(c) Jennifer Morrill-Fabrizi, 13 December 2022
Exiting the Circle
The Catholic Church teaches that the entirety of Sacred Scripture is inspired by God and is inerrant, teaching everything that is necessary for salvation1. The Church teaches that God chooses to reveal himself to man out of love and in order to reveal his will2. The Church teaches what it does about the inerrancy and inspiration of scripture based on dogma that is derived from God’s revelation and developed more fully through speculative reasoning. However, in reading the Bible we encounter what seemed to be changes in doctrine and also contradictions to what we know about God’s nature, the nature of good and evil and other important Church teaching such as those concerning the afterlife.3 Here we are faced with a problem: if the dogmas of the church are based on revealed truths and if some things asserted in scripture seem to contradict these same dogmas, from whence then do these dogmas come? How can we assert, on the basis of scriptural claims, that scripture is wholly inspired and inerrant, if that same scripture seems to contain within it errors? Clearly being able to address this issue and save it from circular reasoning is essential if we are to maintain confidence in the scripture as the basis of our understanding of who God has revealed himself to be and his plan for man. Indeed the whole of faith that the Catholic Church asserts is at risk of falling apart if confidence in the inerrancy and inspiration of scripture cannot be maintained.
This conundrum is at the heart of Dr. Matthew Ramage’s book “The Dark passages of the Bible”. It is a conundrum that demands an honest exploration and response. If we are to effectively evangelize the culture, we must be able to assert and demonstrate that the Good News is indeed true news. In order to address this issue we look towards the theology of Pope Benedict XVI and of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The answer lies in what Ramage calls the hermeneutic of divine pedagogy.4 But first we have to examine what scripture is vis-à-vis revelation and what is meant by inerrancy and inspiration. Only then can we turn to addressing development of doctrine and apparent contradictions and how in spite of these we can confidently maintain the truthfulness of scripture.
What Scripture is — and what it is not.
The Church does not teach that God delivered scripture verbatim to an entirely passive scribe-as-instrument the way that our Muslim brethren believe the Quran was delivered to their prophet.5 Nor do we believe that scripture is merely the appropriation of entirely humanly composed writings that were later identified by the Church as containing Divine truths.6 When the Church speaks about inspiration, it is referring to an illumination of the mind by God. It may or may not be accompanied by prophecy that is by a new revelation. The human author may very well not know the fullness of the truth which God is using them to convey. That is not to say that the author is writing what seems to him as gibberish; rather the author is writing what he believes he has understood; however over the course of time deeper truths emerge in the context of the fullness of revelation and with the ongoing development of doctrine.7It is also important to consider that many of the individual books of scripture show evidence of being compilations of multiple texts, the work of multiple authors, and that our extant versions are indeed redactions. Who then, was the inspired author? Was it the original contributor or contributors, the final redactor, or the Church body who declared the canonicity of the book?8 We would say all of the above. God’s act of inspiration somehow is at work at each level and stage of the production of scripture. There is an emergent level of meaning and truth that is not apparent to the writer, indeed there are many ironic truths in Scripture!9 The person is not merely an instrument in the hand of God, though with the Prophets this may be more accurate – we see Jonah who did not approve of being God’s chosen spokesperson but yet, God was determined to use him. How interesting as a foil to what the prophet actually is!
The second issue we must explore if we want to understand scripture’s nature is to ask what is meant by inerrancy, or positively stated, the truth of scripture. During the patristic and medieval eras the emphasis on scripture interpretation was predominantly within the spiritual mode.10 From early times, there has been an emphasis on understanding the Spiritual sense of the Scriptures: the Old Testament, it is said, could only be fully understood in light of the New and the New was believed to be hidden in the often-mysterious cryptic passages of the Old. Within the Spiritual Sense there are three ways of reading: the Christological or analogical (although nowadays often called typological), the tropological or moral, and the anagogical or eschatological.11 However, despite the spiritual riches, there is still the issue of the literal (or literary) text of Scripture – while a text may not have been written as a science lesson or a historical treatise, it was still written. It still contains a message that the author was inspired to feel was worth recording. And while Dei Verbum states that all that the human authors of scripture assert, is also asserted by God, for the sake of salvation, this does not mean that scripture can be divided into what is profane vs. what is sacred. Nor does it mean that only what concerns faith and morals is asserted whereas historical or scientific assertions can be treated carte blanche as erroneous.12 Something happened that prompted people to write!
