the Bible. | Look for the intended meaning, that is, what are the sacred writers are trying to teach about faith. Keep that portion of the Bible as true and remember that the scientific, cultural, and historical details just set the scene for the teachings about faith. |
Condensed from an article by
Michael B. Finley
Catechist February 1978
A Statement on Biblical Interpretation
The following represents a recognition of the importance of critical method of study of the Bible by an official Church body.
What's the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient writers of the East as it is in our own times. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context. The interpreter must go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing the authors of that period would be likely to use, and in fact did use.
For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their time and centuries. What those exactly were, the commentator cannot determine, as it were, in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East. The investigation carried out on this point during the past forty or fifty years with greater diligence and care than ever before, has more clearly shown what forms of expression were used in those far-off times, whether in poetic description or in the formulation of laws and rules of life or in recording the facts and events of history.
Pope Pius XII's Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu on biblical studied, issued in 1943, paragraphs 35-36.
