[lbo-talk] Catholic Church admits fallibility of Bible!

[C. G. Estabrook]

Despite the gee-whiz style of the article, there's nothing
particularly new about the UK bishops' document.  It's quite
the standard position.  How to read the scriptures
(particularly the Hebrew bible) when they obviously can't be
read literally has been solved in various ways by Christians
over 2,000 years (beginning perhaps with the imaginative
solutions of Clement of Alexandria and Origen early in the 3rd
century).  The real dispute between Galileo and Cardinal
Bellarmine (as they both recognized) was biblical hermeneutics:
neither held a modern Fundamentalist position -- precisely
because the notion of "verbal inerrancy" arises only in the
modern period.  --CGE