I see: there is a doublet in some texts of Luke, in which not only Elizabeth but also the angel at 1:28 says "Blessed art thou amongstwomen", making 1:28 coincide perfectly with the opening lines of the Hail Mary. This is in the main text in the KJV but relegated to the footnotes in RSV and NRSV.
Do you find it in 1:28 in the main text in any modern translations? Did whoever composed the Hail Mary have that text of Luke? As you point out "Together, their words [Gabriel's and Elizabeth's] make up the first half of the Hail Mary," since in 1:42 Elizabeth's words are followed by "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." So the Hail Mary does not give grounds for attributing"Blessed are thou amongst women" to the angel as well, but would rather argue against it.
"We should have no hesitation in repeating those words, because they are God’s own." No, they are St Luke's, or possibly another author who added the infancy narrative to an earlier version of the gospel that began with the baptism, as some scholars think.
However, the shepherds, who are the first Christian missionaries, are described in 2:17-18 in the same language used to describe the apostolic mission in Acts of the Apostles, and this is a sign of Lucan authorship. Maybe Luke added the infancy narrative in a second edition of Luke-Acts or at the final stage in composing the immense double work. Since the infancy narrative is the most beautiful section of the New Testament, we may imagine him surpassing himself in a final inspired effort, inspired by the figure of Mary.
Greetings, Father. Thank you for a spirited reply!
The NKJV follows the KJV, which retains the verse to which you refer. The doublet was certainly familiar to St Bede, from whose commentary on Luke I found this idea: "Mary is blessed by Elisabeth with the same words as before by Gabriel, to show that she was to be reverenced both by men and angels."
I do not know who composed the Hail Mary, but its first half features in the Liturgy of St James, so that part at least is hardly a Western liturgical or para-liturgical innovation.
Whether the words are spoken by Elizabeth alone or by the angel as well, St Luke records that they were spoken when she was filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God, therefore I submit again that they are God's words. Were they pronounced also by the angel, a literal messenger of God, then that is doubly assured. But unless we are to abandon all doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scripture, then the very fact that those words are in the Gospel is enough to make them trustworthy. Lucan authorship by no means impedes their veracity. How much do we know of what Luke know and to whom he spoke? Are we really on firm enough ground to suppose that anything he wrote about Our Lady must be pious and imaginative fabrication, or might it have been verified by people who knew her rather better than we can, at a remove of 2000 years?
Forgive me for being so forthright, but I tire of taking the scalpel to the Scriptures as though we moderns might know better than their authors or than the witness of the Church which, also inspired by the Holy Spirit, has declared them to be true. Historical-critical methodology is good for keeping bread on the table of scholars who need to keep publishing works to refute their immediate predecessors, but far too much is left to surmise, based on limited data. I prefer to trust the ancients and the Church. If we trust neither the inspiration of Church nor Scripture, we are not left with very much, and open the faith to total revisionism.
I'm not suggesting for a minute that we switch off our brains: only that we bear in mind their limitations. Nonetheless, I quite agree with you that the infancy narrative is beautiful, and that is partly why I am moved to think it true. Have a blessed Christmas! Maranatha.
Believe it or not you provided an extra paragraph to my sermon this morning, quoted by name! Your info about the Liturgy of St James (4th cent.) and Bede (8th -- though I shocked the Bede scholar Jennifer O'Reilly by once casually referring to Bede as 6th century -- things tend to dim for me between 450 and 1250). This online report seems to misdate the first half (perhaps only counting occurrences in Latin): https://wedaretosay.com/where-did-the-hail-mary-prayer-come-from/#:~:text=These%20usually%20involved%20asking%20for,Pius%20V.
Needless to say I do not approve of your rejection of biblical hermeneutics, which leads straight to dangerous fundamentalism. Here is how I treated, rather unkindly, a Jesuit writer on the subject of inspiration: Gerald O'Connell, SJ. Inspiration: Towards a Christian Interpretation of Biblical Inspiration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 222. ISBN 978–0–19–882418–3 (Reviewed in Journal of Theological Studies 75 (2024):232-4.)
This book claims to break a silence that has prevailed for nearly half a century on the theme, though its bibliography names William J. Abraham (1998), Helmut Gabel (2011), and Timothy Ward (2002); Abraham also published The Divine Authority of Holy Scripture (Oxford University Press) in 1981 and Gabel published Inspirationsverhältnis im Wandel (Mainz: Grünewald) in 1991. These are serious scholars of the topic, as is Denis Farkasfalvy, A Theology of the Christian Bible (Catholic University of America Press, 2018, who addresses questions left unresolved in Karl Rahner’s influential Über die Schrift-Inspiration (Freiburg: Herder, 1958).
