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MissMusicTeacher
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| Joined: | Mon Jun 30th, 2008 |
| Location: | Silicon Valley, California USA |
| Posts: | 25 |
| First Name: | Laura | | Gender: | Female | | Faith History: | EVFree, Catholic seeker |
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Posted: Thu Jul 10th, 2008 03:31 am |
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I'm about halfway to Catholic in my belief about Sola Scriptura. One verse that has really helped me in my understanding is II Peter 1:20 - "Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation." I was curious if the word "prophecy" literally meant "prophecy," or if it was referring to the Scriptures in general and not just the actual prophetic parts. I looked up the Greek and this is what I found (from studylight.org):
- prophecy
- a discourse emanating from divine inspiration and declaring the purposes of God, whether by reproving and admonishing the wicked, or comforting the afflicted, or revealing things hidden; esp. by foretelling future events
- Used in the NT of the utterance of OT prophets
- of the prediction of events relating to Christ's kingdom and its speedy triumph, together with the consolations and admonitions pertaining to it, the spirit of prophecy, the divine mind, to which the prophetic faculty is due
- of the endowment and speech of the Christian teachers called prophets
- the gifts and utterances of these prophets, esp. of the predictions of the works of which, set apart to teach the gospel, will accomplish for the kingdom of Christ
I'm wondering, based on this Greek, how does the verse mean that no scripture - prophecy or not - is to be interpreted privately, which is the way that most Catholics interpret it?
Thanks!
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David W. Emery
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| Joined: | Fri Sep 29th, 2006 |
| Location: | Brownsville, Texas USA |
| Posts: | 2522 |
| First Name: | David | | Gender: | Male | | Faith History: | Catholic |
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Posted: Thu Jul 10th, 2008 01:07 pm |
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Laura, in Catholic thought, the root meaning of “prophecy” is closest to number 2 in your list of definitions: to have been given to communicate to others a divine inspiration declaring the purposes of God. The text of 2 Peter 1:20 does say “prophecy of scripture.” So we start with what scripture is: a communication to the world, and to Christians in particular (as the people of the covenant), of the purposes of God, based on the divine inspiration of the biblical writer.
Here is what the Navarre Bible commentary says about the passage:
19–21. “The prophetic word” finds its complete fulfulment in Jesus Christ (cf. Heb 1:1). This does not refer to a particular prophecy; at that time [when 2 Peter was written] “the prophetic word” meant the messianic prophecies or (more usually) all the Old Testament insofar as it proclaims the enduring salvation to come.
These verses encapsulate the whole notion of biblical prophecy — its value, interpretation and divine origin. “The books of the Old Testament, all of them caught up into the Gospel message, attain and show forth their full meaning in the New Testament (cf. Mt 5:17; Lk 24:27; Rom 16:25–26; 2 Cor 3:14–16) and, in their turn, shed light on it and explain it” (Vatican II, Dei Verbum, 16).…
20. Prophecy and Sacred Scripture in general are not man-made; they are the word of God: there is nothing in the Bible that is not inspired by the Holy Spirit (v. 21). Therefore, against the false teachers of his time and of all eras, the sacred writer rejects any interpretation of Scripture based exclusively on human ingenuity; as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, it is “the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God” (Dei Verbum, 12).
These words repeat the teaching of the Council of Trent: “No one should dare to rely on his own judgment in matters of faith and morals […] to distort Sacred Scripture to fit meanings of his own that are contrary to the meaning that holy Mother Church has held and now holds; for it is her office to decide on the true sense and interpretation of Sacred Scripture” (De libris sacris; cf. Vatican I, Dei Filius, chap. 2).
21. This verse makes it clear that there is such a thing as biblical interpretation (cf. 2 Tim 3:13ff), and it specifies what it is. Scripture has been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; God and the human author are involved in the writing of the sacred books in such a way that the end-product is, at one and the same time, entirely of God’s making and entirely of man’s.
There follows a lengthy quote from Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, 11. It ends with these words: “God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their powers and faculties so that, although he acted in them and by the it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.” The complete document is available here.
David
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