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DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON DIVINE REVELATION Dei Verbum
cin.org/v2revel.html
The translation of
Dei Verbum #11, given above, is misleading. A better translation is in CCC #107:
“Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.”
Msgr George A Kelly explains in
The New Biblical Theorists – Raymond E Brown and Beyond: “The Council chose not to say that only the Bible’s ‘spiritual truth’ or its ‘religious truth’ is free from error. The actual sentence of Dei Verbum says that every assertion of the sacred writers – whether it be religious or moral or scientific or historical – is free from error, because God wanted these writers to convey to us unalloyed truth for the sake of our salvation. The Council makes no distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ truths to be covered by inerrancy, nor is inerrancy to be restricted to ‘essential religious affirmations’ as Brown avers.” (p 157).
[See also
LT61 - THE ENCYCLICAL SPIRITUS PARACLITUS IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT - Part II]
On a literal interpretation:
See
rtforum.org/lt/lt59.html: [Fr Brian Harrison refers to The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (*Dei Verbum) of Vatican II, 1963-5].
“The true sense of
Dei Verbum, 11, then, is not that the guarantee of inerrancy covers those propositions which a biblical author affirms (or teaches) as opposed to those which he merely “states,” i.e., with less force or deliberation, but still as an expression of his own judgment. Rather, it covers those propositions he affirms (or teaches) as opposed to those which he merely “uses materially,” i.e., those in which what appears on paper, taken in isolation, or in its most superficially literal sense, does not express his own judgment in any way.
”These “materially used” (but not formally affirmed) propositions in Scripture would appear to be of three main kinds. First (and most obviously), there are those which the human author does not himself utter but attributes to someone else, in which case divine inspiration guarantees only the truthful reporting of such propositions, not the truth of the propositions themselves. Secondly, this category would include individual propositions used by the author as part of a parable or other imaginative literary composition, in which the formally affirmed teachings it sets out to convey emerge only from the story as a whole. Finally, there are propositions in which not every word is meant to be understood in the most immediate literal sense, since the author may be “using” hyperbole, metaphor, or other literary devices, even within a passage or book which is substantially ‘straight’ history or didactic teaching rather than fiction of some sort.
”In short, what is essentially guaranteed to be true by virtue of divine inspiration, according to the sentence of
Dei Verbum, 11, we are considering, is not the isolated propositions taken in their ‘surface’ meaning and without regard to their historical and literary context, but rather (as the next article of
Dei Verbum puts it) “that meaning which the sacred writers really intended, and which God, by their words, wanted to make known.” 55 The discernment of that divine and human meaning is what the Church understands by a proper ‘literal’ interpretation of the text - which is not to be confused with a ‘literalist’ interpretation.”
Note
55. “… quid hagiographi reapse significare intenderint et eorum verbis manifestare Deo placuerit” (Dei Verbum, 12). In Abbott (ed.), op. cit., this sentence is rendered as though it had another “quid” between “et” and “eorum”: the Council is made to say that interpreters should carefully investigate “what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words” (p. 120). This is inaccurate, for it makes a distinction between what God says in a given passage and what the human author says in it. That, plainly, could be used to undermine what the previous article (§11) has taught so clearly, namely, that God affirms everything which is affirmed by the human author. God may indeed at times say more than the human author intended (the so-called ‘fuller sense,’ sensus plenior, of Scripture, as well as its various spiritual senses), but certainly not less.
You may find some of these articles helpful from Living Tradition
(
rtforum.org/lt/index.html), at:
googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/rtforum?q=Is+Bible+literally+true%3F&sa=Google+Search
- everything has a meaning; a lot looks like mythology or make-believe, only because the Bible grew up in a culture very different from our own.