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Date:         Thu, 15 Oct 1992 09:29:01 -0400
From:         Eric James Ewanco <ewanco@MLO.DEC.COM>
Subject:      Re: Homosexuality

Excerpts from catholic: 14-Oct-92 RE: Homosexuality Brian I. V.
Support@SWDE (1698)

> Len wrote:
> >writing older than 20 years is out of date...The Bible must be
> >constantly revaluated in light of new information.

> Eric wrote:
> >HA!  What a joke!

> Eric, if what you say were true, there would be exactly and only one
> version of the bible and it would be in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek.

That's not quite what I meant.  I believe the suggestion of the original
post was not that we need to produce more accurate translations and more
precise manuscripts, or even that we need to understand better the
context  in which a book was written so that we may understand it, but
the suggestion, to me, appeared to give us liberty to interpret the
Bible in the context of popular culture and dismiss much of what has
been traditionally believed, and also the liberty to come up with new
theology according to current social belief and "reinterpret" the Bible.
 For example, there is a tendency today to explain the Resurrection not
in terms of a real historical event, where a man died then rose from the
dead to eat and drink, but rather as merely a myth that represented the
uplifting of the disciples, and the joy that Christ brings us.  In the
process they deny the historicity of the Resurrection.  This is an
example of a bad reinterpretation of Scripture.
   Some also suggest that because Scripture was written in a misogynist
culture, we must dismiss its teachings on the behavior of the sexes.
And some believe that in light of modern culture, the prohibition
against premarital sex or divorce can be safely ignored.
   It is preposterous to suggest that all of Christian belief and
doctrine is obsolete and must be reevaluated every once in a while.
Jesus literally rose from the dead -- this happened, and there is no
reason to change this.  Certain doctrines were given to the Apostles and
never meant to be changed.  We can't just make truth relative and
declare open season on all Christian beliefs.
   The idea expressed about throwing out theology every twenty years
assumes that truth is determined by popular culture and human opinion.
I'm sorry, theologians are not infallible.  All Christian truth has been
revealed to us already and we are not free to throw it out and change
it.  We can increase our understanding, we can find new symbols, but to
insist that all Christian doctrine must be thrown out every generation
is even more preposterous than saying that all mathematics must be
thrown out every generation.

> Every time biblical scholars go back to the original texts they find
> something new.  In fact, much of the interpretation of the original
> texts is guesswork, because the original texts have holes in the
> material on which they are written. A lot of what you read as they bible
> today is the result of the scribes in the middle ages who spilled ink on
> the pages they were writing, thus changing the punctuation (in Hebrew,
> punctuation is *very* important.  That's how "Yahweh" became "Jehovah" -
> a few dots out of place).  They also, on occasion, made their own
> marginal notations that later scribes had no idea were not part of the
> original material and so incorporated inthe main texts.

We _do_ have thousands of manuscripts, though, from independent sources,
and these independent manuscripts help us to eliminate scribal errors.
So, too, with marginal notations.  Most of the "additions" can be
identified and removed.

BTW that 's NOT how "Yahweh" became "Jehovah."  These words are both
valid transliterations of the Tetragrammaton, which looks like this:

-+ ---+ -+ ---+
 |    |  |    |
   |  |  | |  |

Literally, this is Y/J H W/V H.  The reason for the confusion is one,
the Hebrew did not have separate Y and J or W and V; two, it was only
recently that written Hebrew had vowels (or more precisely, vowel marks,
that's what all those dots in modern Hebrew are for).  The vowels of
pronunciation for Hebrew words were oral and not written on paper --
therefore we can only know the vowels by the pronunciations handed down
over the centuries.  Unfortunately for the Tetragrammaton, being the
name of God Himself, it was considered too holy to utter.  Consequently
no one ever pronounced it, and the true pronunciation was lost.  The
difference between Yahweh and Jehovah is based on two estimations for
how it is really pronounced.  One could just as easily add Jahveh and
Yehowah; it doesn't really matter since the vowel sounds are lost, and
there is no difference between the J and Y or V and W.

> The church herself has, in the fullness of time, re-evaluated her
> interpretations of Scripture.

Yeah, but she's never gone back on a dogmatic definition or thrown out a
basic article of faith.

> Finally, never make the mistake of believing that God is no longer
> actively revealing Himself to our modern world.  Divine revelation
> happens all the time (or don't you believe the Fatima story that's
> appeared here over the last day or two?)

Certainly God is actively revealing himself.  But he never reveals
anything that is contrary to what he has already revealed.  Notice that
the messages of both Fatima and Medjugorje are filled with socially
out-of-date and backwards doctrines such as the sinfulness of divorce
and abortion, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the
existence of Satan, the existence of heaven, hell, and purgatory, and
other things.  Mary has revealed no new doctrine to us, she has merely
confirmed what we already knew.
   When God reveals himself today, he does not guide us into doctrine
contrary to that which he has already given us, but rather he leads us
back to those doctrines from which we have strayed, and he helps us
understand them more fully.
   And never let us forget that not only does God reveal himself, but
Satan, too, also attempts to get us to depart from the faith of our
fathers.

Eric