O’Collins takes a loose approach to the topic, positively courting a metabasis eis allo genos which is bound to confirm Richard Hanson’s diagnosis that “we still cling to the word... but we can give no meaning to it which does not alter it into an entirely different concept unconnected with the traditional one” (The Attractiveness of God [SPCK,, 1973], p. 21). That a text has been “inspiring” become evidence that it is “inspired”: “The opening chapters of Genesis, read within the context of community worship or beyond, have inspired innumerable insights into the human condition and our relationship with God” (p. 21). Sirach is another text inspired by previous literature including possible Stoic sources and the poet Theognis, and in turn inspiring: “cited or echoed thirty-four times in the New Testament” (p. 42). Amalgamation of the common artistic sense of inspiration with the technical theological claim runs rampant as we are told how the Bible has inspired liturgy, hymns, preaching (Ephrem, Chrysostom, Augustine, Leo the Great, Antony of Padua, Luther, Fox, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Wesley, Newman), prayer, theology, and conciliar texts, drama, art, music--Palestrina's “forty versions of the Magnificat’ and “the Masses composed by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms [sic], Byrd, Haydn, Mozart,” etc. (p. 70)--and even Bob Dylan, Bono, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. We are told twice that it inspired the poets Hopkins, Eliot, and Kevin Hart (pp. 83, 128). All that might prove that the Bible is an inspired literary text, rivaling Shakespeare or Milton. But we are happy to note that these great writers are sometimes uninspired, whereas all of Scripture is claimed to be divinely inspired.
It proceeds on the premise that divine inspiration “provides the grounds for” the authority of Scripture (p. vii). “The Bible was written under a special impulse of the Holy Spirit and, therefore, is true” (p. 131). This is the kind of high claim made in classic theologies of Inspiration, but its defence requires massive scholastic tracts, not a light and digressive work like this one.
O'Collins begins not with the Catholic tradition, in which discussion of divine and human authorship of Scripture matched the theology of Grace in complexity, as chronicled in James T. Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 (Cambridge University Press, 1969, but with Karl Barth (pp. 1-13). Barth marks a realistic distance between the biblical text and the Word of God: “it bears witness to God’s past revelation, and it is God’s past revelation in the form of attestation” (quoted, p. 8). Barth tends to tie the authority of Scripture to the Church’s effective encounter with it, when it “becomes revelation to us" and "grasps at us" (ib.), and indeed was not in principle opposed to the idea of removing from the Canon texts that failed to function in this way. “The fallible and faulty human word is used as such by God," and "has to be received and heard in spite of its human fallibility” (quoted, p. 11). One wonders if Barth’s subtle account of how Scripture works did not in fact open the door to the disappearance of the topic of Inspiration.
Writing in 1989 Raymond Collins “differs from Barth: inspiration is an intrinsic property or character of the Bible” (p. 13). If so, O’Collins urges, we must look at the biblical texts themselves to see inspiration in action. Well, if you define inspiration now one way, now another, you can stretch it to cover a lot of Scripture, but there will always be parts for which no claim of demonstrable inspiration , human or divine, is plausible. Should we claim inspiration for the Apocrypha or for the Septuagint, or for scribal errors and uncertain texts? Whereas inerrancy is falsifiable, inspiration becomes so vague a notion that nothing can discredit it. Newman, we were told at the start of the Scripture course (in 1969) thought that obiter dicta such as the wagging of Tobit's dog's tail were not covered by inspiration, but Leo XIII rejected this. Rahner provided relief from stressful dogma in 1956 with a social theory of inspiration (which is also one of the reasons for the disappearance of discussions of the topic). “The wonderful mighty deed of the God who bears witness to himself in history (in the prophets and in the Son) is the field within which Scripture arises and out of which--if it is Scripture--it arises in a predefined mode" (Über die Schrift-Inspiration [Freiburg: Herder, 1958], p. 66). Joseph Ratzinger echoes this: “The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject — the pilgrim people of God— and lives within this same subject” (Jesus of Nazareth [London: Bloomsbury, 2007],. p. xx).
O’Collins moves within this general entente, but attempts to reach out from it to a restoration of the older dogma, and at the same time muddies its coordinates by bringing in all sorts of associations that have little to do with the doctrine. That a text has been inspiring become evidence that it is inspired:
The “intense immediacy” of the call of the prophets (p. 35) might offer a more telling foothold for the claim of divine inspiration. The initial inspiration of Isaiah ben Amoz was developed further by “many anonymous authors in making subsequent additions, and related groups in editing the text” (p. 40) over centuries to produce the Book of Isaiah. But intra-biblical scenes of inspiration can hardly stretch to cover every jot and tittle. O'Collins is obliged to shift his ground, resorting to a kind of negative theology: inspiration need not mean this, or this, or this, so that in the end it becomes a matter of blind faith. What "inspired" positively means becomes blurred and its application to the texts is a dogmatic a priori with no real phenomenological warrant.
