Friday, November 20, 2020

F.J. Crehan, S.J. on Leonard Lessius' (Odd) Theory of "Inspiration"

 

 

During the sixteenth and seventeen centuries there was a steady movement among Catholic theologians away from the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. Leonard Lessius, picking up a hint from Sixtus of Siena, went so far as to defend (at Louvain in 1585) the view that ‘a book such as II Maccabees, written by human industry without the aid of the Holy Spirit, may afterwards, if the Holy Spirit give testimony that it contains nothing false, be ranked as Holy Scripture’. As Lessius had taken part in controversies about Baius and had made enemies among his disciples, it was not to be wondered at that he was now pilloried by these enemies for his temerity. Bellarmine did not quite like the view of Lessius but thought it could be defended, and Lessius later revised it, withdrawing the reference to Maccabees and saying that the theory represented as hypothesis about what God might do, not a claim to describe that he had in fact done. (F.J. Crehan, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day,” in S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963], 199-237, here, p. 217, emphasis in bold added)