7 - Scripture: Recent Protestant and Catholic Views

Scripture: Recent Protestant and Catholic Views
By Avery Dulles, S.J.

"The documents of Vatican II and those of the Faith and Order Commission, while they do not totally overcome all the historic disputes between Catholics and Protestants, go a long way toward reconciliation. As a result, it is no longer safe to assume that either Protestants or Catholics adhere to the classical orthodoxies of their own churches, as expressed in past centuries. "

FOR A HUNDRED YEARS or more it has been customary for authors writing on the subject to lament that the Bible has been losing its central position in the lives of Christians. Pannenberg, writing on "The Crisis of the Scripture Problem" remarks: "The development of historical research … led to the dissolution of the Scripture principle in the form Protestant scholasticism had given to it, and thereby brought on the crisis in the foundations of evangelical theology which has become more and more acute during the past century or so."¹ According to Gordon Kaufman, "Only in rare and isolated pockets-and surely these are rapidly disappearing forever -has the Bible anything like the kind of existential authority and significance which it once enjoyed throughout much of western culture and certainly among believers."² In the opinion of James Barr, doubt about the status of the Bible may well come to be regarded as normal in the churches.³ The Catholic review, Concilium, published in 1969 an editorial with the thought-provoking title, "Is Scripture Becoming Less Important?"⁴ In 1971 the Faith and Order study on "The Authority of

Avery Dulles is Professor of Theology at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. A graduate of Harvard University and Woodstock College, he also studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. A member of the Jesuit Order since 1946, Dr. Dulles is the author of several works interpreting the history and contemporary character of Catholic theology, such as Revelation and the Quest for Unity (1968), The Survival of Dogma (1971), Models of the Church (1 974), and The Resilient Church (1977).
¹ W. Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970) 6.
² G. D. Kaufman, "What Shall We Do with the Bible?" Interpretation 25 (1971) 96.
³ J. Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) 8.
⁴ Concilium 50 (The Presence of God) (New York: Paulist, 1969) 157-75.

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the Bible" observed: "The automatic acceptance of the Bible as the basis and standard has in many places been severely shaken of late."⁵

However this may be, the Bible continues to hold great interest and attraction for scholars and theologians. As Patrick Henry points out, there are at least 450 books a year in New Testament studies alone, and articles appear at a rate of a thousand or more in about four hundred journals.⁶ It would seem, indeed, that the fascination with the Bible is, if anything, increased by its problematic status. No longer viewed simply as a "divine armory" providing God-given precepts and theological premises, it is perceived as having a multiplicity of uses in the Christian community. Protestant and Catholic theologians are collaborating as never before in seeking to clarify these uses.

The contemporary theological situation, with which we are concerned in the present essay, must be viewed against the background of the previous four centuries, including the Reformation controversies about the sufficiency of Scripture, the authoritarian use of Scripture by Protestant and Catholic scholastics of the "orthodox" period, and, finally, the questioning of biblical authority by the liberal theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Presupposing a general awareness of this background, we may turn immediately to the more modern views of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner.

I. BARTH AND NEO-ORTHODOX BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

The period between the two world wars was marked by a return to the authority of the Bible without the dogmatic rigidities of classical orthodoxy. The prevailing mood was best expressed by the neoorthodoxy of Karl Barth and his associates, who developed a highly Christocentric view of revelation. According to this school, the word of God was to be identified with Jesus Christ and him alone. The Bible was not itself the word of God but a witness to that word. Christ, however, could address the community through the word of Scripture, and when he did so the Bible became, in a genuine sense, the word of God. The believing community could encounter Christ personally through that word.

In Barthian neo-orthodoxy the classical theses of Protestant orthodoxy were notably modified. Inspiration was no longer a property of the biblical authors or of the books taken in themselves. Rather, it was "the promise of God and the Holy Spirit to be present among the faithful when these writings are used in the common life of the church."⁷ Inerrancy, as a property of the texts, was vigorously denied, yet a genuine authority was ascribed to the Bible insofar as it became, on occasion, the word of God. In spite of the errors of the human writers,

⁵ Faith and Order Louvain 1971 (Faith and Order Paper 59) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1971) 9.
⁶ P. Henry, New Directions in New Testament Study (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979) 13.
⁷ Barth is thus paraphrased by D. H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975) 212.

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God acts with sovereign efficacy to lead the believing reader to an authentic faith-encounter. ⁸

The canon, according to the Barthians, was a free decision of the church, but not an autonomous assertion of church authority. On the contrary it was, as Oscar Cullmann eloquently contended, a supreme act of obedience whereby the church humbly submitted its own witness to the norm of apostolic teaching.⁹ For Barth himself, the canon was charismatically determined. In certain books the church heard God speaking; in others it did not.¹⁰ The decision concerning the canon, for Barth, is simply a matter of confession; no human reasons can be given for it. The decision, however, is not irrevocable. In the sixteenth century, Barth admits, the Reformation churches changed the canon by excluding certain books (the "deuterocanonicals") that had previously been accepted. Conceivably the church might decide to change the limits of the canon again at some future time.¹¹

Barth's principles of interpretation were consonant with his charismatic approach to the Bible. As appears from the preface to the first edition of his Epistle to the Romans (1918), he set little store by the historical-critical method. He wished to "see through and beyond history into the Spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit."¹² The task of the exegete in the church is to recreate the biblical message for Christians of a later age, with the help of the Holy Spirit who continues to speak through the Bible.

Finally, regarding the sufficiency of Scripture, Barth castigated both liberal Protestants and Catholics for claiming to have access to God through religious experience or tradition rather than through Scripture alone. Against Catholics he held that "unwritten tradition" is an elusive thing, which in practice coincides with the inner life of the church. By spinning tradition out of its own bosom, Catholicism fails in obedience to the word of God.¹³ The Bible must be free to assert its claims against all human traditions.¹⁴

In the years immediately following World War II, Europe and the United States witnessed a remarkable flourishing of what was called "biblical theology." Largely inspired by neo-orthodoxy, the movement included many who were not theologically close to Barth. Among the leaders in the United States, George Ernest Wright, John Bright, Paul Minear, and James D. Smart are generally mentioned, as well as a few Catholics such as John L. McKenzie. The common program of the movement was to construct a theology with the help of biblical terms, categories, and themes-all of which were deemed incomparably

⁸ K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/2 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1956) 533.
⁹ O. Cullmann, "The Tradition" in his The Early Church (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956) 55-99, esp. 87-98.
¹⁰ Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/ 1, 120-21; 1/ 2, 474.
¹¹ Ibid., 476.
¹² Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) 1.
¹³ Church Dogmatics, I/1, 11 7-18.
¹⁴ Ibid., 119.

