A Time-Conditioned Text Marked by the Limitations of Human Utterance
In discussions surrounding Form F of the document which emerged as Dei Verbum, Franz König claimed that some studies with which he was familiar demonstrated that “in the Holy Scripture the historical and scientific information sometimes deviate[d] from the truth.”
In the view of Alois Grillmeier, König signalled his departure from a premise, both aprioristic and unhistorical, which has dominated teaching on inerrancy since the age of the fathers. If one admits that a sacred writer has made a mistake, the rejected premise goes, then one necessarily admits that God has made a mistake with the human author.
Does Leo XIII advocate the premise König rejects? Leo intends to, I think. Writing long before, in Paragraph 40 of Providentissimus Deus (1893), Leo had stated that inspiration is “essentially incompatible with error, [and] excludes and rejects it [error] as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God himself, the supreme Truth, can utter what is not true.”
I write that Leo intends to advocate the premise which König later rejects, but one paragraph prior to the fortieth, Leo had stated that those to whom the Holy Spirit spoke “did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science.” Yes, but eminent persons of today who speak of the sun rising, know the earth has changed position.
Leo is saying that statements made about nature which accord to ordinary experience (the experience of the seemingly rising sun, for example) are not really errors. However, the author of Joshua cannot be said to have been adapting himself to the ignorance of the people of his time, nor was he, like eminent persons of today, using language whose reality he knew to be different. It is not reasonable for the exegete to assume that a biblical author had scientific and natural knowledge well beyond that of his times.
Conditioning need not be limited to errors of science. In the Markan account of the corn-plucking disciples, Jesus’ creative use of the text of Samuel is puzzling. Scholars generally optimistic about Jesus’ knowledge tend to argue that because Jesus evidences such apparent unfamiliarity with I Samuel 21: 1-6, the words attributed to him in Mark 2:25-27 are likely not his own. I am not sure this solves the problem. To promote the narrative as an invention leads to the question of why a better proof-text was not used (for example, one that actually had to do with the Sabbath). Even representatives of evangelical biblical scholarship state the absence of a fully satisfactory solution to the difficulties presented in this text.
An author marked by the limitations of his or her own environment makes mistakes scientific and historical in nature, but also moral and religious. To those who would protest, I respond with the question: Our knowledge of science and history develop, but not our knowledge of God?
In Faith and the Future, Joseph Ratzinger asks: “Are we still able to believe in the God who smote the first-born of Egypt, who led his people to war against the Canaanites, who struck down Uzzah dead because he dared to put out his hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant? For us, is all of this not just the ancient East — interesting and significant, perhaps, as a phase in human consciousness, but only a phase in human consciousness, not the expression of divine utterance?”
In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger notes that in the formative period of the New Testament era a “completely unexpected event” is experienced when “God shows himself from a hitherto unknown side.” Is it possible that in our evolving perception of God, that we attributed things to him which we shouldn’t have (like genocide)?
In what, then, can we place our confidence? Confidence, I think, can be placed in he who is experienced when God shows himself from a hitherto unknown side. Confidence, I think, can also be placed in those texts which the Church has brought together, and has recognized as “teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation (Dei Verbum, 11).”
K.
Kelly Wilson is a Seminarian for the Archdiocese of Winnipeg. Besides Vox-Nova he also writes at his blog Musings.
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Cardinal Franz Koenig rocks!
Obviously, Peter Paul, König was right. But you know, to someone like Hans Küng, König preferred diplomacy over controversy and settled for a text more ambiguous than it should have been. With Paragraph 11 in mind, I don’t know that it’s a good sign when persons who radically disagree (persons who recognize error and persons who do not) both think that the text validates their own position.
Does Ratzinger ever answer his own rhetorical question? I would be surprised to find the position stated here was actually the final one he takes in the book.
I agree with Mr. Kelly that Pope Leo intended to strongly affirm a traditional patristic idea of inerrancy which Cardinal Koenig strongly denied during the prevoting debates of Vatican II which resulted in Dei Verbum. The thoughtful folks here at Vox Nova have tended to sympathize with Koenig’s side of that disagreement whenever this has been brought up (I have seen it here before). More traditionally oriented Catholics tend to give more weight to final versions of documents than to prevoting debates and to the teachings of Popes and the Fathers than to modern clergy when the latter disagree with the former.
@ The Pachyderminator
FWIW, the passage of Faith and the Future can be found in the Google Books preview of that the text. While the preview only goes so far and I do not own a copy, I, like you, find it impossible to believe that the man who eventually became our current pope ever seriously doubted the historical and/or theological accuracy of the Old Testament passages to which he alludes in the quote shown in the above post by Mr. Kelly. Still, what is shown in that preview is quite interesting in this regard: as Ratzinger continues his point, he voices similar modern doubts about the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Trinity, and Transubstantiation. While I had no online access to any later area in the text where he resolves the tension, I find that I am not at all worried about it. I don’t think that Ratzinger was expressing any serious personal doubts about any of these fundamental pillars of orthodox Catholicism. He was giving rhetorical voice to the doubts characteristic of a modern mindset, not personally confessing to his heretical acceptance of that mindset to the detriment of his faith.
