I thought I had this one down… but I guess I don’t. Why do Catholics genuflect? I thought the reason why Catholics genuflected before they did stuff (like read a passage or something) was in deference to the Host (which, as we all know, is THE body of Christ—as holy as it gets). But I was just at a mass where they were genuflecting just because, to THE BIBLE. Which prompts me to wonder—why on earth would you genuflect to the Bible? They’ve got giant boxes of the things, they hand them out on street corners, there’s one in every hotel room. If we generally genuflected to the Bible, people would be genuflecting all day! I don’t get it.
Of course, thinking along these lines prompts me to wonder about something else. I’ve noticed that at every mass the priest kisses the words of the Gospel after he reads them. Why? They’re God’s Words, surely, but it’s just ink and paper. We don’t worship the words—they’re just words, it’s the IDEAS that are the really important bits. The Words are only important in as far as they convey God’s Will. Writing the Words down in the Bible is like drawing a picture—they both stand for something else! We don’t treat a picture of a king as the King, we don’t treat a Stephen King novel as Stephen King, why would you treat a late edition of the Bible that way?
This makes no sense at all.
Comments (4)
u suck they catholics do these things for a honour to god and to show respect.!!!!!!!
Posted by brigitte | March 30, 2006 3:35 AM
Posted on March 30, 2006 03:35
oopsie i ment without the 'they"
Posted by brigitte | March 30, 2006 3:36 AM
Posted on March 30, 2006 03:36
normally the proper response is to bow to the bible. Although genuflection can also be done. This is because it is not just simply words and ink it is what the Holy Spirit(the third part of the trinity of God) gave us. The Holy Spirit infused the apostles with revelation(God's sharing with us in the divine knowledge). It is the Holy Spirit revealing to us God and his nature through the bible. This is why it is proper to bow before the bible and if by preference genuflect.
P.S: many of the bibles that they hand out on the street in boxes are missing a couple of books(luther took them out)
Posted by God-seeker | November 18, 2008 10:42 PM
Posted on November 18, 2008 22:42
For what it's worth, Luther didn't simply take out books he didn't care for. (He didn't care for the book of James---called it an "epistle of straw", in fact---but he kept it in his translation.) Luther asked the question: what books belong in the Old Testament? There are two general answers: the Septuagint (LXX) and the Masoretic Text (MT).
The Septuagint has the distinction of being older and being traditionally what the earliest Christians used (largely because Greek was the most common language at the time), however it can only be found in Greek (the old story goes that 72 scholars translated the Hebrew into Greek at the same time, compared notes, found that their translations were identical, and that set of books defines the Septuagint).
The Masoretic Text, or Hebrew Bible, is the Jewish canon (i.e. they are the books that the Jewish faith officially considers scripture: the Tanakh), and can be obtained in the original Hebrew and Aramaic, though the oldest copies of it aren't as old as the oldest copies of the Septuagint. Luther, probably motivated at least in part by a desire to distance himself from the Catholic Church, chose to use the books sanctioned by the Jews rather than those sanctioned by tradition. On the other hand, even St. Jerome, when he created the Latin Vulgate, relied heavily upon the Hebrew in the Masoretic Text to inform his latin translation, something which he was roundly criticized for at the time.
Keep in mind, though, that Roman Catholics don't use the FULL Septuagint (the Catholic Canon leaves out sections of Esdras (Ezra), 3rd and 4th Maccabees, and the book of Odes); only the Greek Orthodox Church uses the full Septuagint.
In any case, the Holy Spirit infuses the priest as well, not just the biblical text, and yet we do not genuflect to the priest.
Posted by Kyle | November 25, 2008 1:10 AM
Posted on November 25, 2008 01:10