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superior to Greek thought-forms, described as metaphysical, static, and dualistic. By entering the "strange new world of the Bible," it was felt, one could encounter in a direct and exhilarating way the Lord of history.

During the 1960s and 1970s the biblical theology of the previous two decades has been severely criticized. Its real and supposed weaknesses have been set forth by Langdon Gilkey,¹⁵ Brevard Childs, ¹⁶ and James Barr. ¹⁷ Carl Henry, who writes from a conservative evangelical viewpoint, makes many of the same criticisms.¹⁸ Walter Wink and Sandra Schneiders, in works we will discuss below, praise the neo-orthodox biblical theologians for having seen the inadequacies of the historico-critical approach, but fault them for not having sufficiently freed themselves from objectivistic paradigms.

Among the criticisms directed against the biblical theology of the past generation the following are central. The authors are accused of vague and overblown jargon about encounter, God's saving acts, and eschatological events. It is questioned whether terms such as these, as employed by modern authors, are either authentically biblical or authentically theological. Can one regard terms and concepts of ancient Israel as authorized by revelation? Can one really do theology in words and categories borrowed from the Bible? Is the Israelite thought-world in fact so special, so different from its environment? Is it possible to achieve a unified approach to the Bible through any one set of categories, such as promise and fulfillment, covenant, salvation history, or "elusive presence"? In sum, the critics call for a more critical approach to the biblical materials, and one that takes better account of the full diversity found in the Bible itself. ¹⁹

II. KARL RAHNER

Just as Protestant neo-orthodoxy found ways of preserving the authority of the Bible without the rigidities of the old scholastic dogmatism, a parallel movement in Catholic theology managed to retrieve the main intentions of Counter Reformation orthodoxy while respecting the modern historical consciousness. As an example of this turn, we may consider Karl Rahner's theology of the Bible.²⁰ For Rahner, revelation is the noetic aspect of God's gracious self-communication.

¹⁵ L. Gilkey, "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language," Journal of Religion 41 (1961) 194-204. Cf. his Naming the Whirlwind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969) 91-106.
¹⁶ B. S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970).
¹⁷ J. Barr, The Bible in the Modern World.
¹⁸ C. F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4 (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1979) 454-57.
¹⁹ For a recent defense of "biblical theology" see J. D. Smart, The Past, Present, and Future of Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979).
²⁰ K. Rahner, Inspiration in the Bible (New York: Herder and Herder, rev. trans., 1964). For a restatement of Rahner's position after Vatican II, see his article, "Bible. I.B. Theology," Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise "Sacramentum Mundi" (New York: Seabury, 1975) 99-108.

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Revelation reaches its culmination in Jesus Christ, the supreme self-communication of God. The apostolic church, as the initial recipient of God's self-revelation in Christ, is the irreplaceable foundation of all later Christianity. The history of Israel, as the phylum of religious history leading up to Christ, is the prehistory of the church itself. Ancient Israel and the apostolic church constitute the two major phases of the people of God in its formative period.

For the apostolic church to fulfill its necessary function as the historic basis for the church of future centuries, it was necessary for that church to express its faith in an abiding and dependable form. God brought this about by seeing to it that the apostolic church purely expressed its faith in apostolic writings which could be preserved as a standard for posterity. These writings, together with those of ancient Israel that were judged to point forward to God's revelation in Christ, constitute the Christian Scriptures. The Bible, then, is the literary objectification of the faith of the people of God in its foundational period-the period when the revelation was being initially communicated.

The inspiration of Scripture, according to Rahner, is simply an aspect of God's action in forming the apostolic church. It is the dynamism of the faith of the people of God, insofar as this faith is divinely empowered to express itself in written form. The Bible, for Rahner, is in some sense infallible, for it embodies the normative apostolic witness. By analogy, the Old Testament, too, is infallible, insofar as the church guarantees it as an authentic crystallization of its own prehistory.

The canon, for Rahner, is the necessary correlative of inspiration, which is given precisely in order that there may be canonical books. The revelation of the canon is not an act distinct from the inspiration of the Bible. In reaching a decision concerning the canon, the church of the early centuries did not have to rely on apostolic authorship or on explicit apostolic testimonies. Gifted with the Spirit of Christ, the church was able to recognize through "connaturality" those writings of the foundational period that purely expressed its own faith. In drawing up the canon of the Old Testament, the church had a certain independence from the synagogue. It was not definitively bound by any Jewish canon, but it could profit from what the ancient Jews, by the Spirit of God, were already able to recognize as authentic distillations of their faith.

The interpretation of Scripture, according to Rahner, is the work of the church. Possessing an innate affinity with the God who is revealed in Scripture, the church is able to perceive what God is saying through the canonical books to the questions of the day. Since the church is the community of God's definitive (or eschatological) revelation, it has the power and the responsibility to protect the Scriptures from any corruption that would confuse or obscure their meaning. The infallibility of the church in interpreting comes to expression through the ecclesiastical magisterium, which has the task of formulating the public faith of the church. In its formulations of the faith, however, the church remains permanently dependent on its apostolic origins, and hence on the Scriptures as the normative objectification of the apostolic faith.

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In the framework of Rahner's theory, the Bible must be viewed as materially sufficient. Since the purpose of inspiration is that the church may remain faithful to its apostolic origins, one cannot suppose that the biblical sedimentation of the apostolic faith is incomplete. Furthermore, it is gratuitous to appeal to supposedly apostolic traditions not attested by the Bible, for no such traditions are factually verifiable. The church, meditating on the total import of the Bible in the light of new situations, can at times grasp implications not deducible from any particular statements in the Bible. But any Christian doctrine must in some way be radicated in the apostolic faith as attested by the Bible.

