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Attributed to John Martin (1789–1854), Lot Fleeing Sodom, watercolor, 5.4 x 7.0 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
Dei Verbum and the Ethical Critique of Sacred Scripture
Nathan Mastnjak
At the heart of Dei Verbum stands an expansive doctrine of revelation and emphasis on the human dimension of Scriptural inspiration. The document, however, leaves an important question unaddressed: to what extent does Dei Verbum's theology of revelation and inspiration allow for the ethical critique of Scripture? The question relentlessly confronts readers of both testaments who regularly encounter issues of slavery, the treatment of and attitudes towards women, the genocide of the Canaanites, and many other similarly ethically troubling subjects. Does Dei Verbum's insistence that the human authors “made use of their powers and abilities” (DV 11) give readers permission to critique these elements of Scripture as ethically deficient? Or does the assertion of God’s own authorship and the text’s inerrancy preclude that possibility (also DV 11)? Though Dei Verbum does not answer these questions directly, the trajectory it sets suggests that the ethical critique of Scripture is consistent with its view of inspiration and may in fact be necessary for Catholic theological interpretation.
Central to Dei Verbum's doctrine of inspiration is the articulation of a mystery. In continuity with previous tradition, Dei Verbum identifies God as the author of the Scriptures but with equal clarity asserts that the human authors are also “true authors” who “made use of their powers and abilities” (DV 11). What Dei Verbum leaves out is significant. The Council of Trent described inspiration as accomplished by “the dictation of the Holy Spirit,” “Spiritu Sanctu dictante.” The phrase reappears verbatim in Vatican I and in Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus. While seeking continuity with the tradition, Dei Verbum's avoidance of the language of dictation shows the council’s concern to articulate with new clarity the essential humanity of Scripture whose authors are both God and humans. In light of this, the incarnational analogy articulated in Dei Verbum 13 is not just a rhetorical flourish, but is rather the core theological truth underlying Dei Verbum’'s doctrine of inspiration: “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.”
The contrast between “author” and “true authors” is potentially significant. As Denis Farkasfalvy argues, this distinction between humans, who are true authors, and God, who is the “inspirer and author” (DV 16), implies that the two authors of Scripture operate on different levels of causality. Though undeveloped, Dei Verbum’s distinctions may be positing a move away from viewing God as the literary author, that is, the author responsible for the words and literary forms.
Describing only the human authors as “true authors” plausibly implies that the human authors are the authors responsible, through their own powers and abilities, for the literary content and form of the text. In other words, the human authors write; God, through them, reveals.
Dei Verbum’s norms for Scriptural interpretation emerge logically from its doctrine of inspiration. In order to understand what the divine author means, interpreters must investigate the Scriptures in their full humanity with regard to the literary forms employed by the sacred authors as well as the historical and cultural contexts that they inhabited (DV 12). The incarnational nature of inspiration, in other words, entails the historicization of the sacred texts; they are products of times, cultures, and places, and the truths that God speaks through them are conditioned by those contexts. Dei Verbum thus insists that interpreters “should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended” using historical methodologies.
Though Dei Verbum understands the texts of Scripture to be conditioned by their historical circumstances, their divine authorship means they are not entirely limited by those circumstances. For this reason, interpretation cannot stop with historical investigation but must extend also to “what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.” That is, the human authors might mean one thing, but the divine author might mean something else or something more. Dei Verbum insists on the interpretative importance of both horizons, but it does not entirely merge them.
Does this allow a reading that would understand the human author to promote something unethical, as for instance the owning of slaves and genocidal conquest (see e.g. Exod 21:2–11, 20–11; Deut 7:1–2)? The possibility of this kind of judgment is complicated by Dei Verbum’s insistence that “everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit” (DV 11). This language at the very least precludes a view that would locate inspiration in the inspired text while denying it to the human authors. It is nevertheless noteworthy that when Dei Verbum goes on to assert inerrancy, it applies it to the books rather than the authors: “it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (DV 11). Though both the authors and texts of Scripture are inspired, Dei Verbum predicates inerrancy only of the books.
It is in this distinction that Dei Verbum maintains between author and book that an ethical critique of Scripture might find its footing. If the books are without error, it stands to reason that they are without fault also in their moral and ethical teaching. But how are we to determine the moral teaching of a book of Scripture? As we have already seen, Dei Verbum requires an interpretive approach that extends the horizon of the human author:
But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith (DV 12).
According to this paragraph, understanding the meanings of the human authors requires literary interpretation and historical contextualization. The further Scriptural meaning, however, must be derived in light of Scripture’s unity (i.e. a canonical meaning), the living tradition, and the analogy of faith, none of which can be ascribed to the human author of the text since these categories are by definition beyond the horizons of the human author. This further meaning is a function of divine authorship. Such meaning could be understood as inhering in the book itself, but only insofar as the text is interpreted according to these canons. To put it in other terms, Dei Verbum simultaneously insists that the historical circumstances and intentions of the human author be studied and that the historical meanings discovered in that process are insufficient to fully understand the meaning of the book. The full meaning cannot be reduced to the author’s historical intention, but rather comes to expression in a synthesis that is realized in light of the rest of the canon, tradition, and the analogy of faith. The books, properly understood in these terms, teach “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (DV 11).
