Dei Verbum, Sixty Years On: The Story of the Document

JS: Let’s just dive into the document itself. Dei Verbum is the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine revelation, one of the Vatican II texts, promulgated in 1965. What does all of that mean to someone who’s new to maybe the Second Vatican Council and to Dei Verbum? What was it about? Why is the document significant?

 

HA: Right. Well, let me tell you a little bit about my own history with the document, because when it came out I was a student in college and I wasn’t paying much attention to what the Second Vatican Council was doing in terms of Scripture studies. But I was getting very much interested in Scripture studies and decided to go on and pursue it professionally. So what the document did for Scripture studies had an impact on my life in ways that I came to appreciate later on. And at the time of the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of the document, I was asked to give some reflections on it. And so I dug into it in a way I hadn’t done before and learned a little bit about its pre-history and the like.

 

But basically what it does is give a very lofty view of what revelation is. And that’s in effect what the church fathers at the Second Vatican Council were looking for—a statement about revelation, what it means, and what its implications might be for the study of Scripture. And the document does that in a very, very elegant way, a highly rhetorical way. It’s in some ways easy to read, delightful to read, unlike some older documents. But this is true of a lot of the documents of Vatican II. They were designed to be read and to have an impact and not simply to be legalese kinds of texts. 

 

In any case, the document Dei Verbum reaffirmed something that had been in the air for some time ever since the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943 by Pius XII. And that in many ways set the tone for modern Catholic biblical scholarship and the embrace of critical study of Scripture as part of the theological program that’s been characteristic of Catholic scholarship for the last 75 years. 

 

That was a major shift because prior to that time, in the first part of the 20th century, there was a much more conservative approach to biblical studies that characterized a lot of the Catholic world, in part as a result of a papal encyclical, Providentissimus Deus in 1898, by Leo XIII. That was a kind of reaction to a lot of the critical scholarship that had come to be important, especially in European biblical circles in the 19th century.

 

Actually that document and all of these documents, the three major documents of the 19th and 20th centuries that the Catholic Church has produced on the study of Scripture, all in some ways make a similar set of points, but do so with important nuances. And it starts out with Providentissimus Deus saying that there’s a long tradition of scholarly engagement with Scripture in the Catholic world. Yet we need to note that of all the scholarship that Leo XIII was looking at was mainly philological scholarship and translation work and not historical critical study. 

 

And on the other side, there’s an affirmation that God is somehow speaking through this literature; it’s the divine voice that we’re hearing. And there’s an important emphasis on the theological significance of this literature that’s emphasized time and again. So that the church has been engaged in some sort of serious study of Scripture and that Scripture has theological significance, are continuing points that are scored by all of these papal documents.

 

But the nuance is what’s important. And the nuances of Leo XIII were that some of the scholarship that was underway in the 19th century was not serving the Church well, and calling into question the truth of Scripture in all sorts of ways was problematic and needed to be rejected and fought against. And sure enough, some of the institutions that were put in place in the early 20th century, including the Pontifical Biblical Commission, did that—they kind of resisted critical scholarship on issues like the historical accuracy of the creation story. Was the world created in seven days? Well, the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the early part of the 20th century said ‘yeah…’—they didn’t go into it very deeply, but that’s what they affirmed. So there was a swing toward the right, if you will, in emphasizing objective truth as what happens in revelation and objective truth stated in simple terms, is what you get in Scripture, and that’s what has to be affirmed. 

 

Okay. Is that going to work in the long run? No. And by the time Pius XII wrote his Divino Afflante Spiritu—and the good pope was influenced, I think, by his confessor, who was, I believe, a Jesuit and had been involved in scriptural study. In any case, Pius XII comes along and says, we’re celebrating Providentissimus Deus, celebrating the fact that it has affirmed the Church’s engagement with Scripture, affirmed the objective truth of Scripture, and now we have to engage in that study in a way that incorporates historical critical methods, and attention to the literary forms of Scripture, etc. So Pius XII’s encyclical opened the doors for Catholic scholars to engage in critical scholarship as it was being practiced generally. 

