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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
For us Anglicans it is, of course, open to question whether the latest Papal exposition of the doctrine of inspiration has not imposed restrictions on exegesis which embarrass rather than assist the modern Catholic expositor.’
I.
Since the Reformation the Church has been told that she does not encourage people to read the Bible, that she is opposed to its translation, that she is obscurantist, traditionalist, ultra conservative, etc. Sometimes ‘our erring sister’ is gently chided, but there is always a hardly-veiled air of superiority in rebukes thus delicately administered. Nearly thirty years have elapsed since Leo XIII published his Encyclical, Providenlissimus Deus,on the study of Scripture, and it is nearly three-and-twenty years since he established the Biblical Commission, which published its first decision, that on the Pentateuch, in 1906. Of the writers in the various Biblical reviews during the subsequent years some ‘accord us the praise at least of their silence’ ; others are hostile; many contemptuous: few show any conception of the meaning and value of such Papal pronouncements. The disheartening feature is the fact that hostile and ignorant criticisms are not confined to effusions of the daily Press or irresponsible writers in magazines; they emanate from scholars who should know better. Such criticism continues to this day. Dr. Gore can even now speak of ‘this amazing Encyclical’ and add a hope that ‘this assertion of verbal inspiration in its most stringent sense as the doctrine of the Church’ may not be infallible.
1 A review of P. Lagrangc's S. Matthieu in Church Times, Jan. 23, 1925.
2 The Holy Spirit and the Church, p. 194.
3 For references see the present writer: St. Thvrmas an Interpreter of Scripture. (Blackwell, Oxford, 1924.)
4 Nov. 28, 1924.
5 Gotti, O.P. Theologia Scholastico-Dogmatica, Tom. I, Quaest. 111, dubium ix, sect. 2, ed. Venice, 1781, p. 74.
6 A doctrinal decision is not one the main purport of which is to command or prohibit, but to declare that this or that Dro- position is theologically sound or the reverse. See Ward, The Authority of Doctrinul Decisions, p. 118, note.
7 Card. Gotti, De Locis Theologicis, I, iii, dub. ix, 2, 12. ‘Whether a Book were written by such and such an author does not much concern Catholic faith provided we believe that the Holy Spirit was its Author: ‘i t matters not,” says St. Gregpry, “what pen the King used t o write his letter provided He did write it” (Proem. in job). Hence there is nothing to prevent Pope Innocent and the Council of Carthage from having followed the opinion of their predecessors (antiquorum) in a question which does not touch the faith. At the same time they could make no mistake in enumerating the number of the Canonical Books; for that certainly does pertain t o the faith’; Melchior Canus, De Locis, 11, xi.
8 A good example of this failure is furnished by The Papa! Commission and the Pentateuch. by Briggs and von Hügel. 1906; see, too, Church Times, Nov. 28 and Dee. 12, 1924.
9 See Dublin Review, July, 1878, p. 165, on the condemnation of Ubaghs.
10 The strength and authority of the judgments of Roman theologians are derived not from (so to speak) their personal learning and ability, but chiefly from the circumstance that those judgments may most justly be regarded, if not with absolute certainty, yet with great probability, as expressing the mind and sense of that Church, which is the mother and mistress of all churches'. Murray, de Ecclesia, xvii, 79, quoted by Ward, The Authority of Doctrinal Decisions, p. 136, note.
11 Zuccaria Artifebronicus, 11.v.
12 De Divina Traditione. 1875, p 127. When Franzelin says ‘infallibly secure’ he is of course not using the word ‘infallibly’ in the same sense as when he talks of a proposition as being ‘infallibly true.’ The latter is a divine infallibility, the former human. When, for instance, I accept a statement on the ground that it is the traditional teaching of centuries, I am accepting a statement which has no divine guarantee of its truth and which therefore may conceivably be false, yet since by all the laws of human evidence it is true, I am absolutely ‘secure’ in assenting to it. At the same time we wish Franzelin had not used the expression as it is apt to mislead.
13 Dublin Review, July, 1878, p. 187; two papers by r n anonymous writer-not W. G. Ward: The Assent due to Papal Utterances, July-Oct., 1878.
14 L.C., p. 131.