Mr. Rice, I didn’t say that at Pope Leo intended to strongly affirm a traditional patristic idea of inerrancy. I did say that Leo intended to convey a premise which the Austrian Cardinal will later reject, and I did say that in the view of Grillmeier that rejected premise went back to the fathers. I also said that while the Pope’s *intention* many have been one thing, what he actually did was quite another. That needs to be taken seriously. I refer you back to the middle part of my post, where I attempt to briefly engage with what Leo actually did.
Now if more supposedly traditionally oriented Catholics tend to give more weight to final versions of documents than to prior discussions and to the teachings of Popes and the Fathers than to modern clergy when the latter disagree with the former, then where does Joseph Ratzinger fall?
Right from Article 1 of Dei Verbum, the text you take so seriously, Ratzinger identifies as existing “barely concealed illogicalities” which “betray clearly the confusion from which it has emerged.” Texts need to be read in the context from which they have developed, and if we have access to previous forms like the Form F referenced in my first paragraph, then that has to be employed in interpretation. These Council texts are not perfect, but in a familiarity with the previous forms we can notice changes that are made in the advancement of the document, and therefore something of the intention. However, intention itself (as I attempted to show in the case of Leo) is one thing, and the end result might not reflect that. Interpretation is not a clean process.
Pachyderminator, Ratzinger doesn’t come back, if I remember correctly, to those specific questions. However, as Mr. Rice notes, Ratzinger does go on to voice similar modern doubts about the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Trinity, and Transubstantiation. Now, obviously Ratzinger doesn’t reject the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, Trinity or Transubstantiation, but he does not belittle modern doubt either, or marry himself to untenable positions of the past.
Let me give you an example: Someone like Tracey Rowland views Ratzinger as having signaled his own rejection of the classical definition of person. Instead of understanding person entirely in terms of substance (as Ratzinger has perceived Boethius as doing in his famous classification of a person as an individual substance of a rational nature), Ratzinger instead suggests that the notion of relation[ality] should be recognized as a fundamental category between the Greek categories of substance and accident, for within Trinitarian theology, the notion of person only makes sense when understood as relation.
Perhaps that’s too obscure an example, but think of it this way: If theology is operating in terms of, and articulating a Trinitarian theology from the perspective of Boethius’ understanding of person, then how do you think Ratzinger (and like-minded persons) are going to look in relation to so-called tradition?
I have read a good deal of Ratzinger (with someone like him, however, there is always a good deal more to be read) but I would be shocked if he ever associated divine utterance with some of the things that are attributed to divine utterance in the Scriptures.
I think the text from “Faith and the Future” is helpful in the pointed questions it asks, but if you are looking for an answer, I think the text from “Introduction to Christianity is more helpful in coming to an answer. In the New Testament era a “completely unexpected event” is experienced when “God shows himself from a hitherto unknown side.” It was completely unexpected. Just as persons writing long ago could not have possessed historical or scientific knowledge that were beyond their means, so also what they wrote about God was conditioned by what they knew and experienced of him. The way in which God appeared in Christ was “completely unexpected.” God showed himself from “a hitherto unknown side.” Therefore my question stands: Is it possible that in the evolving perception and experience of God, attributed to God were things which never should have been (like genocide, to name just one example)?
I am asking you Pachyderminator: Do you think it’s possible?
@kellyjwilson
First, to address your question about the Holy Father and where he stands on the final forms of concilar documents compared to the discussions from which those documents emerged, I think that he stands as a uniquely positioned traditional Catholic (holding longstanding liberal sympathies) with inside information about how such documents were brought about. As to the content of his criticism of the preface of DV, I will give him the benefit of the doubt of accurately perceiving as “barely concealed” that which I am completely failing to see at all. I don’t think that his perspective is transferrable to liberal critics of the text and skeptics of scripture, and thus I do not credit the latter with the same view as Ratzinger hen or the Holy Father now.
“Mr. Rice, I didn’t say that at Pope Leo intended to strongly affirm a traditional patristic idea of inerrancy. I did say that Leo intended to convey a premise which the Austrian Cardinal will later reject, and I did say that in the view of Grillmeier that rejected premise went back to the fathers.”
So your point in splitting that hair is that you think that Grillmeir was wrong? Are you suggesting that any of the Fathers charged the scriptures with containing errors as unequivocally as Koenig did? Which Fathers do you believe did that?
” I also said that while the Pope’s *intention* many have been one thing, what he actually did was quite another. That needs to be taken seriously.”
I took it as seriously as I am capable of taking it. You began your reply with an accurate quote of my words (without using the punctuation) that shows that I took it seriously. But obviously I do not agree with you. I read Leo as having successfully achieved what you say he only intended to achieve (implying that he failed). He strongly affirmed a patristic view of biblical inerrancy (I suppose I agree with Grillmeier, having read the many of the Fathers’ consistently taught doctrines of scripture), and he did so with apostolic authority. Granting anthopomorphic language and the presence of turns of phrase that still enjoy contemporary common usage only points out the obvious – that they no more were intended by the inspired human authors of scripture to affirm certain errors, e.g. geocentrism, than they are today – that is to say, since the use of the terms sunrise or sunset does not justify the attribution of geocentrism to the contemporary speaker or writer, there is no basis for seeing that as an error affirmed by the inspired human author who uses such language descriptively, even if he himself happened to believe what we would call geocentrism.