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And that led to some very interesting developments. People like Ray Brown, Joe Fitzmyer, and others went off to secular institutions. Those two went to Johns Hopkins University with William Foxwell Albright, who was a leading light there. And they learned the critical methods of biblical study and engaged them and produced enormously influential scholarship for the Catholic Church. 

 

So that was happening in the 50s and 60s as a result of Pius XII’s encyclical. So the Vatican Council comes along, called upon by John XXIII to engage in aggiornamento—bringing the church up to date, opening it up to the contemporary world and engaging the contemporary world in all sorts of new and meaningful ways. And it did that. It made an enormous impact on Catholic life, no doubt about it. But one of the things that it was called upon to do and what the several previous councils had done, was to say something about revelation. And given the history of the previous fifty, seventy-five years, it was appropriate to do so. 

 

So, the way things worked in the Second Vatican Council was that there were committees that were assigned to prepare preliminary documents for approval by the fathers of the Council. And there was a committee that proposed a document on divine revelation, which reflected the developments that occurred in the church after Providentissimus Deus, and the sort of swing toward a more fundamentalist approach toward—or a more highly traditionalist approach—toward biblical interpretation. And they produced their document and it was delivered to the fathers of the Council in the first sessions and was voted down by something like 1200–50… don’t hold me to those exact numbers. But it was a huge response; and the council fathers said: ‘No—this is not what we’re engaged in, what we’ve been doing, and it’s not the way we want to go into the future.’ So they sent it back to committee.

 

The Pope was very careful to recognize the divisions in the council. And he appointed, I think it was Cardinal Ottaviani to be one of the chairs of the committee. I forget who the other chair was, but it was a much more liberal, modernist kind of figure.[1] And they relied on staff; it’s not the cardinal-bishops who write these things, it’s the theologians who were working for them. And one of the key theologians who was working on all of this was a guy named Joseph Ratzinger, who had been educated in German universities. At that time, 1962, he was the theological adviser to the Cardinal Bishop of Cologne, I think it was.[2] He was not cardinal then, just Father Ratzinger, and was influenced by German theologians of the mid 20th century, especially Karl Rahner.

 

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And there were some other theologians who were important for some other members of the working committee that put this document together. Jean Daniélou was one of them. Those two were probably the most well-known theologians who were rethinking things—fundamental questions like: What does revelation mean? And both Rahner and Daniélou had notions that revelation is not a matter of a catalog of propositional truths to which one gives assent; revelation is the establishment of a relationship between the divine and the human. It’s a disclosure of God’s reality to humankind. These are the notions that were in the air; those are the notions that then motivate and form the core of the affirmation Dei Verbum was making about revelation. So instead of the draft document’s insistence that there’s a series of propositional truths to which one must give assent, and that’s what the validity of Scripture is all about, no, it’s all about the kind of relationship that’s established between God and humankind. Now, as I said before, all of these documents say something about the truth that has been stated by their predecessors. 

 

And so Dei Verbum will also say that what’s happening in Scripture is God speaking. That’s been said before by both of the other documents, and (it says) that what God speaks and says is always true. But can that be somehow corrected or can one be critical of what one sees and reads in Scripture, if it’s God who’s speaking? The earlier forms of balancing these statements found it difficult to do that. 

 

What you find in Dei Verbum and what you find in what happens after it is a recognition that human beings are being involved, in a very significant way, in the way in which God speaks. And one has to take into account the full reality of that human voice. I think that’s what comes through in Dei Verbum. It’s one of the principles of interpretation—that, yes, God is speaking and God in doing so is revealing God’s self and establishing a relationship with humankind through this scriptural word. And yes, what God speaks in that voice is in some ways infallible, but He’s using human voices to do so.

