This might be the single most common source of misunderstandings and controversy in reading Scripture: imposing our modern standards of “truth” on Scripture.
Our culture defines truth as something factually proven by tape recorders, dictations, scientific proof. When you think about it, we have made journalism an idol.
The original authors of Scripture did not propose truth in this way.
Thoughts?
Economy, I believe, in certifying the special presence of the Holy Spirit in humankind is prudent. Therefore, certifying just the final redactors as divinely inspired is both necessary and sufficient to establish the sacredness of the canonical texts. For those inspired by God, actor or redactor, theology always precedes story.
While infallibly divine in their inspirations, the authors remained imperfectly human in their interpretations. This fusion of infinite Truth into finite minds gives the sacred scriptures at once its Divine authority and its human ambiguity.
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 the Scriptures. 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 us the sure way to sanctification and salvation.
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 of the Old Testament had definite knowledge of God’s plan. 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.
Therefore, an important distinction between the secular and sacred historian is the primacy of events and the primacy of meaning. The secular historian, modern or ancient, gives primacy to events and derives from them his or her “truth.” No serious historian would invent or alter events, or ignore controverting facts to prop up a weak hypothesis. Our Old Testament’s divinely inspired authors, giving primacy to God’s inspiration, may well have melded and manipulated the traditional histories of Israel to make their Truth tangible. They were theologians first, secular historians second.
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. Less pedantic interpreters realize that God, seeing all things at once, inspires from on high; men, seeing only a few things here and now, respond from down here. 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.
The issues of sacred scripture are not historical fact but theological truth that can be extracted from the substance, not the form, of the text.