Rahner's synthesis differs from that of Barth in being more ecclesiocentric. He grounds the authority of Scripture directly in the mystery of the church, indirectly in God's revelatory action in Christ. Both see the entire Bible, and not simply the New Testament, as oriented to the Christian witness. Neither accepts supernaturalistic hypotheses that would focus on the Bible as a miraculous book. They concur, moreover, in recognizing the charismatic or pneumatic dimension of inspiration, canonization, and interpretation. For Catholics, Rahner's theory functioned in a way similar to Barth's for many Protestants. It enabled them to accept and profit from modern exegetical advances without compromising their biblical faith. Barth and Rahner, ably seconded by many less celebrated theologians, prepared the way for the Protestant-Catholic convergences of the 1960s.

III. ECUMENICAL CONVERGENCES

Although it would be an exaggeration to speak of an ecumenical consensus, since confessional differences still remain, the decade of the 1960s achieved a significant rapprochement, registered in numerous ecumenical statements of an official or quasi-official character. Generally speaking, the Eastern Orthodox are a party to the new convergence, but the conservative evangelicals have continued to stand by the essentials of the Protestant orthodox position.

The convergence may be illustrated from the documents of Vatican Council II and those of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. Vatican II's Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, is in some respects an ecumenical document, for it was composed by a mixed commission including members of Cardinal Bea's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity who were keenly sensitive to the demands of ecumenism. The Fourth World Conference on Faith and Order, meeting at-Montreal in 1963, issued a remarkable report on "Scripture, Tradition, and Traditions," expressing the common views of Protestant and Orthodox representatives. This was followed up by a report to the Bristol Faith and Order meeting of 1967 on "The Significance of the Hermeneutical Problem for the Ecumenical Movement" and by a report to the Louvain meeting of 1971 on "The Authority of the Bible." This last document was drawn up with Catholic, as well as Protestant and Orthodox, participation.

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With reference to the questions central to the present essay, the main features of the ecumenical covergence may be outlined somewhat as follows:

The divine inspiration of Scripture continues to be affirmed, but it is "depsychologized." Dei Verbum, while repeating the essential teaching of Vatican 1, does not follow Leo XIII in his description of the effects of inspiration on the intellect, will, and executive faculties of the sacred writers; rather, it is content to depict inspiration functionally, in terms of the canonical book which was to be the result (DV 11).

Louvain, in its report on "The Authority of the Bible," prefers not to deduce the authority of the Bible from its inspiration, as was done in the dogmatic tradition. Rather, it establishes the authority of the Bible on the ground of its religious value for the church, and then proceeds to postulate inspiration as the source of that authority. "If God's claim is experienced in the compelling way it undoubtedly is in the Bible, does this not mean that beyond the Bible is the activity of God himself, i.e., of his Spirit?"²¹ While the method of argument differs from that of Vatican II, the result is substantially similar.

The term "inerrancy," though present in the original 1962 schema, was dropped in the final text of Dei Verbum. The Council makes the rather ambiguous statement that "the books of Scripture" teach "firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted to put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation" (DV 11). While some commentators interpret this sentence as excluding all error from the Bible, it may be read as asserting that, while there may be erroneous statements here or there, they are corrected elsewhere or do not affect the meaning of the whole. Further, the Council's statement might seem to allow for errors in matters without importance for our salvation.²²

Louvain likewise avoids any mention of inerrancy. But the fundamental idea is not entirely absent. The report states that the Bible is "a critical court of appeal to which the church must constantly defer and from whose judgment not even the developments taking place in our world are exempted."²³ Since the report presumably does not mean that the church should defer to error, it seems to imply a certain guarantee of truth in the Bible. This of course does not deny that there may be respects in which the Bible could be subject to error, and the possibility of incidental misstatements in Scripture seems to be allowed for elsewhere in the report. ²⁴

²¹ Louvain 1971, p. 20.
²² For interpretations of the teaching of Dei Verbum on inerrancy, see A. Grillmeier in H.Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969) 231-37; B, vawter, Biblical Inspiration (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972) 143-55; N. Lohfink, "The Truth of the Bible and Historicity," Theology Digest 15/1 (Spring 1967) 26-29.
²³ Louvain 1971, p. 22.
²⁴ Ibid., p. 16, #5.

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The contents of the canon are not discussed in Dei Verbum, but the footnote reference in Dei Verbum11 to Vatican I's statement on the subject (DS 3006) indicates an acceptance of all the books in the ancient Latin Vulgate as belonging to the Bible. As for the basis, Dei Verbum 8 declares that the full canon of the sacred books becomes known to the church through tradition, which is said to be present in "the practice and life of the believing and praying church." Although some Catholic biblical scholars have held that the canon rested on explicit apostolic testimonies, the Council gives this opinion no positive support.

Louvain does not explicitly mention the disagreements among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox regarding the Old Testament canon, but it manifests awareness of this problem. It states that the dividing line between canonical and non-canonical books is fluid, and that not all canonical books have the same weight. Further, the intertestamental books are said to be important for the understanding of the biblical period. Still, the canon cannot be dismissed as unimportant, for by accepting a canon the church made the books into a literary unity in which different voices must be heard as authoritative.²⁵

With regard to the idea of a "canon within the canon" recently promoted by Ernst Käsemarm and others, the Louvain report expresses reserve. "We cannot attribute permanent authority to an inner circle of biblical writings or biblical statements and interpret the rest in terms of this inner circle." ²⁶ Yet Louvain recognizes that some statements and passages are more directly related to the central saving events than others are.²⁷ in a similar -vein, Vatican II acknowledges that the four Gospels have a certain preeminence within the New Testament (DV 18).

As to the relations between the Old Testament and the New, Dei Verbum, while unequivocally affirming the abiding value of the Old Testament (DV 15), tends to subordinate the Old Testament to the New. After citing the Augustinian formula to the effect that God "wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New," the Constitution goes on to declare that the Old Testament, "caught up into the proclamation of the gospel," acquires a fullness of meaning that it would not have in itself (DV 16). The Louvain statement, without rejecting Vatican II's prioritization, declines to pronounce on the relative merits of the two Testaments. It mentions a division of opinion between some who hold that the Old Testament has authority equal to that of the New and others who hold that the Old Testament receives its authority for Christians only through its relationship to the New Testament.²⁸

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 18-19, #10.
²⁶ Ibid., p. 17, #7.
²⁷ Ibid.
²⁸ Ibid., p. 19, #11.