 

Human voices are what we know about, and they speak in all sorts of funny ways. And Dei Verbum in some ways recognizes that and says, yes, one has to take into account the literary forms, the standard approaches to language, all sorts of things that are there on the table. As soon as you start reading, you recognize that’s not the way we speak, not the way we think. Can that be objectively true? Well, in one sense, perhaps, yes. But in another sense, no. And so it opens up the possibility of making critical judgments about what one is reading in Scripture. And it also, because of its fluid notion of revelation, recognizes that revelation itself, changes, grows and develops over time. And that’s certainly something we can see in the way in which Scripture has been read and interpreted.

 

So Dei Verbum, as I finally came to appreciate many years after its composition, makes a very important statement about fundamental Catholic beliefs about Scripture, and recognizes the complexity of engaging Scripture for all of the reasons that we do, including that theological reason of understanding what God is doing in revealing God’s self.

 

JS: Do you have more to say about your memory of Vatican II, this document, how you came across it, and that process that you said originally you weren’t following very closely but had a big impact on you, maybe in hindsight? Do you have more to say about your personal relationship, what it has meant for you?

 

HA: So my own engagement with Dei Verbum, as I suggested, came in two ways: one is sort of on the ground, actually studying Scripture—and I’ll just say a few autobiographical words about that. I started really in college; I was a classics major reading Latin and Greek and was intrigued by the opening of scriptural studies that seemed to be going on and thought I might be interested in pursuing that rather than studying Plato or something similar. So I did a senior project in college on Mileto of Sardis, directed by a guy named George MacCrae—a Jesuit who was on the faculty of Boston College where I was an undergraduate. And that convinced me that, yes, it was really kind of interesting to get involved in this world. I didn’t do so directly, I had the opportunity to go and study more classics at Cambridge, which I did for a couple of years, and then came back to Harvard, where I did the Ph.D. and where George MacCrae wound up being on the faculty. So I continued a relationship with him. He was originally at Weston School of Theology, which was then in Cambridge and had a relationship with Harvard, and then he joined the Harvard faculty and ended his life there as Dean of Harvard Divinity School. So, I was in regular touch despite the fact that I was at Harvard, which is not a Catholic institution, with a Catholic biblical scholar who I think knew and understood more than I did about some of the things in the Catholic tradition that I became familiar with later on.

 

But my own research initially was not on topics that had much to do with the theological dimensions of biblical studies. I studied Hellenistic Judaism and Josephus, the Jewish historian at the end of the first century, and then Nag Hammadi texts—the Coptic Gnostic literature from ancient Egypt that was discovered in 1945. And so those are the things that occupied me during that time, and George MacCrae also was someone who was very heavily involved in that Nag Hammadi material.

 

So I did not think an awful lot about some of the theological implications or the way in which the Church has been engaged in wrestling with these questions during the course of the 20th century until I started to teach in the seminary, which was not a Catholic seminary but a Methodist seminary. And interestingly enough, I had various reactions to my presence at Southern Methodist University Perkins School of Theology. And one of them was, ‘Well, you’re a Catholic—have you ever read the Bible?’ Oh, they were joking, of course, but there was an element of truth behind their joke. 

 

And I began to think more seriously about the theological dimensions of what I was teaching as these people who were going to be Methodist ministers would come to me and say, ‘Well, all this is interesting about form criticism, Dr. Attridge, but will it preach?’

 

And so I had to think a little more seriously about about the practical theological implications of what I was up to and would have conversations Catholic friends about some of these things and came to those conversations very much from a historical-critical perspective rather than a theological perspective. And then at one point I spent a year in Rome at the Pontifical Biblical Institute when, at the invitation of my mentors from Harvard, I was given the opportunity to write a commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. So that got me very heavily involved in interpretation of a specific New Testament text with a lot of theological dimensions to it, and I had to do so in an environment where people took their Catholicism very seriously. And so then I began to be a little more aware of some of the controversies that had wracked the church during the early part of the 20th century and came to appreciate what Vatican II had done, had reaffirmed about the kind of scholarship that I was then engaged in.

