The 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.”
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.” 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.”