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With regard to the problem of biblical interpretation, Vatican II's statements should be read against the background of recent Catholic controversies. After Pius XII, in Divino afflante Spiritu (1943), encouraged scholars to take cognizance of the literary forms and conventions prevalent in the ancient Near East, there was widespread fear that Catholic exegetes, by embracing the novelties of form criticism, might subvert the historicity of the Gospels. In 1964 the' Biblical Commission issued an important instruction "On the Historical Truth of the Gospels" which reaffirmed and carried further the directives of Pius XII.²⁹ The Biblical Commission distinguished three stages in the gospel tradition. At the lowest stratum are the words and acts of Jesus himself. At a second stage the church interprets what Jesus said and did in the light of the Resurrection and Pentecost, which provide a richer understanding. And finally, at a third stage, the Evangelists further interpret the tradition by selecting, synthesizing, and adapting the data in accordance with the particular purposes of their respective Gospels.

Vatican II, in Dei Verbum, reproduces the teaching of the 1964 Instruction in very concise form, sufficient, however, to give conciliar authorization to the discreet use of form criticism and redaction criticism (DV 19). In so doing, Vatican II fully committed the church to modern methods of biblical scholarship, thus repudiating the rather fundamentalistic approach commonly found in earlier twentieth-century Catholic exegesis.

The hermeneutical principles set forth in Dei Verbum 12 distinguish between two levels of interpretation. At the first level, historical and literary analysis seeks to reconstruct the meaning intended and expressed by the original writer, whose work is to be interpreted in its own sociocultural setting. At the second level, theological exegesis seeks out the divinely intended meaning in the light of the whole of Scripture, in the light of Christian faith, and in the light of church tradition. All exegesis is ultimately subject to the judgment of the magisterium, which can reject or approve a given interpretation in view of its divinely given mandate (DV 10). But the relationship between exegetes and the magisterium is reciprocal. The exegetes, while subject to the magisterium, help by their work to mature the judgment of the church (DV 12). The magisterium, for its part, is subject to the word of God (DV 10). For the harmony between theological exegesis and ecclesiastical doctrine, it is important that the Bible be read "according to the same Spirit by whom it was written" (DV 12).

While the third chapter of Dei Verbum is chiefly concerned with the Bible as a source of doctrine, chapter 6 treats of Scripture in a wider context. It discusses the uses of Scripture in the life of the church-in liturgy, in preaching, and in prayer. In this section, Protestants will find

²⁹ AAS 56 (1964) 712-18; Eng. transl. in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 26 (1964) 305-12; commentary by J. A. Fitzmyer, Theological Studies 25 (1964) 386-408.

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many familiar themes. According to the Council, "in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets his children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power of the word of God is so great that it remains the support and energy of the church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and perennial source of spiritual life" (DV 2 1 ).

The Bristol report on hermeneutics is rather tentative in tone, but it clearly recommends both literary and historical criticism in the study of biblical texts and traditions.³⁰ The Louvain report in its closing paragraphs addresses the problem of theological interpretation.³¹ The Bible, it states, remains vital and relevant if its message is constantly reinterpreted in relation to the questions and controversies of the present day. The right interpretation cannot be achieved without the help of the Holy Spirit. Scripture, moreover, does not disclose its full meaning except to those who read it with faith and within the community of the church. Even though these Faith and Order reports contain no specific discussion of the role of the magisterium, their positive principles of interpretation are fully consonant with Vatican II.

With respect to the material sufficiency of the Bible, the ecumenical rapprochement is still more striking. Dei Verbum, departing from the preconciliar schema "On the Sources of Revelation," refused to affirm that there are "two sources" or that some revealed truths are contained in tradition alone. Instead the Constitution accented the living and dynamic character of tradition as the process of handing on the word of God, which is indivisibly present both in Scripture and in tradition (DV 7-10). On the other hand, the Council refused to demote tradition to a merely secondary position, as though everything had to be tested by the Bible alone as the final rule of faith. "It is not from sacred Scripture alone that the church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence" (DV 9).

Just as Vatican II broke with the standard Catholic two-source theory, so the Montreal Conference on Faith and Order, meeting almost simultaneously, showed a disposition on the part of Protestants as well as Orthodox to assert the primacy and indispensability of tradition as against the "sola Scriptura" position. The report depicts the prophetic and apostolic writings as sedimentations of tradition, and holds that even after the Bible became complete, the gospel continued to be transmitted in living tradition by the power of the Holy Spirit. "Thus we can say that we exist as Christians by the Tradition of the Gospel (the paradosis of the kerygma) testified in Scripture, transmitted in and by

³⁰ New Directions in Faith and Order, Bristol 1967 (Faith and Order Paper 50) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1968) 33.
³¹ Louvain 1971, pp. 21-23.

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the church through the power of the Holy Spirit."³² While recognizing that Tradition (with a capital "T") is the word of God, Montreal pointed out that the particular traditions of different churches may be inadequate and even distorted. As the criterion for genuine Tradition it proposed "the Holy Scriptures rightly interpreted."³³ The report left unsolved the question how the Bible can judge tradition if its right interpretation depends, in part, upon tradition. The suggestion would seem to be that there is no purely objective norm that can deliver the interpreter from the responsibility to be faithful to the Holy Spirit, whose voice is to be heard in Scripture and Tradition together.

The documents of Vatican II and those of the Faith and Order Commission, while they do not totally overcome all the historic disputes between Catholics and Protestants, go a long way toward reconciliation. As a result, it is no longer safe to assume that either Protestants or Catholics adhere to the classical orthodoxies of their own churches, as expressed in past centuries. Protestant and Catholic biblical reflection, since the mid-sixties, has embarked on a common history, with certain interconfessional tensions still remaining.

