Book 2, Chapter 7, §12
Conscious meaning of human writers not
necessarily the full meaning of Scripture. A third
presupposition grows out of the doctrine that God is the principal Author of Holy
Scripture. It is that we may not treat the conscious intention and meaning
of the human authors as necessarily constituting the full meaning of
Holy Scripture. In some instances, no doubt, we underestimate the spiritual
understanding and meaning of the writers, but nonetheless, the mind of God that
they embodied in the Scriptures was a larger mind than they were capable of
understanding adequately. They wrote more significantly than they knew, and the
richer meanings of what they wrote could only become apparently at a later
stage in sacred history. The task of ascertaining precisely what each human
writer was conscious of meaning is, of course, important, for the divine
meaning is related to this, and what the writer himself meant to say
constitutes the divinely-chosen vehicle of what God teaches to those who read
each Scripture in the light of later history and fuller divine revelations. (Francis
J. Hall, Anglican Dogmatics, ed. John A. Porter, 2 vols. [Nashotah,
Wis.: Nashotah House Press, 2021], 1:234-35)
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