October 6, 1999
Baptists, Catholics seek understanding
___By Bob Allen
___Associated Baptist Press
___WASHINGTON (ABP)--Sixteen U.S. Catholic and Southern Baptist officials released a statement Sept. 23 describing where the two faiths agree--and disagree--about the Bible.
___The statement, finalized in a meeting two weeks earlier in Washington, is the first report of annual conversations between representatives of the two groups that have been going on without publicity for five years.
___The participants, appointed by the interfaith witness evangelism team of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board and the Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, said the 1,600-word report is not a "confessional statement" either for churches or the participants. Rather, it is an account of topics the group has discussed, processes that have been followed and a clarification of terms used in the discussions.
___Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic participants "share a great deal in our Christian faith concerning the authority and truth of the Bible," the statement says, but also have "serious differences."
___According to the statement, "Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics believe in the Triune God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we confess the full deity and perfect humanity of Jesus Christ."
___Both groups "find these truths of faith in God's written word, the sacred Scriptures," but they view the Bible differently.
___But in addition to disagreeing over the canon--Catholic Bibles include a section called the Apocrypha not in most Protestant Bibles--Catholics and Southern Baptists largely disagree over some issues of the nature and interpretation of Scripture.
___Both groups define revelation as "God's free self-communication to the world" through nature, the human heart and the books of the Old and New Testaments.
___"For Catholics, Jesus is the incarnate Word, is the revelation of God. Scripture contains revelation, while both Scripture and tradition witness to revelation. Southern Baptists prefer to speak simply of Scripture as the revealed, written word of God, which is inerrant."
___Inerrancy is defined as "the conviction that the Bible is 'without error' in what it affirms," the statement says. "But there are different interpretations of what this actually means."
___"For Southern Baptists, inerrancy means that the original biblical text was composed precisely as God inspired it and intended it to be ...; not just the thought comes from God, but every word, every inflection, every verse and line, and every tense of the verb, every number of the noun, and every little particle are regarded as coming from God. Scripture is 'God-breathed,' and God does not breathe falsehood, so the text is faithful and true in all it affirms, including the miracle accounts, the attributed authors and the historical narratives."
___"For Roman Catholics, inerrancy is understood as a consequence of biblical inspiration; it has more to do with the truth of the Bible as a whole than with any theory of verbal inerrancy."
___For Catholics, infallibility is a "gift of the Spirit which belongs to the Church for faithfully expounding the deposit of faith." That infallibility can be exercised when the pope speaks "ex cathedra" in defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals.
___Southern Baptists, meanwhile, traditionally have used infallibility and inerrancy as interchangeable terms applying to the Bible. "That is to say, the Bible alone never fails to be God's perfect word." More recently, the statement continues, infallibility "has been construed in a weaker and inadequate sense to mean only that the Bible accomplishes the purpose which God intended."
___Catholics and Southern Baptists both hold that "God's revelation takes place in history and develops through the biblical tradition" but differ about what parts of the Gospels can be taken as historical.
___"Southern Baptists interpret as historical all biblical events which are clearly intended by the sacred authors to be taken as such."
___"Catholics believe that not all biblical narratives should be understood as historical, since the sacred writers also used narratives in a symbolic way to teach religious truths."
___Because of that view, Catholics support the "historical-critical" method to interpret the Bible, which seeks to discover the "literal sense"--or what the author intended to convey--through form criticism (analyzing Bible passages by identifying them as various literary forms) and similar methods.
___"Southern Baptists prefer to speak of the grammatical-historical method in which these tools are employed with a commitment to biblical inerrancy."
___The statement finally addresses using the term "fundamentalist" to describe groups like Southern Baptists. The word originally referred to an early 20th century movement among Protestants in response to liberalism but later came to be viewed as "strongly separationist," the statement says. "Outsiders came to identify fundamentalism with anti-intellectual literalism and to extend the term to conservative non-Christian groups, such as 'Islamic Fundamentalists.'
___"Because of the pejorative connotations, the Associated Press Stylebook appropriately suggests, 'In general, do not use "fundamentalist" unless a group applies the word to itself,'" the statement notes.
___One Catholic participant said the report would help dispel erroneous perceptions that Southern Baptists and Catholics have of each other.
___"We're the two largest Christian denominations in the United States," said Jeffrey Gros, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Religious Affairs. "To say together how we talk about one another and about our common Bible is important progress."
___"It should also lay the common ground for witness together and help those already engaged in Bible study in local situations," he added.
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