A reader writes:
I just picked up a copy of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and skimmed through to paragraph 18. That section deals with the truth of Sacred Scripture and says: "[Sacred Scripture] is said to be inspired and to teach those truths which are necessary for our salvation."
As an armchair observer of the inerrancy controversy, I think I recognize the italicized portion as the motto of theologians dedicated to a limited inerrancy. This struck me as odd and I checked the Catechism.
Sure enough, there’s no mention there of limiting the truth of Scripture to the "truths necessary for salvation." Instead CCC 107 says: "[The Sacred Scriptures] firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."
Am I reading too much into this? I’d appreciate your comments.
This is partly a translation issue. The Compendium is modeling its language off that used in the Catechism, and the Catechism is quoting from the Vatican II constitution Dei Verbum. It’s in Dei Verbum that the problem originates.
Basically, there was a huge, behind-the-scenes fight at Vatican II about inerrancy. The traditional Catholic teaching–which prior popes had said was infallible–is that Scripture has unrestricted inerrancy. That is to say, any time Scripture makes a factual assertion then, properly understood, it’s guaranteed to be true.
But after the rise of biblical criticism in the last couple of hundred years, and the increased skepticism that accompanied it, there were some at the council that disputed the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture, and they were able to get a formulation into a draft of Dei Verbum that seemed to restrict the scope of biblical inerrancy.
Those who held the traditional view were apoplectic and appealed the matter all the way up to Paul VI himself.
In the end, the present wording of Dei Verbum was worked out, and assurances were given that the formulation–which was still not entirely satisfactory–was not to be understood as excluding the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture.
But there were problems: While the final formula didn’t exclude the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture, it didn’t mandate it, either. The formula could be read more than one way, with the clause about our salvation either serving to explain the purpose for which God put his truth in Scripture or limiting the scope of the truth which God inerrantly put in Scripture.
And so after the council people started reading the phrase both ways, and even translating it both ways. The translation that the Catechism relies on uses a rendering that is more open ot the purpose-oriented, non-restrictive interpretation, but other translations lean toward the restrictive interpretation.
I don’t know what the standard Italian translation says, but I suspect it’s in the latter category, and it seems to be influencing the way in which the Compendium formulates the matter.
So where does that leave us?
After the Catechism came out, Pre-16 made a big point, which I’ve blogged about before, of explaining that the Catechism merely summarized Church teaching without changing it. All of the points touched on in the Catechism had the same weight that they always had in Church teaching–no more and no less. The fact that they were placed in the Catechism didn’t increase them all to infallible status. Things that had only been tentatively taught by the Magisterium were still only tentative; things that had been firmly but not infallibly taught were still firm but infallible; and things that were infallible were, of course, still infallible. The Catechism summarized Church teaching without altering it.
The Compendium of the Catechism, precisely as a compendium–a summary–does exactly the same thing. It summarizes what’s in the Catechism, again without changing the doctrinal meaning or weights of the Church teachings that it covers. Changing or altering the weights of teachings is not its purpose.
As a result, if you want a precise, theologically-elaborated formulation of what the Church teaches, you have to go back to the original documents, which in this case means Dei Verebum and the documents on inerrancy that preceded it. The Compendium is just trying to summarize what the Catechism says, and the Catechism is just trying to present what Dei Verbum says. It’s Dei Verbum–if anywhere–that doctrinal development occurred, not in the later works summarizing its teaching.
That would seem to leave us with the ambiguous formulation of Dei Verbum, but there are a couple of problems for those who would like to read it in a restrictive way.
First, it’s patently obvious that Scripture makes assertions that are not connected with our salvation in any obvious way. For example, the fact that Andrew was the brother of Peter in some accepted first century meaning of the word "brother" (and clearly it meant that they were brothers living in the same household, with the same biological or adopted father, not just distant kinsmen) is quite clearly asserted in Scripture.
But if you recognize that there are matters of fact that Scripture asserts that have no bearing on our salvation then you have to explain how these assertions got into Scripture. If God put them there then, since God never asserts anything erroneous, they have to be inerrant, too.
The only way for errant assertions of fact to get into Scripture would be for the human authors to put them there–independent of God asserting them–and this is precisely what Dei Verbum won’t let you do. Dei Verbum makes a big point of the fact that the human authors asserted all that God wanted asserted and no more, so that every assertion in sacred Scripture is an assertion of the Holy Spirit.
That means that, even though Dei Verbum does contain an ambiguous phrase that can be read in a restrictive manner, the overall context of the document still blocks an interpretation of Scripture as containing erroneous assertions of fact.
Anything that Scripture says that appears to the interpreter to be wrong or contradictory, therefore, either must not be an assertion of fact but something else or it must not be understood in the correct fashion by the interpreter.
That’s problem #1. Problem #2 is that the prior teaching of the Magisterium was awfully strong on this point and can, indeed, be read as infallible.
This means that, as far as I can tell, Church teaching has not changed on this point: The Church still teaches that Scripture has unrestricted inerrancy.
But we also have a huge problem, because many churchmen–including very high churchmen–are simply unaware of the problem here or the need to clearly reassert the Church’s traditional teaching.
The sooner an awareness of that is achieved, the better, for tremendous damage is being done to the faithful by their being told through priests and catechists and who have you that Scripture is not inerrant and thus contains errors.