 

So all of that was in the background then of the 50th anniversary, when I was asked to say something about Dei Verbum. So I dug in a little bit more and found out something about the pre-history of it, and that’s when I wrote about the role of Joseph Ratzinger, and constructing the text that we now have. So that’s the history of it.

 

JS: I’m thinking of this widespread stereotype that you said—‘Do Catholics read the Bible?’—as something I often hear, but there’s at least a kernel of truth to it. What was your experience of the biblical texts like before this opening up and this move from classics, and the move to biblical scholarship? What were your interactions like with the Bible in this time of change?

 

HA: My interactions would be typical, I suppose, of many Catholic kids. The interaction with the Bible was mainly what you heard at Mass, and as an altar boy, okay, I probably heard more than others did. And I also constantly heard a text that came to haunt me in the old Latin Mass: In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum and etcetera, repeated day after day. Well, the Prologue of the Gospel of John gets embedded in you, right? But that’s indicative of the way in which Catholics were encountering the Bible overall in those days. That is, primarily through what was read at Mass and what occasionally would be preached upon. All of these sermons were not necessarily biblically based in those days. In fact, usually not. But at least the Scripture was read.

 

There was a Bible in my home, but it was not something that we regularly read. Then in my Jesuit education in high school and college there was a little bit more encounter with Scripture, but through the lens of an Ignatian spirituality and the way in which one read oneself into Scripture. So it was a kind of pietistic approach to Scripture rather than any kind of critical approach, and focused on key narrative things rather than on some of the more complicated texts of various sorts.

 

JS: To just pick up on one part of your story that you were telling, that of being in different teaching and academic environments doing biblical scholarship—is Dei Verbum just a text for Catholics? Does it have something to offer in ecumenical dialog? But then also you alluded to even the challenges of being a Catholic biblical scholar in a Catholic space. I guess those are two separate questions… One is that of working ecumenically—has that impacted your work? But then also, working in explicitly Catholic spaces—are there opportunities and challenges for your biblical scholarship?

 

HA: Let me try to address both of those questions: the ecumenical part and the Catholic, the theological part of things. Ecumenism can be understood even more broadly than one might initially; it’s not simply our separated Christian brethren, but also our Jewish brothers and sisters who are reading some of these same texts. And if there’s one thing that runs through the reading of some of these major Catholic documents, it is: So what about those passages that are very difficult, and especially those passages that have something to do with Jews? How do we deal with them? Well, the Second Vatican Council also addressed that question—not in Dei Verbum, but in Nostra Aetate—and it strongly condemned any kind of antisemitic reading. It therefore challenged a simple reading of something like the Gospel of John and its portrait of “the Jews,” or of the Matthean text that has the Jewish crowds in Jerusalem saying, “his blood be upon us and our children” (Matt 27:25) that has often been used in a highly antisemitic way.

 

So this raises another one of the nuance questions about Scripture, and these come to the fore when you’re engaged in a broadly ecumenical study. That’s also true of questions about the role of women in Scripture, an issue introduced into the conversation if you’re engaged in conversation with people who are from traditions where women play a much larger role than they do in the Catholic Church. What about those scriptural texts that are problematic from that on that topic? So, yes, ecumenical engagement with Scripture, broadly conceived, pushes you to address some serious questions about elements of our biblical texts that are problematic. 

 

There are a couple of ways in which I’ve worked on those sorts of things. There was one course I regularly taught at Yale Divinity School, an ecumenical environment, that was for advanced Master of Divinity students. That is, people had to have taken basic critical scriptural texts, and most of them, since they were master of Divinity students, were engaged in pastoral preparation; they were going to be ministers of some sort or another. The course was ‘Living with Difficult Texts,’ and the way I operated the seminar was as follows. I asked people in the first session to name for me what they thought were five difficult texts. I didn’t explain what difficult meant, and so had a whole range of difficulties thrown onto the table, including the two that I’ve just mentioned: attitudes toward Jews, attitudes toward women, attitudes toward gays and lesbians, etc. There were any number of things that some people threw on the table: ‘Oh, I just don’t understand the parables of Jesus’ or something like that.

