Scripture: the Communication of God’s Word

I figured that some of you may be interested in reading a recent paper I turned in for a graduate course I'm currently enrolled in: "Biblical Foundations".

Scripture: the Communication of God’s Word

The Bible, or “Sacred Scripture” as Catholics speak of it, holds a privileged place in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Within the Christian milieu, Scripture serves as an indispensable tool for each Christian tradition. Its significance is renowned even in the secular universities due to the long-standing primacy it has held both in religion and the living societies that emerged from the principles enunciated in the sacred texts. The aim of this paper is to analyze the place and role of Scripture from within the context of the Roman Catholic tradition with respect to the communication of God’s Word. Upon reaching this goal, I will then build upon this view and attempt to explain how the view of Scripture as the privileged instrument of God’s Word rests on certain fundamentals. Finally, I will proceed to demonstrate how this view of Scripture resists and contradicts the premises of the phenomenon popularly known as Biblical fundamentalism.

In the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, the Council Fathers addressed the purpose, nature, and importance of divine revelation. This revelation is God’s communication with man as he reveals himself and makes known the mystery of his will, which is his plan of salvation fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This divine communication is accomplished through human language (i.e. words) and events in human history (i.e. deeds); it culminates in the advent of Jesus Christ, who is “both the mediator and the sum total of Revelation” (DV 2).

In the Gospel proclaimed by Christ and fulfilled in his person, we find the source of all saving truth and moral discipline, and this truth remains in its entirety as it is transmitted to all generations. This living Gospel is preserved in the Catholic Church through the apostolic succession of bishops and is handed on in two ways: (1) orally and (2) in writing. The apostolic preaching, in its living transmission, is called Sacred Tradition and is distinct from Sacred Scripture, which is “the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit” (DV 9). In Joseph T. Leinhard’s The Bible, the Church, and Authority, Karl Rahner, a well-known contemporary German Catholic theologian, affirms: “God establishes the original community of faith, and the community produces the Scriptures. Hence, the Scriptures are the uniquely authoritative deposit of tradition. God is the principal author of the Scriptures, and the Church is the secondary author. The Bible can exist as Scripture only in the Church; the Bible is the Church’s book.” (Leinhard, p. 84) To interpret or handle Sacred Scripture outside of the context of the Church is to do harm to the very nature of the inspired texts.

The living teaching office (i.e., the Magisterium) of the Catholic Church has been entrusted with giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether it is found in the Scriptures or in the form of Sacred Tradition. However, the Magisterium stands under the Word of God as its servant. She teaches only what has been handed on to her, listening to revelation devotedly and guarding it faithfully. Everything proposed for belief in the Church is drawn from this one single deposit of faith that has been divinely revealed. Dei Verbum succinctly summarizes the interaction involved: “sacred Tradition, sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others” (DV 10 § 3). It is the case that Scripture, taken together with Sacred Tradition, remains the supreme rule of the Church’s faith, and for this reason, the faithful and accurate interpretation of Scripture is of extreme importance in the life of God’s Church.

Sacred Scripture entails that portion of God’s Word written through men in human fashion. This channel of divine speech is entirely unique; it represents that portion of revelation that has been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the books of the Old and New Testaments, in their entirety, have God the Holy Spirit as their primary author and human men as their instrumental authors. What follows from this truth is the incarnational aspect of divine revelation. In Sacred Scripture, God speaks through men in human fashion, which is analogous to the sublime event of the Incarnation wherein God took on human flesh to communicate his unfathomable, eternal love for man (Cf. 1 Jn 4:9). This dual authorship of the divinely inspired Scriptures demands an interpretive stance that is sensitive both to the divinity and the humanity of the Scriptures because of this incarnational aspect of Holy Writ. The interpreter, if he is to learn with certainty what God has wished to make known to us, should first discern the meaning that the sacred writers really had in mind because the communicative intention of God is coterminous with the intention of the human writer.

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical of 1893, emphatically states that it is “absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit that the sacred writer has erred” (Providentissimus Deus, p. 25). The dogma of Scripture’s inspiration in its entirety logically leads to the dogma of Scripture’s inerrancy because God, who is the supreme Truth, cannot utter that which is not true. Nevertheless, the human author can only be held responsible for what he intentionally means to affirm, and it is this intended meaning that we term “the literal sense.” Pope Pius XII, writing 50 years after Leo XIII, tells us, “the foremost and greatest endeavor” of the interpreters “should be to discern and define clearly that sense of the biblical words which is called literal” (Divino Afflante Spiritu, art. 23). It is important to note that in order to ascertain what the sacred author wished to affirm in the literal sense, “due attention must be paid both to the customary and characteristic patterns of perception, speech and narrative which prevailed at the age of the sacred writer, and to the conventions which the people of his time followed in their dealings with one another” (DV 12 § 2). The exegetical task calls for more than a simple literal reading of the inspired text; it demands a literary analysis true to the historicity and humanity of the Sacred Scriptures.