There are many passages in scripture that could be quoted which could cogently show that their human authors probably believed certain things that we would (perhaps in some cases rightly) call erroneous. But even moderately careful reading skills (and we should hope that scripture isn’t merely being read carefully and critically like a secular text, but prayerfully and faithfully as well) would show that what is being affirmed in those passages is not the error-rooted turns of phrase, but the point that the author is trying to illustrate. THAT POINT is what is traditionally taught to be affirmed without error. The point, that is, the intended meaning and affirmative content of such passages, is generally about the majesty of God, or the glory of creation, or its smallness in relation to Him, and so forth. And that, Mr, Wilson, is precisely why I believe you are mistaken in the ultimate conclusion you have drawn above. It simply cannot be faithfully accepted by a Catholic that any divinely inspired human author falsely attributed to God “things he shouldn’t have (like genocide).” No properly orthodox understanding of scripture (and no logically coherent view of inerrancy) could survive such a position.
I was going to wait until Pachyderminator responded before taking the opportunity to discuss Trinitarian theology, but the more I read Mr. Wilson’s reply to P, the more clearly a certain erroneous position appears to be present by implication, and therefore the more urgently I feel a need to address it.
Perhaps KJW did not intend to imply this – I am sure he will clarify his intentions soon enough in response to this comment – but it is certainly not the case that Trinitarian theology has been proceeding from a simple substance-centered Boethian framework up until Joseph Ratzinger came along and cleverly enriched it by introducing the notion of relationality. St. Augustine beat him to it. Also, in the Athanasian Creed it is affirmed that the distinctions between the Persons of the Trinity are distinctions of relation, not of substance.
“Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance…The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father, and of the Son neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.”
And how do we interpret what is experienced in these “inerrant” texts as religious truth?
I don’t think any but Fundamentalists expect scripture to be “inerrant” with regard to scientific and/or historical data. The fathers of the Church, after all, outdid moderns in interpreting Old Testament texts allegorically. Who really cared how the sun went about being the sun? (Well, Galileo is probably clearing his throat right now…although not literally, of course.) But deciding how God operates, or what sort of person He is, much less what He expects of us, by the sort of actions presented as Godly in much of the OT is problematic, to say the least. On that score I think both historical and literary criticism have been an enormous help. Without that help, we might conclude, as you say, that God has simply exerted his right (as God) to act like a genocidal monster in the past, and then turned around and had the nerve (as God) to demand virtual pacifism on the part of followers of His Son.
Of course, there’s the issue of changing demands with regard to morality in general — from rules of divorce in the OT to no divorce at all in the NT. And the OT’s general lumping together of dietary rules, customs and moral injunctions with punishments that make all appear of relatively equal value in the eyes of God. Gay rights advocates have a field day with Deuteronomy, of course. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do.
Well, Anne, I only see your comment now (well, I saw it when I approved it), but you’ll notice that even in this comments section there are persons willing to defend the Scriptures as inerrant, even with regard to scientific and historical data. Are they fundamentalists? They certainly would agree with them in this regard…
Thank you for your comment.
“An author marked by the limitations of his or her own environment makes mistakes scientific and historical in nature, but also moral and religious. To those who would protest, I respond with the question: Our knowledge of science and history develop, but not our knowledge of God?”
This last question needs much disambiguation before it can be adequately answered (or even posed). Given that God is not an object about which we possess knowledge, and is therefore radically unlike (in more ways that one) the objects proper to empirical investigation, development in our understanding of these objects over time has no bearing on the question of a similar development in our knowledge of God. However, if you mean to appeal here to something like the development of doctrine experienced over the fulness of time, then, yes, I suppose that in this sense Catholics are committed to the view that the content of revelation, while not changing per se, develops *for us* as we come to understand it better through the guidance of the Spirit. But, in any case, this process has nothing to do with the advancement of knowledge in other areas, except accidentally, as it were. I don’t think you’re meaning to imply that *because* humans progress technologically they therefore progress morally or religiously, but your question leaves that point unclear.
WJ, you agree that about God we do possess knowledge. You are correct to say that development in understanding surrounding science or history has no bearing on whether development will occur in our understanding of God, but that point is not in dispute. What is being claimed is that just as persons wrote from perspectives limited in nature on matters of science and history, so also, having not experienced what Ratzinger refers to as God’s “unknown side,” those persons wrote about God from a perspective that would evolve.
Consequently, we interpret what they say about God from that perspective. Right?
“Consequently, we interpret what they say about God from that perspective. Right?”
Well, who is “we”? If by “we” you mean Christians, then the answer is obviously “yes”; but note that this answer has no bearing on your larger, more substantive, claim, since by far the majority of those included under “we”–including the Fathers and Doctors of the Church–think that God’s apparent ordering of genocide in the OT (for example) really is God’s ordering of genocide, and not a misunderstanding of God on behalf of the purblind OT author.