IV. CURRENT TRENDS

Because of the complexity of the current situation, one cannot neatly synthesize present-day opinions regarding the Bible in Protestant and Catholic theology. In general, the mood may be characterized as open, inductive, and empirical. In much recent literature, one encounters a certain antipathy to orthodoxy, neo-orthodoxy, and the biblical theology of the neo-orthodox period. Many tend to define revelation, as did Schleiermacher and liberal Protestants, in terms of experience of the transcendent. Schubert Ogden, for instance, holds that the ultimate sources of religious authority are two: "specifically Christian experience of God as decisively revealed in Jesus the Christ" and "universally human experience of ultimate reality as originally revealed in our existence as such."³⁴ Edward Schillebeeckx speaks of two sources of theology: "on the one hand the entire traditional experience of the great Jewish-Christian movement, and on the other hand the new, contemporary human experiences of Christians and non-Christians."³⁵

Authors such as Willi Marxsen and Schubert Ogden stress the importance of the New Testament as a source and norm of specifically Christian experience, since it contains the apostolic witness to Jesus. They emphasize, however, that the real norm is Jesus himself, whose

³² P. C. Rodger and L. Vischer (eds.), The Fourth World Conference on Faith and Order (New York: Association Press, l964) #45, p. 52.
³³ Ibid., #51, P. 53.
³⁴ S. Ogden, "Sources of Religious Authority in Liberal Protestantism," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1976) 41 1.
³⁵ E. Schillebeeckx, Die Auferstehung Jesu als Grund der Erlosung (Quaestiones Disputatae 78) (Freiburg: Herder, 1978) 13.

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place cannot be usurped by either church or Bible.³⁶ Inspired by the "new quest for the historical Jesus," these writers look particularly to what they call the "Jesus-kerygma" as discoverable in the earliest strata of Christian witness. This, they believe, is the norm by which the appropriateness of all explicitly Christological assertions is to be tested.³⁷

Against this idea of a "canon within the canon," others maintain that the earliest testimony is not necessarily the best. The first witnesses may have been too close to the revelatory events to evaluate their real significance. According to D. E. Nineham, "it may seem providential that the Gospels were written a generation or more after the events to which they refer … by a community which, since the end of Jesus' earthly life, had enjoyed a continuous and deepening experience of him as the risen and exalted Lord, and had achieved increasing insight into the connexion between that experience and the events in the days of his flesh." ³⁸

Many authors today turn to the Bible not so much for accurate information about the words and deeds of Jesus as to find in it a model or paradigm of the specifically Jewish and Christian experience of God. According to James Barr, the Bible, as "the classic model for the understanding of God" offers paradigms that empower us to interpret our own lives in a new way. "Faith is Christian," he says, "because it relates itself to classically-expressed models."³⁹ David Tracy proposes a similar ground for the authority of the Bible. "The Scriptures serve for the Christian as the classic judging and transforming all other classics-the norma normans non normata of all Christian religious and theological language."⁴⁰ Gregory Baum does not substantially disagree when be writes: "The Bible is the test, norm, and judge in the church by purifying and reassuring Christians in their own experience of life."⁴¹

In this inductive approach, the doctrine of inspiration undergoes a certain permutation. Unlike their "orthodox" forebears, most contemporary theologians see no reason for identifying inspiration exclusively with the canonical Scriptures. Krister Stendahl, Everett Kalin, A. C. Sundberg, and others have abundantly proved that the early church acknowledged the inspiration of many writings which they did not

³⁶ W. Marxsen, The New Testament as the Church's Book (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972) 154.
³⁷ S. Ogden, "The Authority of Scripture for Theology," Interpretation 30 (1976) 259.
³⁸ D. E. Nineham, "Eye-Witness Testimony and Gospel Tradition, III," Journal of Theological Studies 11(1960) 262.
³⁹ The Bible in the Modern World,11 8.
⁴⁰ D. Tracy, "The Particularity and Universality of Christian Revelation," in E.Schillebeeckx and B. Van Iersel (eds.), Revelation and Experience (Concilium 113), 113.
⁴¹ G. Baum, "The Bible as Norm," The Ecumenist 9/5 (July-Aug. 1971) 75.

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accept as canonical Scripture.⁴² These findings harmonize with the earlier contentions of Pierre Benoit regarding the inspiration of the Septuagint⁴³ and those of Gustave Bardy regarding the inspiration of church Fathers and councils.⁴⁴

For many writers the inspiration of the biblical books is not intelligible except in the light of an antecedent inspired tradition and a subsequent inspired church. Barr insists on all three of these stages, and in this Context reaffirms the inspiration of the Bible. "The biblical men had a pioneering role in the formulation of our classic model, and this may make it fitting for them to be called 'inspired' in a special sense."⁴⁵

Inspiration, as the quality which enabled the community of faith to produce its classic writings, should not be restricted, as some liberals contended, to the ideas of the sacred authors. Luis Alonso Schökel, among others, has shown from the psychology of literary composition that it is impossible to separate an author's ideas from the literary genres and language in which the ideas take shape.⁴⁶ Barr, cognizant of these facts, is willing to speak, in a certain sense, of "plenary verbal inspiration," though of course he understands this term quite differently from the earlier orthodox or recent fundamentalist theologians.⁴⁷

While fundamentalists continue to work with the dogmatic idea of inspiration, and to deduce the authority of the Bible from its divine origin, the more inductive theology of our day proceeds in the opposite direction. Kelsey, for example, grounds the authority of the Bible in its power to nurture and reform the identity of the Christian community and its members. Inspiration, he holds, is a second-order doctrine, intended to give a theological explanation of how the Bible, properly used, achieves this kind of effect.⁴⁸

The question of inerrancy, now as at the beginning of the century, remains sharply controverted between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. In October 1978, a conference of 284 evangelicals, sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, drafted "The

⁴² K. Stendahl, "The Apocalypse of John and the Epistles of Paul in the Muratorian Fragment," in W. Klassen and G. F. Snyder (eds.), Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation (New York: Harper, 1962) 239-45; E. Kalin, "The Inspired Community: A Glance at Canon History," Concordia Theological Monthly 42 (1971) 541-49; A. C. Sundberg, "The Bible Canon and Christian Doctrine," Interpretation 29 (1975) 352-71, esp. 364-7 1.
⁴³ P. Benoit, "La Septante est-elle inspiree?" in N. Adler (ed.), Vom Wort des Lebens (Festschrift Max Mienertz) (Munster: Aschendorff, 1951) 41-49. Cf. P. Auvray, "Comment se pose le probleme de l'inspiration des Septante," Revue Biblique 59 (1952) 321-36.
⁴⁴ G. Bardy, "L'inspiration des Peres de l'Eglise," Recherches de science religieuse 40 (1951-52) (Me1anges Jules Lebreton 2) 7-26.
⁴⁵ The Bible in the Modern World, 132; cf. J. Barr, Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978) 288.
⁴⁶ L. Alonso Schokel, The Inspired Word (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), esp. pp.177-216.
⁴⁷ The Bible in the Modern World, 178-79; cf. his Fundamentalism, 298-99.
⁴⁸ The Uses of Scripture, 211.