God’s instrumental use of men in his task of authoring the Scriptures mandates use of the historical-critical method. The Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1993 document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, describes it as “the indispensable method for the scientific study of the meaning of ancient texts.” Because Holy Scripture is the Word of God in human language and “has been composed by human authors in all its various parts and in all the sources that lie behind them, … its proper understanding not only admits the use of this method but actually requires it” (IBC, p. 35). In brief, the historical-critical method studies the Bible from a historical point of view, operating with the help of scientific criteria that seek to be as objective as possible. In this way, it makes accessible to the modern reader the meaning of Biblical texts that are often very difficult to comprehend.

Since Sacred Scripture has the Holy Spirit as its primary author, it must be “read and interpreted in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written” (DV 12 § 3). Its divine inspiration gives cause for us to read Scripture with attentiveness to its canonical content and unity; even though each book of the Bible is unique and different in many aspects, Scripture is a unity by reason of God’s plan. Secondly, it must be read within the living Tradition of the Church because it was authored in the heart of the Church and her life. It must never be forgotten that Scripture’s proper home is in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Thirdly, we must be attentive to “the analogy of faith”, which is that coherence of truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation. Revelation, given over the course of time, builds upon itself and does not contradict itself when it is properly understood.

Now that we have examined the place and role of Scripture within the context of the Roman Catholic tradition and have examined various fundamentals upon which this view rests, we shall consider the unique problem of Biblical fundamentalism and demonstrate how this particular hermeneutic is irreconcilable with the principles already examined. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, in Scripture, the Soul of Theology, notes that fundamentalism receives its name from the American Bible Conference held at Niagara, N.Y. in 1895 when the “Five Points of Fundamentalism” were issued by a grouping of conservative evangelical theologians in response to liberal Protestant interpretations of the Bible. This unique fundamentalist reading of the Bible “insists on an unyielding adherence to rigid doctrinal attitudes and an unquestioning, uncritical reading of the Bible as the sole source of teaching about Christian life and salvation” (Fitzmyer 58).

In his apologetic, Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating informs his audience of Biblical fundamentalism’s understanding of inspiration and inerrancy, which is derived from Benjamin Warfield’s notion of plenary-verbal inspiration. This view asserts that all of Scripture’s original autographs are inspired; the inspiration extends not just to the message God wished to convey, but also to the very words chosen by the sacred writers.

Unfortunately, “this reduces to the dictation theory of inspiration – the human authors were mere stenographers, their only task being to record what the Voice said” (Keating 20). Biblical fundamentalism tends to view the inspired text as though it were dictated verbatim by God while neglecting the incarnational aspect of divine revelation. It fails to acknowledge that the Word of God has been phrased in human language and distinct literary genres; it neglects to take into account styles of human thought and the fact that the Biblical texts express language that covers long periods of time in multifarious historical situations. Fundamentalism tends to regard as historical everything that is narrated in the past tense without respect for what may have been expressed primarily in symbolic or figurative language. It is “often anti-church, neglecting creeds, dogmas, and liturgical practices that are part of the ecclesiastical tradition” (Fitzmyer 59).

Already, the tension can easily be felt between the Biblical fundamentalist approach to Scripture and the fundamentals upon which a Catholic purview of divine revelation rests. While Biblical fundamentalism insists that the Bible alone is sufficient as the only necessary source for teaching about Christian faith and morality, the authentic Catholic view would insist upon the living Tradition of the People of God as integral to the transmission of supernatural revelation through the ministry of the apostolic Magisterium. Biblical fundamentalism, in contrast to both Catholic and numerous Protestant traditions, approaches the Bible without regard for its historical context and development whereas the Catholic exegete would be careful to ascertain the patterns of thinking and writing used in ancient biblical times. Like the docetist heresies in the early Church’s Christological controversies that denied the humanity of Christ in defense of the transcendent divinity, Biblical fundamentalism tends to deny the human authorship of Sacred Scripture in its overreaction to those liberal exegetes who have unfaithfully discarded the divinity of the Scriptures as well as various tenets of the orthodox Christian faith. The Biblical fundamentalist approach fails to appreciate the other half of the dual authorship of Scripture, that the human authors themselves are also directly involved in the outcome of the Scriptures.

