This is a disturbing news article from Europe:
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.
The bishops acknowledge their debt to biblical scholars. They say the Bible must be approached in the knowledge that it is “God’s word expressed in human language” and that proper acknowledgement should be given both to the word of
God and its human dimensions.
The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”
This could be very damaging to many believers in establishing wrong patterns at the basis of their faith. The Bible is the Word of God and inerrant, very true in every sense. It is the foundation and the rock, and the only thing that can be trusted as being the truest thing. We have a world that wants to be stuck in a very postmodern mind-set. The only thing that is true is what you think about it, that's very incorrect. This article and this kind of thinking erodes the power of the Scripture. If we can be skeptical about we can believe or not about the Word, we lose our foundation and our footing about what we believe, we begin to believe what we want to believe, in order to serve our means.
They say the Church must offer the gospel in ways “appropriate to changing times, intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries”.
Here's the reason why they stated the above. We need to all be very careful of trying to not stand ABOVE the Word, but UNDER its teaching. If we can pick and choose, what parts about the Bible we believe, we are OVER the Word. It doesn't have meaning to us, we try to put meaning on the Bible. "I don't think that parts true, we don't have to follow what it says."
I believe we can interpret their saying above as, "If WE don't change how the Bible is presented, it won't be attractive to modern day people." This is the beginning of the slide in connecting the WE to the ATTRACTION, as if we are determining how important "God" is. God is Almighty, the power of the gospel is true, let's not water down biblical doctrine to serve our means.
Let us become better listerners to what the Word has to say to us. Let us take that as truth into our hearts, being the Word of God, which we know is truth. Let us communicate these absolute truths to others in a gracious, loving way.
Here's a link to the website. Click Here.