The way the council fathers understood the relationship between historically contextualized authors and canonically interpretated books appears in its description of the Old Testament. On the one hand, Dei Verbum makes it clear that the Old Testament is “the true word of God … written under divine inspiration” (DV 14). At the same time, it is “incomplete and temporary” (DV 15). The authors are inspired, and yet express things that are imperfect. Despite this, “the books of the Old Testament with all their parts, caught up into the proclamation of the Gospel, acquire and show forth their full meaning in the New Testament (see Matt. 5:17; Luke 24:27; Rom. 16:25-26; 2 Cor. 14:16) and in turn shed light on it and explain it” (DV 16). The full meaning of Scripture therefore does not reside in individual books considered in isolation—much less the intention of human authors—but in the whole, interpreted according to the canon, tradition, and the analogy of faith.
This understanding could allow an interpretation that identifies certain passages as ethically deficient while maintaining that the books as a whole, rightly understood, bear witness to a consistent Christian ethics. In other words, if the human author’s historical meaning is important but insufficient, perhaps the insufficiency extends to the ethical content of the text. This is in fact the approach taken by Joseph Ratzinger, who was a peritus at the council. He makes the following points in regard to the laws of the Covenant Code (Exod 20:22–23:19):
These juridicial norms emerged from practice and they form a practically oriented legal corpus that serves to build up a realistic social order, corresponding to the concrete possibilities of a society in a particular historical and cultural situation. In this respect, the body of law in question is also historically conditioned and entirely open to criticism, often—at least from our ethical perspective—actually in need of it. Even within the context of the Old Testament legislation, it undergoes further development. Newer prescriptions contradict older ones regarding the same object. These casuistic provisions, while situated in the fundamental context of faith in the God of Revelation who spoke on Sinai, are nonetheless not directly divine law, but are developed from the underlying deposit of divine law, and are therefore subject to further development and correction.
Here Ratzinger addresses the social laws of the Covenant Code, including its infamous slave laws and unapologetically recognizes their ethical problems. Translating this approach into the language of Dei Verbum, the human authors here should be understood to have made use of their “powers and abilities” and as “true authors” produced an ethically deficient code of laws that was nevertheless grounded in an underlying deposit of divine law. The individual laws are imperfect and require ethical critique. But the whole sacred book understood canonically nevertheless teaches “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (DV 11).
This affirmation of ethical critique by no less a figure than Pope Benedict XVI is a significant development and must be considered a distinct fruit of Dei Verbum’s doctrine. But the question must still be pressed: can the same principle be applied to the New Testament? It is worth noticing that Dei Verbum extends the qualifications “incomplete and temporary” only to the Old Testament and that it considers the authors of the New Testament to have had the benefit of looking back on the fullness of revelation in Christ. And yet the New Testament is not free from morally troubling passages including the command for slaves to submit themselves to their owners (Eph 6:5; 1 Pet 2:18), misogynistic views of women (e.g. 1 Tim 2:11–15), and vitriolic language against the Jews (e.g. John 8:44). Interpreters will debate whether these and other passages are in fact ethically problematic, but the question to be raised is whether an ethical critique of them can operate within the bounds of Catholic hermeneutics laid out by Dei Verbum, or whether ethical critique places the interpreter de facto outside those bounds.
It can be frankly admitted that Dei Verbum is not as clear on this question as we might like. Nevertheless, it is significant that the hermeneutical principles laid out in DV 12 make no distinction between the Old and New Testaments. In both cases, the authors must be read in light of the historical contexts and circumstances of composition. And yet in both cases, the interpretation of the book is only complete when the interpreter moves beyond the horizon of the human author’s meanings and contexts and relates them to the whole of Scripture, tradition, and the analogy of faith. Since the texts of the NT also require interpretation along these broader horizons, the texts themselves, like the OT texts, must be described as “incomplete and temporary.” To redeploy Ratzinger’s language, this makes the texts of the NT also “entirely open to criticism, often—at least from our ethical perspective—actually in need of it.” Interpreters sensing the need for that kind of criticism can and should find room within Dei Verbum’s teachings for doing so.
Nathan Mastnjak
Nathan Mastnjak is an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Notre Dame. His work focuses on the composition, theology, and materiality of biblical prophetic literature. He is the author of Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library (2023) and Deuteronomy and the Emergence of Textual Authority in Jeremiah (2016).
34. Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, revised, enlarged, and, in collaboration with Helmut Hoping, edited by Peter Hünermann for the original bilingual edition, edited by Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash for the English edition, 43rd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), DS 2568 (hereafter DS) DS 1501.
35. DS 3006, 3292.
36. Denis Farkaslfavy, A Theology of the Christian Bible: Revelation—Inspiration—Canon (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 112
37. Farkaslfavy, A Theology of the Christian Bible, 61.
38. Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (Doubleday, 2007), 123-24.