On the handout that I've given, which I will partly follow, on the handout that I've given, I've begun with a quotation that I want to read, because it's really important that you recognize how striking it is.

This is a quotation from the catechism, which of course you will all know by heart, and yet it deserves

repeating. The Christian faith is not a religion of the book. Christianity is the religion

of the word of God, a word which is not a written and mute word, but the word which is incarnate and living.

If the scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ the eternal word of the living God,

must through the Holy Spirit, open our minds to understand the scriptures. Much of what I have to say this evening is about how, after a long

story and much controversy, the common teaching of Pope's Benedict and Francis is to emphasize

that theme summarized so nicely in the catechism. So my goal then is to try and understand a common

theme. If you've seen the two popes with Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Price, and if you've read too

much in popular newspapers, you'll be familiar with the idea that Benedict and Francis are resolutely opposed one to the other.

One is a crusty old German who likes his red slippers, while the other is a football-loving Argentinian man of the people.

Now, like most of such presentations, this is mostly nonsense.

But it is a perspective that's very easy to fall into. There certainly are many differences in

between the two popes. There's no doubt about that, and I'm sure many of you could identify some.

But at the same time, there are fascinating areas of strong continuity. And what I'm leading up to

this evening is to talk about one of those areas of continuity. And that's the way in which they talk about the understanding of

scripture in the church. Okay. So what I want to do is to explore a theme of continuity.

And that is how should we think about scripture within a Catholic context? What's our theology of

scripture? And how should we read scripture? The two are, as we'll see, quite interrelated.

Before I can dive straight into that, I need to talk for a while about the longer history of

debates over scriptural interpretation.

These debates are what we might call the deep background to what's happened in the Catholic

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