Your strong claim is really that the “unknown side” of God revealed in the NT makes impossible or implausible the actions of God as depicted in the OT. But why should Christianity, per se, make impossible or implausible these actions? Certainly Aquinas, Augustine, etc. didn’t think so, so why should we now? Also, note that Ratzinger doesn’t say that because God reveals an “unknown side” of himself in the NT, the implicit “side” of himself revealed in the OT simply ceases to exist, or is revealed to be an illusion.
WJ, I suppose I am not ecumenical enough. When I said “we” I was thinking of Catholics. So, you admit that we interpret what persons say about God from the perspective from which such statements emerged? Good. But you’re hung up about my absolving God of genocide? Okay.
So — just so I understand you — you are okay with the fact that just as persons wrote from perspectives limited in nature on matters of science and history, so also, having not experienced what Ratzinger refers to as God’s “unknown side,” those persons wrote about God from a perspective that would evolve? Then why can’t they make errors of science, of history and of speaking about God?
“Yes, but eminent persons of today who speak of the sun rising, know the earth has changed position.”
Well, no, motion is relative and all that, though that’s a trivial point…
“Leo is saying that statements made about nature which accord to ordinary experience (the experience of the seemingly rising sun, for example) are not really errors.”
I think what he’s saying goes quite a bit beyond that. I think what he’s saying is, in fact, akin to something like that Fact does not equal Truth.
A Parable doesn’t need to have actually happened to be true. Jesus wasn’t LYING when He said “There was a certain vineyard owner,” etc.
“However, the author of Joshua cannot be said to have been adapting himself to the ignorance of the people of his time, nor was he, like eminent persons of today, using language whose reality he knew to be different. It is not reasonable for the exegete to assume that a biblical author had scientific and natural knowledge well beyond that of his times.”
The inspired author doesn’t have to have known, anymore than a paintbrush needs to know what it was painting. God uses the inspired author (WITH all his human limitations and ignorance) to say exactly what God wanted to say.
The inspired author MAY have been convinced that the details of some Old Testament battle were factual even though they historically weren’t, but this is not “error” in Scripture if it’s the account GOD wanted to be written for typological reasons etc.
If Lot never had a wife and she never turned to salt, this isn’t an error even if the inspired author thought she “really” did. As the relevance of this story (and most Old Testament stories) for us is not in whether it historically happened or not (which really has no effect on me) but the truths it contains moralistically, symbolically, etc, and so that is the story God intended to be told.
“An author marked by the limitations of his or her own environment makes mistakes scientific and historical in nature, but also moral and religious. To those who would protest, I respond with the question: Our knowledge of science and history develop, but not our knowledge of God?”
The problem isn’t that our knowledge of God did not develop from Old Testament days to New, but that God’s knowledge of Himself certainly did not, and HE is the author of Scripture.
That the inspired authors may not have had the “full picture” of God is something God entirely knew and intended when choosing to use them, and indeed is sort of the point of Christ coming and radically “completing the picture.”
But God could not convey anything WRONG about Himself in the Scriptures, even if His self-revelation is progressive or gradual (and thus, at earlier points, “incomplete”)
It is heresy to see the Scriptures as primarily some sort of human account by a human community of their encounter with God. No, God Himself is the author, and if His inspired human authors had an incomplete understanding, God intended this. But God would never let anything be attributed to Him in Scripture that wasn’t actually Him. The understanding may have been incomplete (and completed in Christ), but He wasn’t inspiring LIES about Himself.
Sinner, just so I am clear, do you really want to have taken the position that the relationship between God and the human author is akin to a painter and his paint-brush?
If you do, our starting points are so far apart, that it won’t make sense to discuss specifics.
Mr. Rice, as an aside, I don’t think a defence of Ratzinger’s reading of DV is necessary. I simply mention it to identify to you that the texts of the Council are not above criticism. I am sure you agree. And I mention it to show that the discussions surrounding the drafts of each text, and their subsequent revisions, eventually culminating in the final text as we have it today, are important to our interpreting of said text. I am sure you agree with this also. (BTW, Ratzinger is even more critical of the Preface to Gaudium et Spes). Related to this aside, I must say that as for Ratzinger’s position being transferable to liberal critics of the text, and sceptics of the Scripture, I am not sure who you have in mind. The general text of DV tends to be accepted with ease. It doesn’t mean there aren’t issues, but generally the text enjoys, in my experience, wide support.
To the substance, you recognize the presence of turns of phrase that still enjoy common usage, and note that the biblical authors were not intending, with such phrases, to affirm error. There is no basis, in your view, to see the authors as erring. Do you not see that you are claiming a scope for inerrancy, and then placing such comments outside of it? Authors of the past, using the language of sunrise and sunset actually though the sun rose and the sun set. In the process of including such details in a text, they wrote and intended something that wasn’t true.
Do you see why I might find irony in your lecturing me about “properly orthodox understanding” and “logically coherent view[s] of inerrancy”?
“Authors of the past, using the language of sunrise and sunset actually though the sun rose and the sun set. In the process of including such details in a text, they wrote and intended something that wasn’t true.”