 

But in any case, engaging in a very serious way with what the issues are that people across an ecumenical spectrum see in scriptural texts has certainly been an important part of what I’ve tried to do when studying Scripture. And then to conclude that little story, what I then had people do was to imagine how they would address questions about a particular verse. I then went and decided what the problems were that we were going to discuss that year, and each week there’d be a new scenario and a particular verse or set of verses on the table that they would have to address. The result was what they had learned about addressing those critical issues they shared with one another, and I think learned from that sharing about some important hermeneutical dimensions of biblical reading.

 

So yes, ecumenical study of Scripture has certainly been an important part of my engagement with things. And it’s a way of addressing some serious questions, some of which also bleed over into the question of:

‘What about Catholics and the theological appropriation of Scripture?’ I was for many years on the faculty of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame and that too was in some ways an ecumenical environment. It’s primarily a Catholic environment, and the range of theological commitments and engagements is pretty broad. So you have some people who are more onto the critical end and some people more onto the pietistic end of things or more philosophical in approach to religious issues, and so there would be critical questions thrown on the table. And yes, you always learn from conversations when you’re engaged with people who come from a different perspective, and so that happened. 

 

But also I was in an environment where I had to teach Scripture to undergraduates being formed in some sort of Catholic way and I did so in two major kinds of courses. One was the big lecture course where you’d talk about the Bible and the development of church doctrine, everything from Adam and Eve for the Council of Chalcedon all in one semester, right?

 

And so what do you do in that kind of course? Well, you can give some fundamental principles, some overarching insights, but you can’t get to that level of wrestling with individual texts the way I did later on in these courses at Yale Divinity School. But nonetheless, some of those principles are important to inculcate. One of the things that I used to try to get people to see and do in reading the Old Testament was to see the diversity of voices that were already there and the way in which there’s already a kind of critical perspective developing on affirmations that are embedded in the text. 

 

So you have something like the Book of Job that’s calling into critical questioning the kind of affirmation about God’s relationship to humankind that you get in the Pentateuch. It’s saying God is not simply out to punish the wicked and reward the good—it’s much more complicated than that, and it remains a mystery. So the fact that you have this critical dialog already going on within Scripture is a way of affirming, I think, one of the key principles that you get in Dei Verbum. That is, that revelation is an ongoing process and it’s not simply the display of a set of propositional truths to which one gives assent. So that was an insight that I tried to get people to see in studying Scripture. 

 

There was another course that I did at Notre Dame. Again, in this we were talking about how to approach Scripture in a Catholic environment. This was a freshman seminar, so 10–15 students from all over the student body, different kinds of majors and interests, and I taught it on the theme of creation and what I did was to begin by having people read creation myths or stories from different cultures and traditions, after which we read Genesis. And everybody would sit there and nod and say, ‘Yeah, this is an awful lot like the creation stories that we get in the Popol Vuh.’ So there were myths all over the place about how things got underway, and Genesis looks an awful lot like that. 

 

Alright, so that’s week two or week three. Then, what did Christians and Jews think about this myth of creation that they had? Well, a lot of them read it, as did the Jewish philosopher Philo in the first century, through a Platonic lens. And that in some ways is not hard to do because Plato, the Greek philosopher, has a creation myth of his own in the Timaeus, where the demiurge, the craftsman, puts things together by looking at the forms, the ideal shape of things, and embedding them in unruly matter. Plato describes that as a likely story, his version of a myth, and it’s a way of explaining some of his philosophical principles. 

 

So that, however, was the dominant lens through which the story of creation was read for over a thousand years in the Jewish and Christian world. And you have all sorts of patristic readers and early medieval readers who were affirming that. Until—all of a sudden in the High Middle Ages—Aristotle comes onto the scene. Aristotle, delivered to Parisian scholars through the agency of Arab translators who rendered it into Latin. Thomas Aquinas encounters Aristotle, and what did Aristotle say about creation? Nope, there wasn’t one. The world always was. So if Aristotle is the key to unlocking truth, how are you going to reconcile that with a creation story that is just myth and has to be dismissed as such?