As the fields of exegesis, ancient languages, anthropology, archaeology, and critical analysis developed, more could be said about the actual text itself. Was it composed in one stage or two? Were there multiple writers? Was it written contemporaneously to the events being described or was it only committed to writing hundreds of years later and if so, of what significance is this? Understanding literary styles has helped to discover what kind of message a particular passage meant to convey. Some people think this quest to reclaim the literary sense simply a modernist phenomenon, but according to Fr. Aidan Nichols there have been at least four major movements in the history of the Church towards recovering this sense beginning with St Jerome in the fifth century.13
The church from medieval times has taught the four senses of scripture which are the literary sense and the three spiritual senses moral christological and eschatological. Modern literary criticism builds upon this awareness that not all communication serves the same purpose. For us to understand the meaning of a written piece of information we must know the literary form that it takes for instance the truth of any of Aesop’s Fables lies not in the fantasy of animals talking and carrying on with one another but rather in the moral lesson transmitted therein. The Hebrew writers wrote poetically and beautifully as do modern authors. We can read metaphorical language and understand simultaneously that this is an image and yet also conveys truth. Certainly not every single word or sentence recorded in Scripture was intended to be read as a record of a historical event.
In a chapter entitled, “Farewell to the Devil,” Pope Benedict XVI expounds upon the difference between the form and content of scripture.14 He explains that the content of the message is like a shell for the truth, it is analogously the accidental quality of the message, whereas the form of the message, the kernel which is the truth, is the substantial part of the message and this does not change. Although this principle is beautiful in its simplicity, its application is challenging. Elsewhere, Benedict highlights in addition to the form-content distinction, two other principles: the unity of the Bible as a criterion for its interpretation and Christology as a hermeneutic.15 Another idea is that inerrancy only emerges in the long view, or at the Whole-Scripture level, but this isn’t exactly consistent with Catholic teaching. This is a point of debate and passionate discussion, but what we can assert is that determining what is being asserted by the author takes the best tools of literary criticism and historical-critical examination, but above all must be guided by certain principles most importantly that God is indeed real, and has chosen to reveal himself to us. Other principles come out too, but it’s not a methodology that we can just run each and every passage through.
Modern critical analysis and the explosion of historical investigation into the Ancient Near East cultures and languages as well as archeology and other modern sciences have given us a much greater understanding of the social context within which the scriptures of God’s people were written. In knowing this context we can discern with greater insight the truths that are in fact being asserted, which are not always what a surface reading would suggest. For instance the creation narrative in Genesis 1 has many similarities and similar features to the creation tales of the surrounding cultures which dominated the region however unlike these other myths the Hebrew creation myth turned them entirely on their head by placing a good God as the creator of all things and the Creator who creates out of goodness and whose creation is good. By incorporating all of the elements and features of these other competing myths the subversive nature of Genesis serves as a powerful assertion of the truth that God is love and that we are his beloved.16
Divine Pedagogy and the Development of Doctrine
The fact that there seem to be contradictions in doctrine especially when the Old Testament is juxtaposed with the new is not a new observation. Part of the explanation lies in the development of dogma:
The divine plan of revelation [. . .] involves a specific divine pedagogy: God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.17
Thomas Aquinas developed a theology of the development of doctrine; he taught that the fullness of faith is contained in rosebud or embryonic form and that it is only the number of articles of faith that increases over time and not the nature of faith that changes. Some of these articles came through direct revelations, some through speculative reasoning – emerging comprehension of earlier revelation in light of history and in light of the whole of scripture and the history of the Church. The Church famously teaches that the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New and that the New Testament is fully contained in the Old. For Benedict, the evidence of a development of doctrine helps us to understand the nature of Revelation:
Indeed Holy Scripture in its entirety was not written from beginning to end like a novel or a textbook. It is, rather, the echo of God’s history with his people. It arose out of the struggles and the vagaries of this history, and all through it we can catch a glimpse of the rises and falls, the sufferings and hopes, and the greatness and failures of this history. The Bible is thus the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time…. Only in the process of the journeying was the Bible’s real way of declaring itself formed, step by step.18
Tools for Encountering Contradictions
