Enter Modernism

Enter Modernism | Philip Trower | From Truth and Turmoil: The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church

The Bible, the Word of God in human speech, is not like a manual of instructions - though it has often been treated like that. While most of it is straightforward enough, there are also many passages whose meaning is far from immediately self-evident. This is why Bible study has a history going back to Old Testament times.

The obscurities are basically of three kinds.

The first are due to mistakes by copyists. In the transmission of the manuscripts down the ages, the attention of the copyists sometimes wandered, or they added comments in the margin which later became incorporated in the text. As a result, the surviving manuscripts contain numbers of variant readings. The kind of scholarship that tries to determine which of these different readings comes nearest to the original is called textual criticism. It is largely a matter of comparing manuscripts to determine which seems most reliable. [1]

It is not difficult, I think, to see why God, in his providence, allowed the texts to become corrupted in this way. Had he prevented it, had he ensured that the thousands of copyists working over two to three millennia had never made a mistake, the Bible would so obviously be a work of divine origin that faith would no longer be a free act. The variant readings are never sufficient to make the main substance of the biblical books uncertain. They only affect particular sentences or phrases.

Obscurities of the second kind flow from the human limitations and character traits of the inspired human authors. While ensuring that they wrote what he wanted, God did so through the medium of their particular personalities and styles of writing and the kinds of literary composition characteristic of their age. Since they were writing a long time ago, they, not surprisingly, used modes of expression or referred to events and things some-times beyond the comprehension of later readers.

Difficulties arising from this second class of causes are resolved, in so far as they can be, by the study of ancient languages, history, archaeology, and literary forms or genres (not to be confused with "form criticism"). Are some words to be taken literally or metaphorically? Is a certain book or passage intended to be history in the strict sense, or an allegory or parable, or is it some combination of the two? The search is for what the human author intended to say and how. This is called "the literal sense".

These first two forms of Bible study simply prepare the ground for what in the Church's eyes has always been the most important branch; the study of the religious significance or theological meaning of the texts.

Obscurities in this field are due to the mysterious nature of the subject matter, or, according to St. Augustine, are deliberately put there by the divine author himself. "The Sacred Books inspired by God were purposely interspersed by him with difficulties both to stimulate us to study and examine them with close attention, and also to give us a salutary experience of the limitations of our minds and thus exercise us in proper humility". [2] God does not disclose the full meaning of what he is saying to mere cleverness or sharp wits.

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Comments

[Eric Giunta]

Wasn't Trower supposed to publish a sequel to this book? It's the best work I know of on the subject! Can't wait for Part II!