In the descriptive words of Pope Pius XII, “the God of all Providence” has made known to man “by supernatural means the hidden mysteries of His divinity, His wisdom and His mercy” (Divino Afflante Spiritu, Intro). In the Sacred Scriptures, we witness the transcendent God of the universe making known his inner life and eternal plan in an act of divine condescension and charity. Our God employs the use of human co-workers, through whom, as instruments, he transmits his supernatural revelation to all generations, and this instrumentality has a genuinely human face. We have seen how Biblical fundamentalism’s approach to the Scriptures fails to fully recognize the human embodiment of the divine message, and in the process, it rejects the indispensable historical-critical method, which is entirely necessary in doing justice to the historical context of revelation. Our analysis leaves us with one overarching principle: the humanity of Scripture should not serve as a stumbling block for the divinity, nor vice-versa, and when this harmonious balance is achieved, the result is an authentically Catholic view of Sacred Scripture.

Carson Weber
Franciscan University of Steubenville

[ November 06, 2002, 11:49 PM: Message edited by: Carson Weber ]

 

I hope this paper helps with an understanding of a Catholic approach to the divine literature.

 

Hi Multimom,

Thank you for the invitation, but I am unable to spend time away from my studies at present. We're on our home stretch with less than a month left before the end of the semester.

Hi Curtis,

You quoted Leo XIII, "the pope holds "upon this earth the place of God Almighty""

Let's not get sidetracked from the topic of this thread, which is Scripture as the communication of God's word. Leo XIII is speaking of the vicarious duty the successor of St. Peter has to shepherd Christ flock. If you would like Biblical support, I can give it to you, but I refuse to further dialogue on the verses on this thread. Christ appoints Peter as his Prime Minister: Matthew 16:16-19 & Christ appoints Peter as the shepherd to shepherd the Shepherd's flock: John 21:15ff.

You quoted Saint John's Gospel, ""In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."John 1:1"

John is speaking of Jesus in this passage, not the Bible. He is employing a philosophical Greek term, which is "Logos" (it translates to "reason" or "word"), in speaking of the Incarnate Word, the Divine Logos.

You wrote, "The human writers of the Bible we so fearful of God that they didn't dare write anything other than what they were told."

Your sentence harkens to the dictational theory of inspiration (one of several Fundamentalist inventions), which I find to be quite superfluous and false. I'm not speaking of the revelation prophets received, but the general quality that all Scripture holds, which is Divine Inspiration. When Paul wrote to the community in Corinth, Paul did not sit at a desk with papyrus and a pen, writing down exactly what God revealed for him to write. He simply wrote a letter to his Christian disciples. In time, the Church recognized that God, in his Almighty Providence, inspired the letter and serves as the letter's primary author. But, Paul, at the time, was very unaware of this activity.

You also wrote, "Dubious, Carson. I believe you posted it to take yet another stab at fundmentalism, and the way we hold the Bible so dear. You may hide it with big words, and quote lots of educated people, but it still is equal to throwing stones."

You could at least give your Christian brother the benefit of the doubt. Jesus bless you.

Hi Brian,

Good to hear from you again.

You wrote, "Does the sentance wording you use just flow out of you or do you have to think a lot to use words that make everything sound so complex? ... Jesus spoke in everyday language for the most part."

I wrote the paper for a graduate Bible course; my primary audience is a highly critical professor with a doctorate, not commonfolk along the seashore. Could you level the same criticism to the writer of Matthew, who wrote primarily for a Jewish audience? Today, Matthew's Gospel is reprinted for our reception of divine truth (as my paper is reprinted here for you to take in), but his primary audience is not us today. If it were, he would explain the literary and religious allusion that is woven throughout his text.

You quoted me, "We have seen how Biblical fundamentalism’s approach to the Scriptures fails to fully recognize the human embodiment of the divine message, and in the process, it rejects the indispensable historical-critical method, which is entirely necessary in doing justice to the historical context of revelation." and responded with, "What I think you meant to say above is: "The Catholic Church is the B-E-S-T""

The paragraph you quote speaks of a fundamental truth concerning the difference between two approaches to the Bible. The first is shared by all non-fundamentalist Christian bodies (this includes the vast majority of Protestant Biblical scholars); the second is held by Fundamentalists, who, I argue, have an impoverished view of the Divine Scriptures, and I explain myself thoroughly.

Hi Rev G,

It's good to see a fellow Texan on the board. I'm an Aggie.. "Gig 'em!"

You wrote, "Please, let's not forget to use the term "Roman Catholic Church." After all, orthodox Protestants are catholic."

I employ the term "Catholic" as it is meant within the context of the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D., which delineates the true Church from all sects. Of course, this was at a time 1,200 years before Protestants existed, so I argue that Protestants, even orthodox Protestants, far from fit the description "Catholic".