 

Well, how did Aquinas do it? Aquinas did it by looking at certain principles of reading texts that he gets out of Aristotle. And he finally says that what’s going on in this creation story is not about a process; it’s not about a literal event of creation, but it’s about a set of relationships. It’s about a set of principles. And what creation is all about is an affirmation that everything that is, that we are currently aware of, has no reason to be. It is totally contingent. But it is. So how does it come to be? There must be something underlying it, says Aquinas. And what he’s doing is taking Aristotelian categories to reinterpret what creation is all about.

 

We’re getting back to our freshman at Notre Dame: ‘Aha—almost 1,000 years ago someone saw a way of reconciling science as he understood it and religion by creatively appropriating the categories of one and expanding them in a new way.’ And then what we did in the rest of that course was to look at debates to this very day about science and religion, but taking a cue from what Thomas Aquinas was able to do with Aristotle, showing that you have to be, again getting back to Dei Verbum, you have to be open to the development of what revelation is all about. And so, yes, engaging with Catholics about Scripture and about revelation sometimes can be a complicated thing, but appealing to elements within the tradition can lead to important insights.

 

JA: So I think that’s an excellent explanation that covers a lot of grounds of what I think of as being important to Dei Verbum. I think maybe of readers today going back to read the text might have, with developments that have happened within Catholic teaching since Dei Verbum, might read it again taking for granted a lot of the big ideas about how God relates to humans through Scripture and through other methods of revelation, not just Scripture. They might read it as outdated in some ways and not addressing some issues and maybe the idea of the presentation of the Old Testament in potentially a supersessionist lens. I think I hear you giving as a response that of recognizing the diversity, like you said, of all Scripture. But also, as you say, looking to other texts within the Second Vatican Council itself for understandings of what the Council was saying about ecumenical relationships in Christian-Jewish relations. I have heard people take issue with Dei Verbum for the teaching on the Magisterium and the idea that the Magisterium has the authentic interpretation of Scripture. I feel like that language in particular maybe rubs people the wrong way. Do you have thoughts on that or do you think that this language is explainable to Catholics or has been explained in in documents since?

 

HA: Yes, probably not. Or not to everybody’s satisfaction. Yes, in all those papal encyclicals that I mentioned early on, that is, in Providentissimus Deus and Divino Afflante Spiritu and also in Dei Verbum, there’s an insistence that the Church has a role. The first couple of chapters of Dei Verbum spend a lot of time on revelation, tradition and church authority and try to say something nuanced about all of those, and it says at the same time that all three are somehow essential to understanding what Scripture is all about.

 

I guess my own take on the third element of that triad, the importance of the Church, is not to see it as way of controlling the details of historical critical or any kind of other critical appropriation of Scripture, but reminding people that what Scripture is there for, and what it ultimately does as Scripture, is to serve as a revelation of the reality of God and God’s desires for humankind. That’s the way the whole text opens, that Scripture serves as a foundation of belief that engenders hope that leads to love. It’s a wonderful little rhetorical flourish. And so I think what that document does is what the Church does, I think, appropriately, in encountering biblical scholarship: to insist that what we’re engaged in to begin with in this whole process is a religious engagement that has our fundamental being as its reality.

 

That’s not something that a historical critic or a literary critic is always going to be interested in. And so the Church, I think, and the church hierarchy, will always play a useful role in reminding everybody else that that’s why we get engaged in this business in the first place. So that’s how I would defend the proposition that the church has an essential role. I wouldn’t want cardinals interfering in my reading of the literary qualities of the Gospel of John or the semantic plays that go on the Epistle to the Hebrews or the historical configuration of the Fourth Gospel or whatever. Those are those are technical questions that I think are in the hands of biblical scholars and thus need to remain so.

 

JS: But as it pertains to then applying that in a pastoral setting or in preaching or for the life of the Church, that’s up to them.

