Recently I had a conversation with a Roman Catholic about whether a Catholic can reject the inerrancy of the Bible. He argues that a Catholic must affirm the inerrancy of scripture in totality, and I argue the Second Vatican Council taught otherwise:
Michael The Catholic:
Inspired Scripture is Inspired Scripture.
TheSire:
Scripture is only inerrant on matters of faith and morals.
Michael The Catholic:
Scripture is inerrant in everything the Sacred Writers assert. If they assert a historical fact, like the census in Luke 1 – that is inerrant. You are straw-manning the Catholic Church.. again.
TheSire:
You don’t think a Roman Catholic can hold to that position I presented?
Michael The Catholic:
No.
For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily, as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. . . . It follows that those who maintain that an error is possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings either pervert the Catholic notion of inspiration or make God the author of such error (Providentissimus Deus, 20-21).
Pope Leo XIII
Pope St. Pius X in his 1907 Lamentabili Sane condemned the proposition:
“Divine inspiration does not extend to all of Sacred Scriptures so that it renders its parts, each and every one, free from every error” (LS 11).
Pope Benedict XV re-affirmed Pope Leo XIII’s teaching in his own encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus in 1920:
But although these words of our predecessor leave no room for doubt or dispute, it grieves us to find that not only men outside, but even children of the Catholic Church—nay, what is a peculiar sorrow to us, even clerics and professors of sacred learning—who in their own conceit either openly repudiate or at least attack in secret the Church’s teaching on this point (SP 18).
Pope Pius XII
For as the substantial Word of God became like to men in all things, except sin, so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in every respect, except error (DAS 37).
In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII dealt with the issue yet again:
For some . . . put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters (HG 22).
So yes, it is totally unacceptable for Catholics to hold anything but total and unrestricted inerrancy of scripture in everything that the Sacred Writers assert in any given words, phrase, chapter, or book. Hopefully, that clears it up for you.
Particularly Pope Leo XIII, who was responding to the surge of liberal Protestantism that questioned the inerrancy of scripture in all matters. So you have liberal Protestants to thank for the recent reiterations of the Church’s ancient position that has always been that scripture is inerrant in everything it asserts, which, as you can see, are plenty. So don’t go around saying that Catholics can hold anything but what the Popes have said very clearly.
Ben:
Were they speaking infallibly at the time?
TheSire:
Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation. Therefore, “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Greek text).
This is from Vatican II:
If you would notice the careful clarification had “for the sake of salvation.” This new clarification occurred at the Second Vatican Council because the Catholic Church was going to reaffirm the traditional position. Franz Cardinal König (a progressive) ended up swaying the Council that the Bible contained many errors (not that they accepted it but seen its legitimacy). So, given the context, it seems to me obvious that they convinced the council to not reaffirm the traditional position, and that is now the common position among Catholic elites.
Benedict XV addressed this:
Their notion is that only what concerns religion is intended and taught by God in Scripture, and that all the rest — things concerning ‘profane knowledge,’ the garments in which Divine truth is presented — God merely permits, and even leaves to the individual author’s greater or less knowledge. Small wonder, then, that in their view a considerable number of things occur in the Bible touching physical science, history, and the like, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress in science! (Spiritus Paraclitus, 19)
Michael The Catholic:
No, the clause “for the sake of salvation” gives the intention of God writing scripture, not limiting scripture itself. For further proof of this, check where the footnotes take you. They take you to Pope Leo XIII above. Also, note how Benedict above is condemning people who hold that view? He was at the Council. Also, the Magisterium explicitly stated that Vatican II introduced no new dogmas. A limiting of inerrancy would be a new dogma and thus you can’t read Vatican II as saying that. Anytime there is a new dogma, it is always sign-posted. So again, that phrase “for the sake of salvation” isn’t referring to the truths relevant to our salvation, but is referring to why God decided to write scripture at all.
Is Scripture Inerrant? – Catholic Answers
So please don’t tell me what my magisterium believes. And just accept that you are wrong on this lol.
TheSire:
When one comes to inerrancy, it has to be understood as a consequence of inspiration, but one that is not conterminous with it. It is restricted to inspired statements in the Bible, and not to its questions, exclamations, or prayers. For the Constitution [Dei Verbum, Vatican II Council] plainly states, “Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers should be regarded as asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that we must acknowledge the Books of Scripture as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth that God wished to be recorded in the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation” (§11). Especially noteworthy are two things: the verb “asserted,” which is used twice, and the last phrase, “recorded…for the sake of our salvation.” In other words, inerrancy is the quality of all assertions in the Bible that pertain to human salvation. That important phrase saves Catholic interpreters from crass fundamentalism because it means that the charism of inerrancy does not necessarily grace every statement made with a past tense verb as if it were historically true. (J. Fitzmyer, The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method, Paulist Press, 2008, p. 8)
Michael The Catholic:
And that is also a lie, that Cardinal did not sway the Council at all. Show me your source for that. I don’t care what liberal scholars have to say. Popes prior to, during, and after the council, and the CDF have been perfectly clear that scripture’s inerrancy is unlimited. Magisterium annihilates a scholar’s private opinion any day because the Holy Spirit > Man. It’s also an infallible teaching from Florence, Trent, and Vatican I.