I already addressed that. Nowhere in scripture is geocentrism affirmed. The point being affirmed is invariably theological one, not an astronomical one. As I said, that is precisely why you are wrong, Mr. Wilson, since you are using the trivial astronomical ignorance of the human authors to back up an accusation of theological error. If you focus on the poetic and anthropomorphic or appearance- based language used, you miss the whole point that such language was used to illustrate. If I tell someone that I will meet him at the cafe at sunrise, the meaning of my statement is imperative and future based, not descriptive and astronomical, and it would be foolish for that person to interpret me as being in error or affirming geocentrism, and for that reason not showing up at dawn out of a decision not to trust such an unreliably unscientific person as myself. Your erroneous view about the affirmative content of scripture about God is akin to that sort of bizarre mistake.
“Do you see why I might find irony in your lecturing me about “properly orthodox understanding” and “logically coherent view[s] of inerrancy”?
There is no irony to be found. If you think your understanding of scripture is orthodox, I invite you to back it up with tradition. If you have a logically coherent view of inerrancy, I invite you to present it. If you think that scripture affirms scientific and historical propositions that are erroneous and go further than that by accusing the human authors of scripture of affirming moral and theological falsehoods then what is left of any affimation of scriptural inerrancy, according to you (now that you are to the left of Ramond Brown, so to speak)? What is its scope? What does it cover?
To answer that question, I invite you back to the last paragraph of my opening post.
Can I throw one back your way? What am I saying that Raymond Brown hasn’t (to earn me the designation of being to the left of him)?
This is a response to your response above, Kelly.
I don’t think you’re answering my question. My question was, on what grounds do you believe that the incomplete revelation of God in the OT–a claim that nobody denies–entails the false representation of God in the OT? It will not do for you to appeal to the new “perspective” on God’s “unknown side” afforded by the NT. Why? Because every Father and Doctor of the Church both affirms the new perspective on God’s unknown side afforded by the NT (they are Christians, after all), and rejects the claim that God was falsely represented in the OT. (This was the error of Marcion.) But because they affirm a premise that you affirm, and yet deny your conclusion, it would seem that your premise does not necessitate the conclusion which you draw from it. Affirming that the NT offers a new perspective on God doesn’t–by itself–get you where you want to go.
WJ, Marcion read the New Testament as communicating that the Jews did not know the father of Jesus Christ, and it was Marcion’s own eventual assertion that the God experienced by the Hebrew people could not be considered the God of Jesus Christ, for Jesus, in Marcion’s view, testified to a previously unknown God who had nothing in common with the God experienced in the Hebrew Bible.
That is not what is being claimed here. Not for a minute.
What is being identified as possible are occasions wherein a person conditioned by his own time, attributes to God things that are best not attributed to him. I would wager that approximately 95 % of Catholic biblical scholarship would feel more comfortable such a claim than they would with the premise that all that is attributed to God is, in fact, accurate. I do not agree with the perspective that “God is not good. God was never good,” but listen, in this clip, to some examples of things that have been attributed to God. How do we engage with such examples?
Well, your latter question is a good one, to which there’s probably no easy answer. (By the way, I hope you’re not reading me as necessarily hostile to your approach; I’m merely skeptical of our ability to justify it in non question-begging ways.)
Just because 95% of Catholic biblical scholars *today* (or, from 1950 onwards, or, from 1900 onwards…it matters little) would feel more comfortable with the approach you propose is no reason for thinking your approach is theologically justifiable. After all, why is it largely the denizens of late capitalist western societies who suddenly feel that these actions in the OT to which you link cannot be attributed to God? None of the saints thought this. None of the Doctors thought this. Why? What is the difference?
Is it likely that we moderns have been gifted a sudden and special insight into the theology and mechanisms of revelation (one that is not easy to reconcile with the tradition) or is it more likely that we are informed by the assumptions of our own society and so come up with ex post facto theological justifications for those assumptions?
God is a pretty strange dude.
WJ, is it possible that your own conditioning has influenced your vision of God as a “dude”? :)
Your points are fine, but we don’t really know what the Saints or Doctors thought about these things unless they write about such things and unless what they write corresponds to what they think. I’ve never really explored the way in which the genocide in Joshua or Judges is explored by representatives of the patristic era. It would be interesting, I suppose, but it wouldn’t change how I interpret such texts. Of course our assumptions are informed by the society in which we find ourself, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
God is the author of life. God has the authority to give life and take away life. Therefore genocide as understood by human reason cannot be applied to God for he has the right to end life. When and how God does that is his decision. It is impossible for God to commit murder. If genocide is considered mass murder then it cannot be attributed to God no matter how many people he kills.
Why shouldn’t the final, published form of a conciliar document be given more weight than the crib notes for it? If you agree with Koenig’s position aren’t you in essence rejecting the Church’s view that scripture is divinely inspired and inerrant?
Ms. Rice, the published form of a conciliar document should be given more weight than “crib notes” (as you call them). You pose this as a question, as if someone is questioning it. Perhaps you are misunderstanding my repeated claim that an important key to interpreting the text as we have it, are those discussions and prior forms of the text. As for your later question, regarding the Cardinal’s position, the question really is the relation such a position holds to what the Church teaches about inerrancy and inspiration. In using a text from Leo — and the distinction between what he likely intends and what he writes — I have attempted to show that a determination of the Church’s position is, or what room there is for such a position to become, is not as clean as we’d like it.
