Friday, October 25, 2019

Henry Edward Cardinal Manning and the Catholic Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy



Henry Edward Manning, an Anglican who would later convert and become a Catholic cardinal (similar to his friend, John Henry Cardinal Newman) wrote a number of works on Catholic theology. In one such work, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost (1885), he defended the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. Here is one such example:

It may be from ‘intellectual obtuseness,’ or ‘want of the critical faculty,’ or ‘obstinate adherence to preconceived belief,’ but it makes little impression on me to be told that S. Stephen, in Acts vii. 16, fell into an historical error in saying that Jacob was buried in Sichem. I confess that I cannot explain the difficulty, and that the explanations usually given, though possible and even probable, are hardly sufficient. Nevertheless, I am not shaken in the least as to the divine axiom, that Holy Scripture is exempt from all error. Whether it be a fault in the manuscript, or in the translator, or only a want of our understanding, I cannot tell; but an error in Scripture most assuredly it is not, and our inability to solve it, is no proof that it is. There it stands, an undoubted difficulty in the existing text—and not the only one; and yet all together will not shake our faith in the immunity from error which was granted to the sacred writers. (Henry Edward Manning, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation [New York: D. & J Sadler & Co., 1885], 173)

I quote this as many Catholics I encounter, both in person and online, deny that it is a Catholic doctrine that the Bible (at least the original autographs) were inerrant, notwithstanding the papal and conciliar evidence to the contrary (to be fair, most Catholic apologists [e.g., Mitchell Pacwa; Scot Hahn; Tim Staples; Robert Sungenis; John Salza] affirm this doctrine). A very useful book on this issue would be:

John F. McCarthy, Catholic Biblical Scholarship for the Third Millennium (Fitzwilliam, N.H.: Loreto Publications, 2017)

I reproduced some important quotations from this volume in this blog post.


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