Catholic Church admits parts of the Bible are false

[Jernau]

An interesting Times (UK) article about a recent teaching document released by the Catholic Church that admits parts of the Bible are not true: Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of Bible

To start the discussion I'd like to play Devil's Advocate...

To my understanding there are two main schools of Christian thought on the Bible:

1) The Bible is the inerrant word of God. It is historically accurate and everything in it should be taken literally.
2) The Bible is the word of God through man. Parts are historically inaccurate and only some of it should be taken literally.

This study guide from the Catholic Church places them firmly in the second camp, and I would suggest that this non-literal interpretation of the Bible is actually a harder position to defend than a literal one. This may sound counter-intuitive at first glance, so let me explain. As soon as you admit that parts of the Bible are not true you beg the question; where do I look to find out which parts are true? To my knowledge the church does not have a 'Holy Bible II: Your guide to the true parts of the original Bible'. Without a God given guide such as this, the truth of the Bible can only be discerned through individual interpretation: "Genesis is obviously figurative", "The Old Testament is mainly myths, but the New Testament is all true", "The Gospels aren't an accurate account of Jesus' life, but we can still learn from them", etc.

The literalists don't have to ask themselves these difficult questions; according to them the whole book is the absolute truth. Non-literalist's admission that the Bible has errors requires the further admission that the Bible cannot be from God. The source of these human errors is largely irrelevant; they could be from the original authors, or from the socio-political decisions involved in selecting the cannon, or from errors in translation from the Hebrew and Greek. The point is that as soon as you admit to one error in the Bible, you cannot claim it to be the true word of God, it becomes simply a flawed work of man.

I believe the Catholic Church have opened a huge can of worms with this admission. It will be fascinating to follow the ramifications; will this be swept under the carpet and forgotten or will it be a catalyst that helps to bring down the whole house of cards?