Mr. Rice — this comment regards the thread in which you respond to my response to Pachy — the term “excessive emphasis” is sometimes used in theology. Trinitarian theology proceeded, in many ways and at many times, from a substance-centred Boethian framework. It was excessively emphasized to the detriment of other realities.
As for Ratzinger, nowhere did I say he revolutionized the way Trinitarian theology was being done (I asked how he might be seen in relation to so-called tradition). But as for Augustine, about whom Ratzinger is normally quite pleasant, Ratzinger identifies Augustine as having made a “decisive mistake” when (although rightly seeking to understand the human person as an image of the Trinity) Augustine “projects the divine persons into the interior life of the human person and affirms that intra-psychic processes correspond to these persons.” To Ratzinger, what occurred in Augustine’s psychological analogies, was that the concept of “person” was no longer transferred to the human person in all its immediate impact.
I keep up with theology too you know. Perhaps what you perceive as a “certain erroneous position” would be best clarified by your re-reading what I actually am saying, rather than your movement beyond my words to what you feel I must mean.
This is a very interesting critique of Augustine, one that I did not know Ratzinger had made explicitly, but which is certainly in keeping with his broader writings in systematics. Very helpful.
It’s from his “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” and I think can be read online without access to an academic journal database.
I have re-read my response to Pachy, Mr. Wilson, and it is exactly as I remembered – not an interpretation of the meaning of your words nor a divination of your intention, but an address of an apparent (if not actually present) implication. What you wrote left the appearance of a certain erroneous implication. It needed to be addressed, even if the appearance was illusory. There was no assumption on my part of your theological ignorance. I know better. (Indeed, you know [and may have even forgotten] more of Ratzinger than I ever had the opportunity to be exposed to.) Rather than being driven by an assumption about you, my comment was based on a lack of an assumption that P would not be vulnerable to being deceived by the appearance of an erroneous implication, even if it was there in appearance only, and no deceptive intention on your part at all. I don’t want to be uncharitable in my estimate of anyone’s competence in this area, but I saw what appeared to be an implication that I felt needed a reply even if you never intended that implication. I even said as much.
Fair enough.
@Mr. KellyJWilson
Before I respond further I need a clarification – I would like to ask are you asserting that the sacred authors did not know all things in science and history and that this is manifested in the Biblical text or are you saying that the sacred authors asserted something false with respect to science and history in the Biblical text itself?
Ms. Rice, I wrote in a past post on this subject — creatively entitled Biblical Inerrancy — that genre or literary form has some relevance in distinguishing between real and supposed error. The Creation narratives, for example, if intended literally, expose the error of their authors, given what we know about evolution. However, to the extent that authorial intention was spiritual and ethical, rather than factual and descriptive (as you find Ratzinger arguing), then what appears to be error isn’t really, because the author isn’t intending what he is writing about the unfolding creation to be interpreted as conveying the actual events of creation.
But take the text in Joshua about the sun standing still. Leo seems to be telling us not to worry about it when he says that the authors of Scripture “did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science.” But we can’t leave this aside, because the eminent persons of today who speak of the sun rising do so knowing (knowing in a loose sense) that the earth has changed position. The biblical author of Joshua would not have had that knowledge. When he spoke of the sun standing still, and wrote of it, even if this was not the point of his treatise, he still introduced these words to his text, and therefore opens himself to the question of why he would write of the sun standing still, when it is we who make our way around the sun.
I agree with Raymond Brown who writes that in Providentissimus Deus, Leo “excluded natural or scientific matters from biblical inerrancy, even if he did it through the expedient of insisting that statements made about nature according to ordinary appearances were not errors.” As Brown notes, the “theory that these statements were made according to surface appearances and so are not necessarily correct from a scientific viewpoint is a backdoor way of admitting human conditioning on the part of the biblical authors.”
“God is the author of life. God has the authority to give life and take away life. Therefore genocide as understood by human reason cannot be applied to God for he has the right to end life. When and how God does that is his decision. It is impossible for God to commit murder. If genocide is considered mass murder then it cannot be attributed to God no matter how many people he kills. ”
Yikes. I’m having some trouble orienting myself in this discussion, as I guess was evident in my last post. Some of my problem undoubtedly stems from my having studied the differences in point of view between Old Testament times and modernity from a literary rather than a strictly theological perspective. I’d thought those insights (not to mention history and science) had had more impact on some of these questions than apparently is the case.
Bronze-age peoples really did see the world and what happens in it in a very different way than we do. That their style of sacred history or story telling would reflect that point of view, not ours, makes perfect sense, but requiring us to think as they did is problematic. Why should we twist logic in order to defend God doing something we’d consider a crime against humanity if a human did it?
I guess you could explain why we see mass killing in a different light than did the OT writers as attributable to God having shown us his “hitherto unknown side.” Christ ‘s teaching definitely leads this way, not back to the other. But that said, I don’t believe it’s honoring truth to view the mass annihilations set down in the OT as “not genocide” because they were written of as commanded by God. In fact, historians have evidence that some of these annihilations didn’t really happen. Some of the Biblical stories even contradict themselves. They were stories told to encourage God’s people that He was on their side on their journey to the “promised” land, not historical facts told with impeccable moral rectitude.