Pope Pius XII:
The sacred Council of Trent ordained by solemn decree that “the entire books with all their parts, as they have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Vulgate Latin edition, are to be held sacred and canonical.” In our own time, the Vatican Council, with the object of condemning false doctrines regarding inspiration, declared that these same books were to be regarded by the Church as sacred and canonical “not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterward approved by her authority, nor merely because they contain revelation without error, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their author, and as such were handed down to the Church herself.” When, subsequently, some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, by which such divine authority is claimed for the “entire books with all their parts” as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as “obiter dicta” and — as they contended — in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, published on November 18 in the year 1893, justly and rightly condemned these errors and safeguarded the studies of the Divine Books by most wise precepts and rules. (Divino Afflante Spiritu, n. 1)
Jimmy Stephens:
It’s just question-begging to revert to Vatican I to counter the objection that Vatican II changed Rome’s doctrine. If it did, that Vatican I disagrees with Vatican II only solidifies Bahnsen’s point. If it didn’t, you should be able to show that Vatican II in itself just teaches the same doctrine as Vatican I.
TheSire:
There are several issues here that are being missed. It seems that we have two different interpretations of Vatican II. There is my interpretation and Catholic scholar’s interpretation (such as Dr. Joseph Fitzmyer). Fitzmyer was a Catholic priest as well, so he has more authority than you do, and being a well-respected scholar, is more familiar with these issues than the both of us. This understanding was also held by Franz Cardinal König. Hardly just liberal scholars have openly presented this position. Even in the article you brought up, the appearance of Catholic turf wars has occurred:
To understand how this could be so controversial, compare and contrast the arguments of Fr. Raymond Brown and Scott Hahn, evaluating each of them in light of the papal teaching discussed above. (For reference, Fr. Brown’s argument is printed on page 1169 of The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990). Hahn’s argument is found on pages 35-36 of Letter & Spirit (Vol. 6): For the Sake of Our Salvation; The Truth and Humility of God’s Word (Steubenville, OH: St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, 2010).)
Brown isolates the last phrase of Dei Verbum 11—“that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation”—to argue that the Council intended to teach that Scripture’s inerrancy is limited “to the extent that it conforms to the salvific purpose of God.” Hahn concedes that a reading such as Brown’s “is firmly entrenched in modern Catholic scholarship,” but he explains that, due to the grammatical structure of the phrase, “the wording of the Constitution does not support such an interpretation.” He notes:
[T]he grammar of the text does not in fact delimit the kind of truth under discussion. The prepositional phrase nostrae salutis causa, “for the sake of our salvation,” functions as an adverbial phrase modifying the verbal expression, consignari voluit, “wished to be recorded.” As such, it elucidates the purpose behind God’s desire to put his truth in the Bible without differentiating between different classes of truths it may be said to express.
To support his reading, Brown argues that Dei Verbum’s “statements on disputed subjects reflect careful compromise, stemming from the five revisions through which the document passed.”
It seems that this is further proof that one can remain Catholic and differ on this issue of unclarified doctrine.
Furthermore, Fitzmyer was familiar with Divino Afflante Spiritu and discusses it in the same book:
I have always maintained that there never would have been a Second Vatican Council, if it were not for the 1943 encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Divino afflante Spiritu, “On the Promotion of Biblical Studies.” We have all heard of that encyclical, but not many of us realize its importance. It was a “sleeper,” because its effects did not immediately see fruition, and it took a while for Catholic people to become aware of what it was all about. The main reason for the delayed reaction to this encyclical was that it was issued in 1943, during the Second World War, when the minds of most people in the countries involved in that war were preoccupied with things other than the interpretation of the Bible. With the end of World War II, there emerged in Europe what was called la nouvelle théologie (especially in the 1950s). It was heavily dependent on a new way of reading, studying, and interpreting Scripture, in effect on the way that Pope Pius XII had recommended. This new theology and the encyclical of Pope Pius XII thus provided the background and stimulus for the Council. …
Because of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment, German historicism, the Babel-Bibel disputes, and because of the new discoveries and the scientific advances in biology and evolution, a radically rationalist way of thinking and interpreting emerged, which Leo XIII sought to cope with in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus. All of this contributed to the Modernism that marked the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in the Catholic Church.
