The topic tonight is one of great interest to me, although a philosopher, I very much enjoy the chance to study the scriptures.

And in particular, what I wanted to share with you is a concern about the question of, is the entire Bible true, how should we mean it?

And what I'd like to share with you is the church's own

understanding of hermeneutics. I suspect that in the course of your studies, you have run into

various kinds of hermeneutics, some of which are very helpful, some of which leave me

scratching my head. But I believe that the church has a sophisticated

kind of hermeneutics which is worthy of our knowing. The handout that you've received gives a

brief account of that, and what I've provided near the top, I'll go over it there, is my own

statement of these things, whereas down two-thirds of,

most two-thirds of the page is a statement from the catechism of the Catholic Church.

So I'll spend a minute or two just introducing the textual sources here, but then talk it

through, and then I intend to just leave lots of time for conversation,

for I'm sure that questions emerge, and I think that that will be a very fruitful way to our

proceed. So I'm eager for that kind of conversation. The church has understood the scriptures

to have four levels of meaning.

These are outlined for you there, the bottom two-thirds of the page.

It's part of the section from 100 to 130 in the catechism

that deals in general with how a Catholic reads the Bible. But in particular, beginning at paragraph 115, there is a reference to this traditional theory of the four senses of Scripture,

and you simply have a printed text of what the catechism said.

Near the top of the page, I offer my own take on this, and let me present that first, and then raise some other questions.

The idea of the four senses of Scripture is this, that there is a literal sense, but that the literal sense is usually misunderstood.

And then in addition to the literal sense,

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