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Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy," which concludes from the doctrine of inspiration the inerrancy of the Bible in all its parts.⁴⁹ "We deny that biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood" (Art. 12). These assertions are somewhat qualified later in the document, where it is admitted that the Bible uses "non-chronological narration and imprecise citation" and is not "absolutely precise by modern standards."

While inerrancy continues to be defended by distinguished conservatives such as Carl Henry, a few evangelicals, such as Dewey Beegle, reject the doctrine.⁵⁰ In Roman Catholicism, many prominent theologians still assert inerrancy, but only in a very qualified manner. Norbert Lohfink, for example, has maintained that the unity of the Bible demands that each individual statement be interpreted in terms of the whole, so that it no longer bears the meaning which it would have if read in isolation. Thus an erroneous statement in one or another of the books of Scripture does not compromise the inerrancy of the Bible.⁵¹ Other Catholic theologians, as we have seen, insist only on the "salvific truth" of Scripture, and are willing to admit scientific and historical errors. Oswald Loretz, on the other hand, holds that the Bible is true in the Hebrew sense of being reliable and faithful, but not in the Greek, scientific sense, which would demand conformity between statements and the facts they refer to.⁵² Hans KÜng, who accepts a fundamentally Barthian notion of inspiration, cheerfully admits that the Bible is not immune to "errors of the most varied kind."⁵³

James Barr, the Scottish Presbyterian, harking back to the Catholic ecole large of a century ago, pleads for what he calls "inspiration without inerrancy."⁵⁴ David Kelsey maintains that the admission of error in the Bible does not compromise its authority, for the adequate norm or discrimen of the Christian life is not simply the Bible taken as a book. Rather, the discrimen is both the Bible as used in the community and the active presence of God, taken together as reciprocal coefficients. Since the active presence of God is essential, literal conformity with biblical statements is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee theological positions.⁵⁵

⁴⁹ Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21 (1978) 289-96; reprinted in C.F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4, pp. 211-19.
⁵⁰ D. M. Beegle, Scripture, Tradition and Infallibility (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973).
⁵¹ N. Lohfink, "The Inerrancy of Scripture," reprinted in his The Christian Meaning of the Old Testament (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1968), chap. 2, pp. 24-5 1.
⁵² O . Loretz, The Truth of the Bible (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968).
⁵³ H. KÜng, Infallible? An Inquiry (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971) 209-21, quotation from p. 215.
⁵⁴ Fundamentalism, 287.
⁵⁵ The Uses of Scripture, 215.

21 - Scripture: Recent Protestant and Catholic Views

In contemporary writings about the canon one encounters a widespread rejection, except in fundamentalist circles, of the "orthodox" positions that the canon was explicitly revealed in apostolic times or that the canonical books could be identified by their prophetic or apostolic authorship. Ogden, for instance, asserts: "We now know not only that the Old Testament is not prophetic in the traditional sense of the, word but also that the New Testament is not apostolic in the same traditional sense. We known, in fact, that the New Testament canon, both as such and in its individual writings, itself belongs to the tradition of the church, as distinct from the original witness of the apostles with which it has traditionally been identified."⁵⁶

Recent historical investigation has provided ample grounds for the position here expressed. With respect to the Old Testament, Sundberg has forcefully argued that the so-called Alexandrian or Septuagint canon never existed. The church, he says, adopted the full range of what circulated as Scripture throughout Judaism (and not simply in the diaspora) before the rabbinic "council" of Jamnia, which, in the last decade of the first century A.D., drew up a restrictive canon so as to exclude certain tendencies, such as the apocalyptic. In limiting its Old Testament to the Jewish canon, Protestantism, according to Sundberg, was misled by the mistaken belief that Jesus, the apostles, and the New Testament writers would not have recognized the Jewish Scriptures later repudiated by the rabbis. By correcting this historical error, he concludes, Protestants could today unite with Catholics in accepting the undivided canon of the early church.⁵⁷

With regard to the New Testament, it was widely agreed, until recently, that the canon was fixed, in substance, about the middle of the second century. According to Cullmann, this was the time when the church was still near enough to the apostolic age to be able to identify the apostolic writings. "At no other time in the history of the church could the fixing of the canon have been undertaken."⁵⁸ Since Harnack, it had become customary to appeal to the Muratorian Fragment as a Roman canon of the late second century, and to the testimony of Origen as indicating the canon of the Greek church in the early third century. Sundberg, however, maintains that these evidences are dubious, at best. He argues that the Muratorian Fragment is an Eastern list of the fourth

⁵⁶ "Sources of Religious Authority," 414; cf. "The Authority of Scripture for Theology," 248-52.
⁵⁷ A. C. Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1964); "The 'Old Testament': A Christian Canon," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 30 (1968) 143-55, and several other articles. Sounding a note of caution, James C. Turro and R. E. Brown point out that we know of no books that were excluded at Jamnia; they also surmise that the Jewish canon may not have been rigidly fixed until the end of the second or the early part of the third century [art. "Canonicity," Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968) 67:35]. B. S. Childs, in his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979) 661-71, still favors the narrower Jewish canon, which in his view was prior to Jamnia.
⁵⁸ Cullmann, "The Tradition," 91-92.