For this reason, the Constitution continues with a discussion about the relation of biblical truth to “literary forms”:
Truth is differently presented and expressed in various types of historical writings, in prophetic or poetic texts, or in other modes of speech. Furthermore, the interpreter must search for what meaning the sacred writer, in his own historical situation and in accordance with the condition of his time and culture, intended to express and did in fact express with the help of literary forms that were in use during that time.
In this regard, the Constitution was reiterating merely what Pius XII had said less directly in Divino Afflante Spiritu 20-21. (J. Fitzmyer, The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method, Paulist Press, 2008, p. 8-9)
The point of these statements is obvious: the Roman Catholic Church saw the advancements in our knowledge of the ancient world and was trying to counter the critical scholarship of their day. This was a slow progression of the Roman Catholic Church to accept modernism and modern methods of interpretation into the Church (contra Spiritus Paraclitus). The appeal to Providentissimus Deus and Divino Afflante Spiritu doesn’t undermine my point but rather shows the progression to what culminates in the Second Vatican Council.
The article you cited quotes Scott Hahn’s counterargument to Brown’s argument for limited inerrancy. Hahn makes the mistake of ignoring the critical history of the Council and the significance that the Pope didn’t merely reaffirm the traditional position.
History:
The original schema De fontibus differed radically from DV. It said inspiration “necessarily excludes and repels error in any matter, religious or profane” (12). The word profane encompassed historical statements. When Dei Verbum was first drafted to replace De fontibus, it said something similar, namely that the Bible is “completely free of all error.” This wording was taken more or less from Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu: “freedom from any error whatsoever” (1); “immunity from all error” (38). The third draft changed it to “without any error.” While this is the same assertion, it is less emphatic, as if the document were moving farther and farther away from the original, at least rhetorically.
During the Council, Cardinal Franz König, the Archbishop of Vienna, advocated against total inerrancy, famously reading aloud a list of well-known errors in the Bible, such as the locus classicus of Mark 2:26, which mistakes Abiathar for his father Achimelech (2 Sam 8:17). In this, he seemed to have the support of the majority, and so the fourth draft of DV was substantially changed, so that it now said the Scriptures “teach saving truth without error.” Far from saying the Bible is free of any error, it now asserted that it was free of error only with respect to “saving truth.” This wording clearly implied that inerrancy was limited and caused a stir among the more conservative bishops, who asked Paul VI to intervene. As a result, the pope had the word saving removed. However, when this was done, the clause “for the sake of our salvation” was added in its place! One hand gives, while the other takes away. Thus, the final, authoritative wording –approved by 99.7% of the assembled bishops– states that the Scriptures “teach without error the truth that God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to be put in writing in Holy Writ” (DV 11).
As a historical theologian, I believe magisterial documents should be interpreted within their historical context. I despise attempts to interpret them purely Platonically, as if the words stood apart from history and the men that wrote them in some Ideal realm. What does this drafting and debate process tell us about what DV 11 means? It seems to suggest that the majority of bishops favored some kind of salvation-centric limited inerrancy. However, since the conservative minority went to the pope about this, and he was sympathetic to their concern (which is no surprise, given the view of his predecessor Pius XII), the Council had little choice but to settle for a somewhat-ambiguous compromise.
Are There Any Mistakes in the Bible? – Dei Verbum Chapter 3
The issue is that over the four drafts, the Pope chose the weakest of all the drafts and chose something not that different from what the liberals of the Council were arguing for. They simply could have affirmed the Bible was without error and given the Traditional Catholics the victory, but history had other plans. Furthermore, why weren’t any of these people condemned if the Second Vatican Council condemned limited inerrancy? Why allow these men to continue to teach and influence laymen, clergy, scholars, and Popes?! It seems more likely that limited inerrancy is acceptable rather than every conservative Catholic at the Vatican being blind deaf-mutes. Scott Hahn simply isn’t grasping the arguments from his interlocutors. The argument is that he isn’t reading the Council in its historical context and ignoring it for the sake of his theological goals.
The other question is how has this aged in recent times of the Roman Catholic Church. If we are to look at how it all turned out, then we would see that the RCC has turned to a more progressive notion of inerrancy:
When Pope Leo XIII said in 1893 that limited inerrancy “cannot be tolerated” (Providentissimus Deus 20), it was understood that he had the recently-deceased Cardinal Newman in mind. Fifty years later, Pius XII renewed this, explicitly naming “obiter dicta” but not Newman himself (Divino Afflante Spiritu 1). Vatican II and the post-conciliar popes have brought about many theological and liturgical developments. Pope Francis canonized John Henry Newman on October 13, 2019, and it seems likely that a future pope will declare Newman a Doctor of the Church. If that were to happen, it would mean that he had been judged as useful for the whole Church. Given Newman’s canonization and prominent influence on the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, I think his views deserve serious re-consideration.