Hi g_1933,

You wrote, "A follower of Christ does not need ANY tradition other than God's holy Word."

I understand that you believe this, but I do not find this teaching in the Holy Bible.

Saint Paul commends the disciples at Corinth by giving quite a hefty value to Christian Tradition, "I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you" (1 Cor 11:2). He also commands the Thessalonians to hold fast to Christian Tradition, "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter." (2 Thess 2:15)

If you are interested in the Biblical foundations of authentic, orthodox Christian Tradition, which has as its substance the Word of God and is used as the form by which to interpret the written Word of God (Scripture), I suggest visiting

http://www.catholicoutlook.com/bible.html

Hi Colin,

Thank you for responding.

You wrote, "Your view of inspiration needs to honour these texts."

When I speak of "inspiration", I speak of the quality that all of Scripture possesses, including the revelation received through the prophet's ministry. However, prophetic revelation is a category in its own respect, and I do not intend to treat it specifically when I speak of "inspiration".

You asked, "Jesus speaks of every "jot and tittle" being eternally true. Would you agree?"

Jesus is not speaking of Scripture, but of the Law. The context of this verse is the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus - the New Moses - ascends the mountain and gives the New Law of the Beatitudes, which fulfills and surpasses the Old Law. This is the Law, which can only be lived by the new life in the Holy Spirit, which is Gospel morality.

You also asked, " Equally, did the writer of 2 Peter "intentionally mean to affirm" that "Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ" as the letter starts, wrote the letter?"

Your question speaks to your Fundamentalist approach to the Bible, which rejects the Historical-Critical Method - a method that I and the majority of Biblical (Protestant & Catholic) scholars find indispensable to approaching the Divine Scriptures.

Pseudoauthorship was a popular literary convention among the ancients (similar to ghostwriting in our time, but still substantially different), and Fundamentalism, with its elementary view towards the Scriptures, rejects such a device as out of hand - as a forgery - without regard to this mode of authorship prevalent in the Ancient World.

I would like to thank everyone who has responded. My time is becoming very limited at school, and so I thank you in advance for your kindness when I am unable to respond.

Bless you all,

Carson

[ November 07, 2002, 09:29 PM: Message edited by: Carson Weber ]

 

Hi Colin,

You wrote, "Pseudoauthorship was common in the ancient world. So was child sacrifice.

The Jews viewed child sacrifice as a wee bit immoral; did they view pseudoauthorship or redaction to be equated with the gravity of child sacrifice? I hope not.

I don't find a difficulty with what you presented. I, at many times, especially on this board, will say that "Paul wrote to Timothy.." or "Peter wrote in his second extant catholic epistle.." while not holding to Pauline authorship of the Pastorals nor holding to Petrine authorship of 2 Peter (and, I still am open to Pauline and Petrine authorship, while I find it unlikely).

What is also needed here is a study behind the Mythopoeic and Enlightenment horizons, which entails a bit of philosophical background. The ancients lived in an age much different than our own, which is highly critical. I will not go into it here; I have not the time, but I will say that the demands you place upon the Biblical writers are demands that they did not even consider. Their worldview was not rational, chronological, and critical; it was mythic and poetic.

Hi Curtis,

You wrote, "you tell me I can't trust my Bible"

I never said such, and you will be hard pressed to find a quote from what I have written that says this; I'll say it now: "You may trust your Bible". However, what you should trust is not a simplistic reading of the text, but a text illuminated by diachronic and synchronic studies that brings forth what the author meant to say to his audience in his time in order to ascertain what the author "intended to affirm". This is called Bible Study.

You asked me, "If you died right after reading this post, are you sure you would go to Heaven?"

Yes, I am sure that I would go to heaven if I were to die at this moment.

Hi g_1933,

You wrote, "What nead is there of another source when the Bible was given by God?"

When you quote 2 Tim 3:16, Paul is speaking specifically of the Old Testament Scriptures, the ones that Timothy had known since birth. So, if we are to take this passage as you intend for it to suggest - that all that we need is Scripture - then you should do away with your New Testament.

You also asked, "Is God's Word not enough that we need man's interpretation?"

Translating texts, doing exegesis, as well as hermeneutics all involve man's interpretation. You can't "get around" having a man interpret the divine writ. To suggest otherwise is naively simplistic.

Of course, the Bible commands disciples of Christ to adhere to Tradition, but you ignore or try to wash over these verses. The Catholic finds that, in doing so, one nullifies the Word of God with his own human tradition, and so the Catholic cannot and will not disobey this Biblical command.

God bless you guys,

Carson

[ November 08, 2002, 10:41 AM: Message edited by: Carson Weber ]