Anyway, that’s what I understand. If it conflicts with what the Church teaches about “inerrancy,” oops, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not a theologian.:)
I wouldn’t say it’s like a paintbrush, inasmuch as a paintbrush is a passive object. When God uses human instruments, He uses us with all our own natural faculties as active subjects. This is the “synergy” of the grace-and-free-will question.
However, the inspired authors were no doubt “instruments” (that formulation is used repeatedly in the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the topic), with idiosyncrasies including in their intellects and wills. God chose His instruments knowing and intending them to have those idiosyncrasies, however.
As the CE article says, “the sacred text is wholly the work of God and wholly the work of man, of the latter, by way of instrument, of the former by way of principal cause.”
God’s authorship of scripture cannot be perceived as different from HIs authorship of all good works. We cannot be Catholics when it comes to other actual graces, but then a sort of semi-pelagian when it comes to the inspiration of Scripture. God inspired the whole of Scripture, and while He can do so gradually or not inspire “the whole picture” at first, He certainly is not inspiring falsehoods about Himself.
Now, does that mean God necessarily, historically, actually told the Hebrews to massacre the Canaanites? Not necessarily. But even if that was (from the human perspective) a justification interpreted after-the-fact onto historical events…the inerrancy of the text DOES mean that God definitely DID want that action attributed to Him the STORY at least (to make a typological point about sin, for example), wanted to be “read into” those historical events, wanted to use them as an exempla (if only of the order of a sort of parable) to teach something about Himself that makes the representation of Him in that manner definitely not “false”
“Now, does that mean God necessarily, historically, actually told the Hebrews to massacre the Canaanites? Not necessarily. But even if that was (from the human perspective) a justification interpreted after-the-fact onto historical events…the inerrancy of the text DOES mean that God definitely DID want that action attributed to Him the STORY at least (to make a typological point about sin, for example), wanted to be “read into” those historical events, wanted to use them as an exempla (if only of the order of a sort of parable) to teach something about Himself that makes the representation of Him in that manner definitely not “false””
But exactly what kind of example is He setting (if that was indeed what he was doing) in the case of allegedly commanding the annihilation of innocents? To think of it that way is problematic in so many ways: First, it gives us today a very ugly picture of the First Person of the Trinity, a picture exactly opposite of the one Jesus conveyed when he said to call Him “Father.” Secondly, it can be used to justify — and in fact, has been used to justify — the same behavior on the part of humans.
No, I just don’t think that’s the way the Bible should be read. Jesus himself corrected beliefs held by authors of OT texts. Really, He himself served to reveal “God hitherto unknown.” In that sense, the entire Bible might be seen as a self-correcting revelation of God. But to isolate a part and say we have to believe everything attributed to God there is true just doesn’t work. I can’t believe that’s
required.
Allow me to add to what I just wrote by quoting Kelly from his latest posting on the subject, “Moving Beyond ‘Escape Clauses’ of Biblical Inerrancy”:
“Rather than isolating verses or books of the Bible from one another, and implausibly defending the inerrancy of the isolated, it is best, I think, to view inerrancy as belonging to the Bible as a completed whole. This is the contribution Norbert Lohfink makes to this discussion. When we do as he suggests, the scientific and historical observations or assertions of a particular text or a particular author (even the moral and religious assertions) enjoy a certain provisionality. Nichols’ example is of the Psalmist who writes “happy are those who pay you back for what you have done to us — who take your babies and smash them against a rock (Psalms 137:8-9). An error of conscience, honestly manifested in this Psalm, forms part of a process of inspiration that is only rectified at a later stage (in bringing the Scriptures together).”
By this point in salvation history, we surely know God would never want anybody to “take your babies and smash them against a rock”! The psalmist may have thought God capable of “punishing” his enemies in this way, but we know Him better than that, thanks to getting the full story, not just the part the psalmist went by so many centuries ago.
But for example, the note on this verse in the Douay (following a long Christian tradition) says:
“Dash thy little ones: In the spiritual sense, we dash the little ones of Babylon against the rock, when we mortify our passions, and stifle the first motions of them, by a speedy recourse to the rock which is Christ. ”
Again, this verse doesn’t mean God wants to smash any real babies. But, disturbing as the image may be to us today, He did want that IMAGE in the Psalm (even if the inspired author really did have a primitive warrior ethic that imagined God ACTUALLY doing that).
The spiritual sense of the text hinges on the literal sense. This doesn’t mean the literal sense is always “factual,” and that was really never the thing of import in the tradition of the Church (until Protestantism came along and confused things). But it does mean that what is signified can only be discerned or made sense with reference to the structure or symbolism of the signifier. If you simply throw out the literal image of smashing babies a priori, then you are also throwing out any possible spiritual sense about mortifying passions, etc
What is written in the Bible is what God wanted to be written. In the OT, the message is in the stories qua stories (all made sense of by Christ) and the story told is the one God wanted to be told.
But the dashing babies statement was written by a person whom, I am to believe, greatly wanted revenge. It sprung from his sadness, perhaps, but represents a conscience in need of purification. Inspiration does not, in this case, purify it, and we are left with a person seeking vengeance.
