… When you read Luke you know he is not giving us mythical stories. When you read the Old Testament it’s not really clear.
I mean we can gauge that there may have been a time of oral tradition from the events that occurred in Luke to the time of his writing them down. Try to figure that out for Genesis.
Sacred scripture inerrancy subsides in its salvation history, not its secular history. The theological truths of sacred scripture can be extracted from the substance, not the form, of the text. For example, Genesis presents not the religious vision of the patriarchs (whose deeds it recounts) but the religious visions of the era of its final composition. Taking the accidents of time and place away, the creation story in Genesis tells us about the nature of time, reaching its climax in the Sabbath. The text tells us about the nature of the world, reaching its perfection in God’s pleasure with what God had created, God’s blessing and sanctifying creation. It also tells us about the character of humankind, man and women, perfect in God’s image, like God, but tragically flawed. Remembering that the substance of the text tells us about a timeless God, we may treat as peripheral incidentals that are peculiar to the time of composition if doing so unveils the central themes: the enduring attributes of God and His plan for humanity.
This timeless sacred drama, framed initially in Israel’s history, becomes our sacred drama when distilled of Israel’s particulars of time and place. Stories about eternal truths are important by virtue of their subject but when God directly involves Himself in begetting the stories, they transcend story and become sacred. Catholics believe the Holy Spirit directly enlightened the minds of the authors of Israel’s story. This divine inspiration put Truth into the authors’ minds. Their human task was to find their prophetic voice and wrap into words the Truth given to them. The Truth in their story is, therefore, substantive (beneath the form of the text), infallible and eternal. Since humanity’s story, past present and future, is present to the mind of God, this timeless Truth shows Israel and us the way to sanctification and salvation.
God’s plan, made present to the sacred editors’ minds through the Holy Spirit, moved them to select, write and re-write the stories of Israel in words and ways that revealed God’s plan for the people of their times. This fusion of infinite Truth into finite minds gives the sacred scriptures at once its Divine authority and its human ambiguity.
The scribes put God’s inspiration into the reality known to them. Not to do so would make understanding God a completely otherworldly affair. Making God immanent as well as transcendent, the scribes wrote for a people at a time in which the scriptures explained Yahweh working in the world. The scribes’ message, though, was primarily theology and secondarily history. This important distinction separates the work of the sacred scribes as salvation historians from that of secular historians.
Secular history, one of the historiographical sciences, proposes theories that give meaning by organizing events in a manner that shows coherence. As a science, historiographers (paleontologists, geologists, historians, etc.) make observations and use
inductive reasoning to put forth theories concerned with the origin and history of the cosmos and of living beings. Because phenomena of the distant past are not open to observation and experiment, historiographers must attempt to reconstruct the events of the past and appeal to the principle of uniformity.
As historians, the ancients knew of no such “scientific” method in their time. When asked to explain causality, as in the origins of man and the world, the ancients asked not “how” but “who.” They believed that a purposeful will commanded all reality. As historians, the ancients attempted to explain natural phenomena not by analysis but by action which required they use story or myth. Myth was serious business; they did not intend these stories to be merely entertainment. They were recounting events upon which their very existence depended. Through myth, the ancient historians put order into apparent chaos. The myth or interpretation of reality followed the observation of the natural phenomena. In this respect the myths were a posteriori or induced from prior observations.
Ancient historians, like their modern counterparts, used inductive reasoning. They produced their myths after examining the natural phenomena. If the myth stood the test of coherence and gave meaning to the phenomena, it endured passing from generation to generation. But the sacred writers, unlike their contemporary and our modern historians, used
deductive reasoning. Through divine inspiration, the sacred writers had definite knowledge of God’s plan of salvation. This knowledge was *a priori *and independent of Israel’s many traditions, oral or written. From this certainty, using their human faculties, the sacred writers enlisted the available stories, selecting and manipulating them to write the Truth for the people of their times.
Fundamentalists ignore the difference between salvation history and secular history and dogmatically insist on constant and continuous “verbal inerrancy” in the entire text. The scribes, being more attentive to their own prophetic voice than to historicity, explained the meaning of events near at hand by writing into those events the Truth with which they were divinely inspired. Forgetting that the scribes wrote for a particular people at a particular time, today’s fundamentalists attempt to extract the Truth from the form rather than the substance of the text. The fundamentalist’s error imputes God’s Word into every word the author wrote. By denying human ambiguity in the texts, the fundamentalist assumes that the wits of man can completely contain and express in words an Idea from the mind of God.
Catholics do not believe in “verbal inerrancy” because we do not believe God was directly and specially involved in the choice of every single word in the text’s original language or in every subsequent interpretation of that language to another.
When the sacred writers put the story together in ca. 450 BC, the issues were clear: How was the world made such that Israel served God in a Temple that was destroyed and now rebuilt, in a land that was lost and now regained, in a holy way of life that was set down in Sinai, violated but then recovered and renewed? Genesis is our answer.
Peace,
O’Malley