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century, and that Eusebius himself was responsible for the list of canonical books ascribed on his authority to Origen. On these and other grounds he concludes that the adoption of a canon, in the sense of a closed list of officially recognized books, was an achievement of the fourth century.⁵⁹ If Sundberg is correct, Cullmann seriously erred in maintaining that the church, in the middle of the second century, surrendered the normative status of all traditions "that are not fixed by the apostles in writing."⁶⁰

This does not mean that the church, by its fourth-century decision concerning the canon, set itself as judge over the Scriptures. Recent Catholic authors, following along the general lines of Rahner and Barth, regard the fixation of the canon as an act of obedience to the Holy Spirit. The books, they assert, were recognized by a kind of charismatic discernment, analogous to what Thomas Aquinas called knowledge through connaturality.⁶¹ Contemporary Catholic scholarship seems to assume that the canon drawn up by Trent is definitively binding in faith, and consequently subject to no further revision,⁶² but this view could perhaps, merit reexamination in the light of a careful scrutiny of the acts of the council with the help of recent work on the scope and nature of conciliar infallibility.

Protestant authors, for their part, tend to hold that the decision concerning the canon was a practical one, which could no doubt have been made otherwise. As a result of this decision the church is able to present its faithful with what Barr calls a manageable body of material representing different genres, periods, and points of view. ⁶³ According to Barr, the canon is de facto settled, since this material is now built into Christian faith through its historical roots. We are no longer in the canon-building phase.⁶⁴ According to Kelsey, the church in establshing the canon certifies that these writings function together as a sufficient occasion for that presence of God which preserves and nurtures the church's identity^.65

Like Kelsey, James Sanders stresses the essential relationship between the identity of the community and the books taken as canonical. He proposes a new approach to Scripture which he calls "canon criticism" on the analogy of source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism.⁶⁶ Brevard Childs prefers to speak of "canon analysis." Reacting against an exaggerated interest in the provenance of the

⁵⁹ A. C. Sundberg, "Towards a Revised History of the New Testament Canon," Studio Evangelica 4 (1968) 452-61 (TU, vol. 102); "Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List," Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973) 1-41.
⁶⁰ Cullmann, "The Tradition," 90.
⁶¹ Cf. R. Murray, "How Did the Church Determine the Canon of Scripture?" Heythrop Journal 11 (1970) 115-26; N. Appel, "The New Testament Canon," Theological Studies 32 (1971) 627-46.
⁶² Brown and Turro, "Canonicity," JBC 67:13, 42-43, 90; Appel, "The NT Canon."
⁶³ Barr, The Bible in the Modern World, 155-56.
⁶⁴ Ibid., 154-56.
⁶⁵ The Uses of Scripture, 106.
⁶⁶ J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), esp. pp. ix-xx.

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texts, he advocates concentrating on the final form of the text as we have it in the canonical Scriptures.⁶⁷ The adoption of the canon, he says, implies confidence on the part of the church that all the diversity will not lead off into irreconcilable opposites.⁶⁸

Turning from the canon to interpretation, we may observe that biblical interpretation is complicated by a lack of agreement about the goals of exegesis. Barr conveniently distinguishes three approaches: the referential, which aims to discover the historical or theological realities about which the Bible speaks; the intentional, which aims to establish what the original writers intended to say; and the poetic or aesthetic, which aims to explore the images, myths, and literary qualities of the biblical text as it is.⁶⁹

While competent exegetes continue to produce valuable studies on what the biblical authors meant by their words, theological scholarship generally pursues the wider goal of seeking out the realities to which faith is committed. The "new quest of the historical Jesus," launched in the late 1950s, continues to have influence, though the original Heideggerian orientation of that quest is today less pronounced. In the late 1970s Catholic theologians such as Hans Küng, ⁷⁰ Edward Schillebeeckx ⁷¹ and Jon Sobrino⁷² have produced exciting studies focusing on the public ministry of Jesus as retrieved through historical-critical analysis of the earliest traditions. In these studies the influence of Protestants such as Marxsen, Pannenberg, and Moltmann is easily discerned.

Complaints are still heard-and not simply from the fundamentalist camp-to the effect that the historical-critical approach is theologically sterile. In what was evidently intended as a programmatic essay, Walter Wink of Union Theological Seminary in New York City inveighed against the "biblical critical paradigm" as laboring under a false objectivism, technologism, and isolation from the community of faith.⁷³ Drawing heavily on the hermeneutical theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer and on the critical sociology of Jürgen Habermas, Wink proposes a new model of biblical study, based on the human sciences, and directed to personal and social transformation.

Gadarner's influence is evident also in the work of Peter Stuhlmacher, a former pupil and assistant of Ernst Käsemann, who advocates a "hermeneutics of consent" which allows the text itself to determine the horizons of the interpreter and thus to generate what Gadamer calls "an effective historical consciousness." Tradition, Stuhlmacher contends, is

⁶⁷ Introduction lo the Old Testament, 73-75.
⁶⁸ Biblical Theology in Crisis, 18 1.
⁶⁹ The Bible in the Modern World, 61-62.
⁷⁰ H. Küng, On Being a Christian (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976).
⁷¹ E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Seabury, 1979).
⁷² J. Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1978).
⁷³ W. Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973).

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indispensable for exegesis, for any classic text interprets itself by establishing a continuous but fluid stream of commentary which mediates between the text itself and the contemporary reader.⁷⁴

In a perceptive article, Sandra Schneiders, I.H.M., of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, attempts to integrate hermeneutics with faith and spirituality. Theological exegesis, she maintains, must explain not only what the original author meant to say to the original readers, but also what the word of God says to us today through the text.⁷⁵ Every significant text, she holds, has an inexhaustible fullness of meaning. "The text functions like a musical composition, which cannot be rendered except by genuine fidelity to the score but which will be rendered differently by each artist."⁷⁶ In this way Schneiders attempts to retrieve what was valid in the search for a "fuller meaning" (sensus plenior) recently pursued by Raymond Brown among others. ⁷⁷

Contemporary exegesis in France is strongly influenced by structuralism, and in the United States is affected by a combination of structuralism and the new literary criticism which looks upon texts as having an independent life of their own and thus as having meanings irrespective of the intentions of their authors. Distinguished exegetes such as Norman Perrin, Robert W. Funk, John Dominic Crossan, and Dan O. Via, Jr., have been producing new literary and structural analyses of the metaphors and parables in the New Testament. For an introduction to this type of hermeneutics, and of the hermeneutical theory of philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur, one may consult the periodical, Semeia, founded in 1974, which describes itself as "an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent methods of biblical criticism."

