RE: My Escatological Vision
January 16, 2011 at 4:25 pm
(This post was last modified: January 16, 2011 at 4:32 pm by dqualk.)
OnlyNatural Wrote:dqualk Wrote:The Bible says a lot of thing, most of which is analagous, not literal.
If that's the case, and the Bible is mostly analogy and metaphor, then it can be interpreted in nearly limitless ways. Interpreting a metaphor in the way that is most pleasing to you, then calling your interpretation the truth, is laughable. And you can't pick and choose which parts are literal, and which parts are metaphorical. On what basis could you make such claims anyway? Let's just agree that it's all fiction, with no bearing on the truth, and leave it at that.
No because I am a Catholic. And so the Church and her magesterium has interpretted the Bible to such a degree that we know what is to be taken literal, what can be taken as analogy and what is just analogy. For example, the resurrection is to be taken literal de fide (this means from faith literally, but dynamically it means it is to be taken as true forever and can never change) the Church has bound this on the faithful in such a way that that teaching can never change, however a 7 day creation can be taken as analogy or it can be taken literally, and so can Jonah and the Whale etc. Something that must be taken as analogy is God the father getting angry or walking in the garden. These are just temporal ways to explain how the Jews felt about God. God was not really angry, as God is Divinely Simple, as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas. Jesus in his human nature can really be angry etc. But his Divine Nature is Divinely simple and therefore the best way to describe his personality in human terms is charity, we only know this from Divine Revelation, but God is composed of no parts and therefore he is unintelligable within the temporal realm apart from Divine Revelation.
Anyway, the Church does not make it a point to list everything one must believe and one must not believe but when contention arises she is there to tell the faithful whether something must be believed de fide, or whether we can have our own personal opinion, or if we can have an opinion within a range of opinions or if we just outright cannot believe something. Also, to be Christian one does not need to believe all the right things. Its the spirit of the thing, as long as you seek the Truth in charity you are fulfilling the laws and commandments of what it takes to be "saved" for all of the law is contained in this that you love God and the second is like unto it, that you love your neighbor as yourself.
On the basis that Jesus handed to Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven and earth so that whatever he should bind on earth would be bound in heaven and whatever he should loose on earth should be loosed in heaven. The See of Peter is our direct and only connection back to Christ. The See of Peter and those Bishops in union with him make use of Holy Tradition which is contained within the written (Holy Bible) and oral form. The Bishops then respond to various problems that might arise, and on issues of faith and morals they do so infallibly.
