Different Forms of Christianity, Essay Example

Different forms of Christianity have different views on the Bible. For Protestants and fundamentalists, everything a Christian needs to know about God and Christ can be found in the pages of the Bible. The Catholic Church takes a very different view, and believes that the teachings of the Bible must be interpreted and understood through the teachings of the Church. Most of these different forms of Christianity still view the Bible as canon, meaning that over the course of history some writings were determined to be divinely inspired by God, and were included and combined with other appropriate writings to form what we know as The Holy Bible. These include the texts that are combined as The Old Testament along with the texts of the New Testament, which are the texts of the apostles and other texts that help us understand the teachings of Christ. The New Testament contains these teachings and also gives guidance for building a living Church, and this is the tradition that the Catholic Church was founded on.  The Church offers teaching and guidance for Catholics to understand the Word of God, and the canon of the Bible is the central part and the basis of the Church’s traditions and teachings.

The challenge of interpreting the Scriptures and texts of the Bible has been a part of the tradition of the Catholic Church since it was founded. The Church doctrine teaches that the Holy Spirit was responsible for inspiring the authors of the texts that make up the Bible, and also teaches that the Holy Spirit has continued to inspire the Church so that it can continue to be a living and vital organization. The Fathers of the Church have been responsible for learning, understanding, and teaching the lessons in the Bible, and part of this process has included making decisions and judgments about which texts are canon.

The Bible is made up of texts from a variety of different sources, and the Church teaches that these texts were ultimately authored by God, since HE inspired the human messengers who wrote the texts. Party of the challenge for the Church has been to decide which of these texts really are inspired by God so that they can be included in Biblical canon. The Fathers of the Church critically examined and interpreted texts to determine their sources, and to see if they were truly inspired by God. The texts of the New Testament, for example, include many parts that were originally passed down through oral traditions for decades after the death of Christ. When they were written down as texts they sometimes contained ideas or words that contradicted other parts of the Bible. It was the task of the Church to examine these different texts from these different sources to see how the contradictions could be explained, or to decide if mistakes had been made. The Bible contains texts that are many centuries old, and part of the job of the living Church has been to interpret these texts in order to reveal the teachings of God.