Studies such as these shy away from any attempt to translate the meaning of the Bible into propositional statements. Instead, they seek to clarify bow the biblical language can work on the modern reader. The concern is not so much with interpretation as with use; not so much with what Dei Verbum discusses in its third chapter as in its sixth, as described above. In this connection, one is reminded of Kelsey's statement that theology should not be content with exploring what the text says, or even what God is saying through the text, but should inquire rather what God is using the text for.⁷⁸ In the church, according to Kelsey, God uses the texts of Scripture to shape, nurture, and reform the church's self-identity. By following up this suggestion, one might

⁷⁴ p. Stuhlmacher, Historical Criticism and Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).
⁷⁵ "The Literal Sense of Scripture," Theological Studies 39 (1978) 719-36, p. 724.
⁷⁶ Ibid., 731.
⁷⁷ R. E. Brown, The "Sensus Plenior" of Sacred Scripture (Baltimore: St. Mary's Seminary, 1955). For Brown's more recent views on the subject see his article, "Hermeneutics," JBC 71:57-70.
⁷⁸ The Uses of Scripture, 213.

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find surprising new relevance in the spiritual exegesis of the middle ages. ⁷⁹

Finally, how is Scripture related to tradition? Since Vatican II and Montreal there has been a growing ecumenical consensus to the effect that both the "two sources" theory of Counter Reformation Catholicism and the sola Scriptura formula of Reformation Protestantism are unsatisfactory. Against the former position it is argued that Scripture and tradition are not two distinct reservoirs, each containing a certain portion of revealed truth.. Against the latter, it is observed that Scripture is never really alone. The Christian reads it within the church, in the light of the use the church makes of it.

There is rather general agreement, also, that the Bible, rather than tradition, is the fundamental embodiment of the word of God. As Joseph Ratzinger says in his commentary on Dei Verbum, Chapter 2: "It is important to note that only Scripture is defined in terms of what it is: it is stated that Scripture is the word of God consigned to writing. Tradition, however, is described only functionally, in terms of what it does: it hands on the word of God, but is not the word of God."⁸⁰ Kelsey, from a Protestant point of view, says much the same. Scripture and tradition, he declares, cannot properly be viewed as competing authorities. Scripture he defines as "that set of writings whose proper use serves as the occasion by God's grace for his presence,"⁸¹ whereas tradition is "the process that embraces both the church's use of Scripture and the presence of God which, in dialectical interrelationship, are together essential to the church's self-identity."⁸²

Montreal, as we have seen, acknowledged the possibility of distorting traditions and proposed Scripture, rightly interpreted, as a criterion by which authentic tradition could be distinguished from unauthentic. Ratzinger agrees with this proposal and faults Dei Verbum for not having pointed out the critical use of Scripture to adjudicate tradition.⁸³ But as we have noted, the Faith and Order documents fail to settle the question how the Bible can function as a norm against tradition if the Bible itself must be interpreted in the light of tradition.

Catholics continue to hold, in accordance with Vatican I and Vatican II, that the ecclesiastical magisterium is a divinely given guide that enables the truth of revelation to be authoritatively heralded by the church. But as the Councils also point out, the teaching of the magisterium is not itself the word of God; rather, it is under the word of God,

⁷⁹ On this see H. de Lubac, The Sources of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), containing selections from his 4-volume Exegese medievale (Paris: Aubier, 1959-64).
⁸⁰ Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary, vol. 3, p. 194.
⁸¹ The Uses of Scripture, 96 (italics Kelsey's).
⁸² Ibid., 95.
⁸³ Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary, vol. 3, p.191.

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which it serves.⁸⁴ Kelsey therefore exaggerates when he says: "For the Roman Catholics, God is present only in the mode of uses of canonical Scripture ruled by the divinely instituted teaching office of the church which is to be identified with 'tradition' unambiguously."⁸⁵ Most contemporary Catholic theologians clearly distinguish between tradition and the teaching of the ecclesiastical magisterium, but they recognize in the magisterium a power to judge authoritatively when there is doubt about what the tradition has to say.

Vatican Council II, in its Decree on Ecumenism, pointed out that Protestants and Catholics generally differ in their understanding of the proper role of the magisterium in the interpretation of Scripture. In the Catholic view, according to the Council, "an authentic teaching office plays a special role in the explanation and proclamation of the written word of God."⁸⁶ The difference, however, may not be unbridgeable. In point of fact it is doubtful that the Catholic magisterium has ever issued an irreformable decision regarding the literal meaning of any given text, and thus Catholic exegetes may, with proper deference to official teaching, continue to explore exegetical questions according to their own proper methodology.⁸⁷ On the other hand, Protestants are generally inclined to interpret Scripture in accordance with the confessional standards and traditions of their own ecclesial bodies. The interconfessional disagreements about biblical interpretation are, on both sides, influenced by official church teaching. And the increasing agreements among exegetes of different confessional traditions may well be the harbingers of future agreements among the churches themselves.

In the preceding sketch I have deliberately focused on centrist positions, which I regard as dominant in the recent Protestant and Catholic literature on the Bible. In a longer survey it would be necessary to give closer attention to radical tendencies, which subordinate Scripture to something else (such as personal experience or political action), and to conservative tendencies, which accord peremptory authority to individual texts taken by themselves. The centrist positions we have examined differ from the "orthodoxy" of recent centuries and from contemporary conservative theology by insisting that the biblical texts must be read in their full historical and literary context and pondered in the light of Christian tradition and present experience. But, unlike radical theology, the centrist positions accept the Bible as a primary embodiment of the word of God and as an indispensable normative source for the church and for theology.

⁸⁴ See the discussion above of Vatican I (DS 301 1) and Dei Verbum 10 and 12.
⁸⁵ The Uses of Scripture, 97.
⁸⁶ Unitatis redintegratio, 21.
⁸⁷ R. E. Brown, "Hermeneutics," JBC 71:87.