While some Modern biblical exegetes seem to be motivated by a desire to dismantle Catholic faith, Benedict insists on the importance and value of the insights that can be found through these new approaches. However these tools must be harnessed and utilized within the context of the wisdom which asserts the unity of revelation, and its christological nature — i.e., the hermeneutic of faith. Indeed the historical critical analysis of a text can shed greater light and reveal profound truths if the hermeneutic of faith is kept in the fore.19
We can see how historical-critical analysis has deepened traditional understanding by examining the following two classes of what seem to be contradictions in the literal text. We will first consider the observation that in many instances within the Old Testament, gods are spoken of in the plural.20 Another seeming area of contradiction are the many instances in which an afterlife is denied.21 How can we assert that these statements are consistent with church teaching? Let us look at the plurality of Gods. It is clear from the teachings of the Mosaic law that God wanted to instill the truth of monotheism however often the terminology is henotheistic — that is to say placing God as the greatest among other gods — when we look at the surrounding cultures which were fully polytheistic we can see an unfolding of the teaching first for the people to realize that their God was greater than all other gods and only second to realize that these other gods were not Gods at all but rather idols or even evil spirits. This pedagogical unfolding makes sense in the context of teaching an entirely new concept to a people who had never encountered anything like this before.22
Looking at the development of the doctrine of the afterlife is a very fascinating instance of showing the help that the historical critical method has lent to our understanding: the spiritual teaching on texts which denied the afterlife that come from being medieval and patristic teachers tended to downplay the actual content of these texts and instead spoke of these references to the bleakness to expect for those who would die in sin.23 But, this approach fails to address the assertion stated therein: that these people did not believe in life after death. Through modern methods we encounter the fact that the surrounding cultures did believe in an afterlife, but one that had nothing to do with one’s relationship with God or a reward for living morally. Indeed, an escapist focus on the secular afterlife that the Egyptians believed in, would have plausibly distracted the Hebrews from wholly serving God in this present life. It is actually a unique and remarkable feature of the Hebrew religion that God was imminently interested in their current life and that blessedness consisted in living a good life; experiencing material and physical well-being and most of all, in living on through one’s descendants and building up the nation. This insight that God may have wanted to purposefully delay consideration of an afterlife, when coupled with the spiritual truth and unity of scripture leads to a profundity in our understanding of the gratitude that God wants us to experience in relationship to him, to our fellow man, and to all of creation while rooted in this present order.24
“C’est le Tout qui est la Verité”25
It seems that the smaller the unit you look at it — individual words or phrases, the harder it is to assert inspiration or inerrancy. Both seem to be most strongly evident as they emerge when looking at the whole of salvation history, and its written record — the Sacred Scriptures. The principle of unity that is so fundamental to Benedict’s approach to exegesis extends not only to the contents of Scripture but to Tradition and the Magisterium. This unity also extends through time. We recall that the substance of faith — which Ramage summarizes as belief in God and in his providence for those who love him — remains unchanged while articles unfold.26Indeed, although the Church affirms that there will be no further public revelation, doctrine has continued to develop as in our humility may we recognize that it will continue to develop, within the Church, during this age of grace. The story of God’s gradual revelation to man has an analogue in the story of God’s revelation to each person in the Body of Christ:
This Church is the place where God gives us the Invisible to feed upon in visible form, thus leading us ever more towards the Invisible until we are become adults in his presence. Because of man’s wounding through sin, the Church now becomes a necessary stage in the ascent of the soul to Wisdom. All must pass through the triad of credere, auctoritas, humilitas, ‘have faith, accept authority, practice humility’, if they are to see the divine Wisdom in its beauty.27
The God who Reveals
Part of the reason that making sense of apparent contradictions is so challenging is precisely that the Church asserts dogmatically many of God’s attributes – dogma which is derived through revelation, poured over and safeguarded, but somehow can seem at odds with the individual building blocks involved in its construction? We must keep in mind that scripture is not the whole of revelation. Christ is the ultimate revelation. Christ is the Word made flesh. The Bible is God’s Word in human words, it is revelation crystallized in a moment of time. It’s more an anthology of what people thought over the course of a timeline than a textbook. It can be very easy to slip into circular reasoning or at least to throw our hands up, and yet the Church needs this safeguarded faith and time and again we discover with awe that indeed the Truth is preserved and vindicated!