Now, I see your point, but there’s an understanding of inerrancy that would present this Psalmist’s cry as free from error, and would present God as sanctioning the words by allowing them to remain in the text. You are in the right direction, in my opinion, in comparison to such persons but I think more reflection is required as to what God “wanted” written. You might consider my more recent post on this subject. It may invite your reaction.
I don’t know any serious Catholic view of inerrancy which would present the Psalmist’s desire for martial vengeance as justified or sanctioned by God just because it remains in the text.
More likely, I think, you’d find a view that would suggest the Psalmist really didn’t want vengeance but was using the common human experience of desiring vengeance to teach a typological lesson about the Christ and the passions.
I think even that is unnecessary. The Psalmist didn’t need to have that intent explicitly in mind. He could have really been, on the human level, desiring vengeance in a sinful way when he wrote, and yet God chose him as His instrument for that very reason, because He wanted this image in the text for the typological reasons HE was intending. This is what I meant by God making use of the instrument even WITH all its personal idiosyncracies. His experience of God, as “wrong” as it may have been on the HUMAN level at the time…is, nevertheless, in Christ, “opened up,” “revealed” to actually not be “wrong” on the Divine level at all, for in this image of babies smashed on rocks…Christ turned out to be that rock.
Obviously, even a story about immorality can actually be an allegory for GOOD things; take Christ’s parable of the unjust steward, for example. Is Christ condoning what the steward does literally? No. But the literal sense of the parable is the vessel for the spiritual sense, which IS condoned. This is how much of the Old Testament must be read. But it doesn’t mean it contains “error” anymore than Christ’s parable of the Unjust Steward contains ethical error about justice.
Human error (even things like mixing up names in the text) should not be counted as Divine error. In fact, God intended every word of Scripture as it turned out, and chose His instruments even knowing they’d make “errors” on that human level. Even errors in their conception of God, you wonder? Perhaps. But only of the type that God intended to Reveal (ie, unveil) in Christ. And not merely in the sense of Christ being, like, “Surprise!!! God isn’t really like that!” but in the typology and spiritual/allegorical senses of these stories themselves, founded on that literal sense.
Does God condone taking vengeance by smashing babies on rocks? No. But He does condone smashing our perverse passions against the Rock which is Christ. And so even in the Psalmist’s “misguided” image of God, God nevertheless really intended that literal image set down so that the truth He intended in inspiring the psalmist to write THAT could be Revealed spiritually under it in Christ.
Great discussion here. I haven’t had time to participate this weekend but I’ll be back soon.
Sinner, if we are going to distinguish the “serious” from what is popularly held, I don’t know too many biblical scholars whom I would consider serious who discredit the possibility of error existing in the Bible.
No serious scholar would take the view that the Psalmist really didn’t want vengeance, but rather was using the common human experience of desiring vengeance to teach a typological lesson about the Christ and the passions. Absolutely not. Whatever the particular intention of the individual author, in this case the Psalmist, that intention must be subordinated to the intention of God, which may be to teach a lesson about Christ. But then we have moved in the direction of God’s intention.
You say that human error should not be counted as divine error, and I agree, but human error is human error and where it appears it should be recognized as such, even if we recognize that through imperfect persons God can still communicate his message of salvation.
“No serious scholar would take the view that the Psalmist really didn’t want vengeance, but rather was using the common human experience of desiring vengeance to teach a typological lesson about the Christ and the passions. Absolutely not.”
And yet, why not? I’m not saying we have to believe that. As I said, I think that’s unnecessary. But there’s nothing unbelievable about it on face value. If we believe in a world where miracles take place, then a “dictation” theory of the text where God was “whispering in the ear” of the psalmist exactly what He wanted written IS possible.
Now, that’s not the Catholic notion if inspiration. That would be needlessly simplistic. But there can be no “scholarly” argument for or against it unless the scholars take a position that is a priori skeptical of the supernatural or of such extraordinary intervention of God in human affairs. There is no way, from the text itself, to get “inside the head” of the psalmist, which is a black-box. Maybe he personally wanted vengeance. Maybe he was just a poet using the common ancient cultural trope of war-as-glorious. Maybe he was explicitly informed by God that he was making a typological statement.
Personally I do prefer a “grittier” theory whereby God is speaking to us THROUGH the “mistakes” of the instruments he chooses. But it is no more or less “scholarly” unless we take “scholarly” to equal inherently skeptical of the more explicitly miraculous.
“You say that human error should not be counted as divine error, and I agree, but human error is human error and where it appears it should be recognized as such, even if we recognize that through imperfect persons God can still communicate his message of salvation.”
Yes. But it must be even “through” the mistakes, not “in spite of.”
And at that point what the instruments were thinking in their own minds on a human level becomes rather irrelevant to me. I know that God is the Author of Scripture and wanted said every word that was said. Whether that came through direct dictation or through Providence using even the mistakes of human beings to create the exact story God wanted…becomes a rather hypothetical and purely naturalist/materialist concern.
Did God want the Hebrews to massacre the Canaanites? Maybe, maybe not. But He certainly wanted that desire ATTRIBUTED to Him in the Bible, at least, for some reason, even if only for the sake of typological allegory. Whether the inspired author knew this and was an active collaborator with God’s intent, or whether God was using the primitive notion of God held by an imperfect human…is impossible to know and frankly irrelevant to our typological interpretation of the text.