It’s often been said, though perhaps not often enough lately, that the Devil can cite Scripture for his purposes. Whether the Evil One is operative in many of the current approaches to Scripture – in university departments and some Church circles – is a question best left to true authorities and even exorcists. But there’s no question that the people who wrote Final Report of Study Group Number 9: Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues, which appeared just last week, were engaged in serial Scriptural abuse.
Admittedly, they’re not alone. A good deal of current Scripture scholarship seems like the work of a lawyer looking for legal loopholes – on behalf of the usual “emerging” subjects: LGBTs, women’s ordinations, suicidal concessions to postmodern “paradigms.”
A long line of doctors, martyrs, confessors, saints, spiritual adepts, holy men and women, ordinary Catholics, and popes – to say nothing of the Apostles and Early Church Fathers – would not even have conceded that such subjects are “controversial” – the original area that the study group was supposed to be considering. Let alone “emerging.”
Homosexuality, priestesses, and heterodox “paradigms” were quite common in the pagan
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