Revelation ultimately is about the God who reveals, and the person who encounters this revelation. Thus there is both an objective and subjective act in revelation. Theological reading is not merely the process of absorbing information from the text, rather it is a dynamic interplay between a certain reader and certain text written in a certain context. Information is not only imparted, but like every single relationship, God is the mediator – that includes between the reader and the text – God elevates this encounter from the immanent reading to a transcendent encounter with Himself. The consequence of this is that we have a duty as readers to read and interpret using worthy tools, so that we can and do in fact encounter God and what He would have us know about him.28
In approaching this subject, it becomes clear that Scripture is the Living Word and that reading it is not like reading just any other book. Benedict speak about the two struggles of God and man in communicating and receiving this revelation;29 Sarisky emphasizes the idea of reading the Bible theologically, and Fr. Nichols speaks of the life changing event which is the encounter with the Word.30 Let us not lose this sense in the midst of all of this. And just as we see the Scripture as a record of the unveiling of revelation in a people and then in a church, this is also the story of us. There is the need for an ongoing revelation to each one of us, each one of us needs to be illuminated by the light of faith, the light that shines in the darkness that has not been overcome. We are each on a pilgrimage of understanding revelation. Blessed are we that the Word made Flesh, in giving us the crystalized Word, also gave us his Body, the Church, to safeguard, teach, and transmit it.
(c) Jennifer Morrill-Fabrizi, 13 December 2022
Endnotes
1 Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum (1965), www.vatican.va, §11.
2 Dei Verbum, §2.
3 Matthew J. Ramage, Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI & Thomas Aquinas, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 17.
4 Ramage, Dark Passages, 16.
5 Aidan Nichols, The Shape of Catholic Theology, (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 1991), 118.
6 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 120.
7 Ramage, Dark Passages, 99.
8 Ramage, Dark Passages, 255.
9 For instance, consider Pontius Pilate’s words “Behold the Man” spoken in irony to Christ; John 19:5.
10 Ramage, Dark Passages, 73.
11 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 161.
12 Ramage, Dark Passages, 58.
13 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 143.
14 Benedict XVI, Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 199,
15 Benedict XVI, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), First homily, Kindle edition.
16 Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, First homily, Kindle edition.
17 Catechism of the Catholic Church 53
18 Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, First homily, Kindle edition.
19 Ramage, Dark Passages, 90.
20 Ramage, Dark Passages, 164.
21 Ramage, Dark Passages, 196.
22 Ramage, Dark Passages, 172-3.
23 Ramage, Dark Passages, 221.
24 Ramage, Dark Passages, 229.
25 Benedict XVI, “Préface”, in J.H. Nichols, Synthèse Dogmatique: De la Trinité à la Trinité, (Fribourg: Éditions Beauchesne, 1991), 5.
26 Ramage, Dark Passages, 97.
27 Aidan Nichols, The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007) Foreward, Kindle edition.
28 Darren Sarisky, Reading the Bible Theologically, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 71-72.
29 Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 2010, www.vatican.va, §42.
30 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 159.
Bibliography
Benedict XVI. In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, trans. Boniface Ramsey. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. Kindle edition.
Benedict XVI. Verbum Domini. 2010. www.vatican.va.
Benedict XVI. Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Translated by United States Catholic Conference. Washington, D.C.: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1994.
Nichols, Aidan. The Shape of Catholic Theology. Collegeville, Minn.:Liturgical Press, 1991.
Ramage, Matthew J. Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI & Thomas Aquinas. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013.
Ratzinger, Joseph. “Préface,” in J.H. Nichols Synthèse Dogmatique: De la Trinité à la Trinité. Fribourg: Éditions Beauchesne, 1991.
Sarisky, Darren. Reading the Bible Theologically. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Vatican Council II. Dei Verbum. 1965. www.vatican.va