By Richard N. Ostling

                             AP Religion Writer

                             Cortland Standard Friday May 6, 2005

 

    He's the first pope from a nation with many Protestants (Martin Luther's Germany), the first with full fluency in English and German, and the first in modern times who was an important university theologian. So he knows his biblical scholarship.

  

    Ratzingers felt the Vatican was too repressive  in the early 20th century. He recalls his beloved New Testament professor, Friedrich Wilhelm Maier, who had suffered previous Vatican banishment  for asserting that Mark was the earliest Gospel, a view now widely taught on Catholic campuses.

 

    The landmarks in papal teaching on the Bible are Leo XIII's "Providentissimus Deus" (1893) and Pius XII's "Divino Afflante Spiritu" (1943).

 

    Leo declared, "It is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow (biblical) inspiration to certain parts of Holy Scriptures or to admit that the sacred writer has erred." 

 

    Pius reaffirmed the Bible's total inerrancy, but cautiously opened the church to current techniques and study of the context to better understand the sacred writers intentions.

 

    Ratzinger was a theological adviser for the Second Vatican Council's 1965 decree "Dei Verbum", which reframed this by stating that the Bible teaches "faithfully, and without error, that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of our salvation."

 

    In a 1988 lecture at a Lutheran church in New York, Ratzinger chided fundamentalism, saying it's "useless to take refuge in an allegedly pure, literal understanding of the Bible."

 

    Ratzinger said a 1993 Pontifical Biblical Commission statement on Bible interpretation was "very helpful" and "advances" previous papal teaching "in a fruitful way." 

 

    That paper denounced fundamentalism as "dangerous" and "a kind of intellectual suicide." It said fundamentalists place "undue stress upon the inerrancy of certain details in the biblical texts" and naively confuse the Gospels as finally edited with "the words and deeds of the historical Jesus."