In fact, DV 11 is widely understood to mean some kind of limited inerrancy; it is the de facto default position of most Catholic theologians and even bishops. In 2005, for example, the bishops’ conference of England and Wales, together with the bishops’ conference of Scotland, interpreted DV 11 as follows:
It is important to note this teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the truth of Scripture is to be found in all that is written down ‘for the sake of our salvation’. We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters. We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision.
The two bishops conferences specifically labeled this a “teaching document,” meaning that it exercised the ordinary magisterium of the bishops of those countries. The same position was taken in the working document (Instrumentum Laboris) of the 2008 Synod of Bishops on the Word of God. It is even stronger:
The following can be said with certainty: […] with regards to what might be inspired in the many parts of Sacred Scripture, inerrancy applies only to “that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (DV 11).
Biblical Inerrancy for Catholics – Dei Verbum Chapter 3
Furthermore, then just denying inerrancy (which arguably Ratzinger did) some Catholics will argue that inspiration doesn’t entail inerrancy. That isn’t my problem as a Protestant that simply can reject the difficult statements of the Council. Here is how Joseph Fitzmyer tries to reconcile these matters here:
Although many documents of the Second Vatican Council made use of Scripture in the course of their composition, the direct teaching of the Council on Scripture is found in the six chapters of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum, “The Word of God”). After a short prologue, the Constitution defines revelation as the way God makes known himself and his will through creation and especially through his son Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind: “We proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us…; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:2-3). Revelation is, then, not simply a communication of knowledge but a dynamic process by which the divine persons invite human beings to enter into a relation of fellowship. It further teaches how that self-revelation of God is transmitted to all generations through the gospel of Christ preached by the apostles and their successors with the help of the Holy Spirit and is expressed in Tradition and Scripture, a single deposit of the Word of God. It thus emphasizes the inseparability of Scripture and Tradition and avoids saying that there are any revealed truths transmitted solely by Tradition (chap. 2). The Constitution likewise affirms the inspiration of Scripture, teaching that it has God as its author, who speaks through human agents and in human fashion so that one must attend to the literary forms used and to the unity of Scripture in order to ascertain the intention of the inspired writers and to realize that the sacred books teach firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth that God wanted to be recorded for the sake of our salvation (chap. 3). The Constitution then describes the OT as the preparation for the salvation of all humanity in the choice of a people to whom divine promises were entrusted gradually and as a preparation for the coming of Christ, stressing that these OT books have meaning even for Christians (chap. 4). In chap. 5, the Constitution shows how the Word of God, which is God’s power for the salvation of believers, is set forth in the writings of the NT, preeminently in the four Gospels of apostolic origin, but also in other writings, all of which have to be understood properly. Finally, in chap. 6, the Constitution sets forth how Scripture plays a role in the life of the Church, by being, along with Tradition, the supreme rule of faith, because in it our heavenly Father speaks to and meets his children; for this reason easy access to Scripture should be available to the Christian faithful in accurate vernacular translations. …
First, in chap. 3 the Constitution stresses the venerable and traditional teaching about the inspiration of Scripture, echoing the doctrine of the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council, but it relates to that traditional teaching an important assertion about inerrancy. To explain this adequately, I must make a preliminary point about inspiration and revelation, because some Christians fail to distinguish them properly. Inspiration is not a charism that makes the writing a revelation. The Constitution had already defined revelation in chap. 1 as the self-manifestation of a personal God and the making known of the mystery of his will for the salvation of humanity. Inspiration is rather the charism by which human beings were moved by God (or by the Spirit of God) to record aspects or details of that divine revelation. The two ideas are not the same, or even coterminous. It is conceivable that a whole biblical book is inspired, from the first word to the last, and yet not contain revelation. Many of the aphorisms or maxims in Ecclesiastes or in the Book of Proverbs are nuggets of human wisdom, inspired indeed, but saying nothing about the self-revealing God, his will, or his designs for human salvation. For instance, Prov 21:9 reads, “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a contentious wife”; that is repeated in 25:24. Such a saying passes on inspired wisdom, but it is not revelation; it tells its nothing about God or his will. When one comes to inerrancy, it has to be understood as a consequence of inspiration, but one that is not coterminous with it. It is restricted to inspired statements in the Bible, and not to its questions, exclamations, or prayers.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer. The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method 7-9.
Further Suggestions:
The Council 