 

HA: Right.

 

JS: I love the examples that you give from pedagogy in the classroom. It seems to me that the process of how Dei Verbum developed, as well as in the content of the document itself, seems to preempt this idea of bishop and theologian working together, religious and layperson coming together in prayer and reading and interpreting Scripture. Coming back to this idea of the Magisterium and the teaching authority, it’s a reminder that this is always a communal process—there are different interpretations and it’s about dialog. Do you think it’s a fair assessment to say that this document kind of preempts synodality as we see it today?

 

HA: I think the ideal of synodality and the process of engaging in a broad dialog over critical matters in the life of the church is maybe implicit in what we saw as the process for generating Dei Verbum, but it’s not there explicitly. And as I’ve described it, the process of generating Dei Verbum was not atypical of what was going on in the generation of some of the other documents of Vatican II. That is, there was a fairly substantial engagement with key theologians across a theological spectrum in producing those documents. But there wasn’t the engagement of the laity, the way in which it’s happened in the synods of the last several years. I think the opening of the windows of the Vatican in Vatican II prepared the way for the synodality of Francis and probably Leo XIV—we’ll see. But it’s an extension of that openness.

 

JS: In 2023, Pope Francis called for the preparation of this current jubilee year now for people to go back and read the constitution of Dei Verbum to prepare and to pray and to get ready for the pilgrimage of this year. He called for Catholics to go back to Dei Verbum to reappropriate it ever anew. If someone were to take up Pope Francis’ call to come back and read Dei Verbum, what would you say to them?

 

HA: I’d be interested, if someone is going to read Dei Verbum, what they take away from it and what they think it hasn’t addressed. There are issues that are not explicitly addressed, and we’ve mentioned a couple of them going along here and there are more that can be put on the table. But if revelation is an ongoing process and it’s not yet totally complete, then what are the cutting edges of revelation at this stage of the game? Matters of human sexuality might be among them; these are not specifically addressed at all in the documents are Vatican II. They’re very hot on the table these days, and some of them deeply divide the Catholic world, both in this country and abroad, much more deeply in some other parts of the world. I’m in regular touch with a theologian in Nigeria and review some of his work. And some of it I find very interesting in engaging and some of what I find very challenging. In any case, there are key critical issues that are unresolved, and that will always be the case. And we need to find ways of engaging in appropriate conversation about those issues, as the process of revelation continues.

 

JA: Do you have anything else you want to say about Dei Verbum?

 

HA: I think you’ve covered the main points. The one thing that I would note—I just reread it quickly before our conversation here today—is how much the Gospel of John plays an important role in the redefinition of what revelation is all about. I found that kind of inspiring since I’m working a lot of the Gospel of John.

 

JS: Do you think that reflects something about John’s unique nature?

 

HA: Yes, I think it captures an important element of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John shows the process of revelation at work because it’s an attempt to take the stories of Jesus you get in Synoptics and other such places and says, ‘there’s a deeper meaning to these stories that these other authors haven’t quite captured, and what this meaning is all about is God revealing God’s self—let me tell you about it, and let me engage you in it!’ That’s what the gospel is trying to do. And so seeing that recognized in Dei Verbum was rather encouraging to me.

 

JS: From some of your work I’ve read on the Gospel of John, you have, as I’ve understood it, pointed to John uniquely among the canonical gospels, as this almost apophatic direction. There’s something about it that is paradoxical—this word becoming flesh—that can’t be captured, to which I agree. I think it speaks to this ongoing revelation, it’s almost an opposite approach to the neo-scholastic.

 

HA: Very much so.

 

JS: Leading up to Dei Verbum, this approach of ‘we can understand all that there is to understand about God’—I think John would disagree with that.

 

HA: Yes, it tries to engage people in the process of understanding God’s self-revelation by showing that you don’t understand it!

 

JS: Well, thank you so much, Harry, for joining me today to talk about Dei Verbum.

 

HA: You’re welcome.