{219} II. The Catholic doctrines
of the faith just stated, in light of more detailed indications given in
Scripture and Tradition, lead logically the following more or less certain corollaries,
both A. concerning the extent and efficacy of inspiration and also B.
concerning the nature and character of inspiration.
{220} A. First, as far as the extent
and efficacy of inspiration are concerned, it is 1) a direct
offense against dogma and consequently heretical to restrict the
full concept of inspiration—whereby the inspired word is to be viewed as God’s
word and believed with divine faith—merely to a part of the content of
Sacred Scripture, for instance its teaching on faith and morals, or to what
is expressly designated as revealed, and not to extend it to the whole
substance of its content, therefore to the historical parts also. For in that
case God would no longer be the author of the whole book in all its parts, as
is expressly defined. However it would also be 2) extremely questionable,
if not heretical also, to say that the inspiration covers the whole text
merely in the moral sense or refers merely to the substance of the books,
but not to certain things that could be regarded as lying outside the substance
or as accidents, especially if one went so far as to conclude from this that
errors in such matters could have crept in from the start and that the truth of
Sacred Scripture with respect to them is a merely subjective truth, i.e. that
of the personal truthfulness of the sacred writers.
{221} The first view mentioned
in 1) was advanced particularly by Holden (around 1650) in his Divinae fidei
analysis and was repeated by Chrismann in his Regula fidei. Neither,
however, went so far, as many believed about Holden, on the basis of several
ambiguous expressions (e.g. I, 5), as to deny the infallible truth of
those things that they did not view as the word of God; rather, they regarded
these nonetheless as veritates catholicae or canonicae [Catholic
or canonical truths], since they had been written under God’s special
protection. But even so Holden’s view provoked the utmost indignation from the
start and elicited the harshest critiques. Cf. esp. the objections of
Kleutgen, op. cit., n. 29 ff.
{222} The second view mentioned
in 2) was expressed repeatedly in periodicals in recent times, because it was
thought that without it one could not get over certain antilogies or
historical-exegetical errors in Sacred Scripture. Similar statements occur in
the writings of many exegetes of the old Antiochene School. In contrast, Saint
Thomas already said (I, q. 32, art. 4): it is heretical to say that Sacred
Scripture is false, and so everyone who maintains that any point whatsoever
that is clearly contained in Sacred Scripture (e.g. that Samuel is the
son of Elcana) is false, is a heretic too. Also pertinent to this is Article
114 of the questions presented by Clement VI to the Armenians: “Did you believe
and do you still believe that the New and the Old Testament, in all the books
that the authority of the Roman Church recommends, contain truth that is
certain in all respects?”; and yet the discussion here was not about a doctrine
or even just about a dogmatically significant fact, but merely about the
manner of Cain’s death. Since, however, the Church guarantees the text of
Sacred Scripture absolutely only in matters of faith and morals, and otherwise
only by and large, therefore it goes without saying that the “truth that is
certain in all respects” refers in the absolute sense only to the original text—and
to every other text only insofar as it is determined to be identical, in the
sense of the passage from Augustine, Epistle 82 (cited above in n. 218
c)—but
necessarily to the faithful translation also. The objection that the books of
Sacred Scripture, especially in the Vulgate, although admittedly errors in
chronology and in the names of places and persons may creep in, nevertheless
due to their moral [i.e. virtual] identity with the original are
designated simply as the word of God, and that consequently we need to regard
the original text of them too as “generally” the word of God only in a moral
sense, is of no avail. For 1) in the case of the Vulgate, only moral identity
is asserted explicitly, while all the sources in no way restrict the influence
of the Holy Ghost in their composition; 2) the Vulgate text, on account of its
moral conformity with the original, can simply be called the word of God only
because the original is such simply and absolutely; 3) in the case of a copy,
an accidental erroneous discrepancy with the original is much less critical and
much easier to spot than a separation of the human instrument from the
influence of the principal author in the case of the original; given the close
connection between the two, the human error would redound on God, and clearly
there would be a danger of calling the substance of Sacred Scripture into doubt
also. (Cf. Augustine, Epistle 28 to erome: of course he is speaking only
about mendacium, lying, but what he says applies also to any error.)
Hence too among the Fathers and theologians the constant and serious endeavor
to resolve all antinomies, and when this is impossible, to seek the reason
solely in their own lack of knowledge (see above Augustine, Epistle 28 and The
Harmony of the Gospels, II, 12). More in Denzinger, op. cit., II:219
f. The more recent proponents of the view refuted here should exercise this
caution also, and not immediately advance a theory that endangers the dignity
of Sacred Scripture when they can make neither head nor tail of the meaning of
a text that they have in mind. Many difficulties are resolved, moreover, by the
fact that the intrinsic objective truth of many passages need not be an
absolute and material truth but merely a formal and relative one; see
Kaulen, op. cit., 31 ff. (Matthias
Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, Book 1, Part 1 [trans. Michael
J. Miler; Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic, 2019], §16 nos. 219-222)
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