That the New Testament was often inspired by the Old can be viewed (making an appeal to hermeneutic generosity) as illustrating divine inspiration in action. Jesus “exemplified par excellence the presence and power of prophetic inspiration. But recording the Jesus story in written texts under the impact of biblical inspiration was left to others” (p. 52).
Theological seriousness is attempted in a discussion of revelation (unveiling) in Scripture, and of tradition (as in the successive reframing of stories of Moses). Tradition is rooted in faith-encounters with the self-revealing God and is the matrix within which inspired Scripture emerges (p. 94). “Tradition is much more extensive than Scripture” (p. 100).
O'Collins offers a fairly realistic account of objections to the idea that every part of Scripture is inspired (pp. 103-7). With reference to God killing 70,000 people by sending a pestilence and to Jephthah's daughter, he remarks: “There is a sad truth in what these and other passages record under the impulse of divine inspiration” (p. 136), and the “other passages” no doubt cover the instances of divinely sanctioned herem, not otherwise mentioned. From a 2014 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, he draws the conclusion that “while saying that the Scriptures were all written under the divine inspiration, we should, nevertheless, acknowledge how not infrequently they record what comes from human beings in their cultural and religious diversity” (p. 107). Inspiration is “a ‘spiritual’ influence from God that empowers human beings to think, speak, or act in ways which go beyond their normal capacity” (p. 108).
He gives ten characteristics of inspired scriptures (pp. 110-29): 1. role of the Spirit, 2. special charism of the human authors, who are reliable in their narrations of history, 3. and sometimes literarily gifted, but inspiration covers the dull writers too, 4. as is also the case with their varying religious power. 5. Inspiration is not uniform and extends even to non-Israelite sources: "Through the foreknowledge and activity of God, what they wrote was already earmarked for its place in the Sacred Scriptures of Israel. It seems necessary to recognize some degree of divine inspiration at work in advance when the kings (and their scribes), those who addressed letters to them, an Egyptian wisdom writer, one or more Canaanites, and Theognis composed their texts, which provided source material for three canonical books of the Old Testament" (p. 115). O'Connell picks out a “quite isolated” remark in the PBC text, agreeing that “the charism of inspiration was not uniform for ‘all the authors of the biblical books.’ It was only ‘analogously the same’” (p. 117). 6. Consciousness of being inspired is not usual. 7. It may take the form of a special impulse to write in one or another genre. 8. The inspired authors worked within traditions. 9. They sometimes had a church-founding function. Echoing Rahner, O'Collins states that “the charism of inspiration was communicated primarily to the community” (p. 126). This important principle should have been enunciated more prominently and not in this random way. 10. The inspired writings inspire others in turn. The rest of the book discusses canon-formation, authorial intention, and ten very broad principles for interpreting Scripture (faithful and active hearing, the community and its creed, biblical convergence, contemporary consensus, etc.).
A firmer hold on the dominant literary characteristics of Scripture might have enabled O’Collins to see Scripture as using tried and tested rhetorical machineries for generating pious recollection of the divine and for allowing God to speak in Law and Prophecy. The machinery does not always work and sometimes works in a dangerous way. A seasoned assessment of all this is not helped by clinging to the categories of Leo XIII. The rich biblical and patristic language about inspiration is cramped when used to square the realities of history with the demands of dogmas upheld in a context of post-Cartesian epistemology. It is in spite of these dogmas, not because of them, that Scripture is sufficiently treasured and revered today in the churches and in the scholarly world.
Angels (messengers) figure in two recurrent literary contexts: annunciations of birth (in Luke 1-2 for example) and as interpreting angels (Luke 24 and Acts 1 for example) -- I believe that Luke uses them in this way, perhaps with full consciousness that they are not meant to be literally the case. The very varied angelic appearances in Mk 16, Mt 28, Jn 20 as well absolve readers of the task of reconciling contradictory details -- Scripture breathes more wonderfully when released from the straitjacket of literalism. Origen vacillates between excruciating literalism -- three sets of blind men at the entry into Jericho to reconcile the details of the Synoptics on one hand and sweeping declaration of the non-historicity of John 2, read as an allegory of the descent of the Logos and his energies into the world on the other. To say the Fathers knew better than modern scholars is untenable, not only in terms of their cosmology (long surpassed by science) but in terms of their allegoresis (so often wildly tangential to the historical realities as scholars and archeologists have painfully retrieved them) and in terms of moral perception in regard to texts used to support slavery, antisemitism, subordination of women, homophobia, etc. There are more fundamentalists on the march today than in the ancient world -- it is in many ways a specifically modern dogmatism. It was innocent of the Fathers to think the world was 4-5,000 years old. It is not innocent now. It was innocent to see blacks as the descendants of Ham, under some kind of curse. It is not innocent now. etc.
Thank you for posting your article on O'Collins, which I suppose ended in the previous comment. It is not clear to me how the claim that all holy Scripture is inspired necessarily leads to fundamentalism, nor that fundamentalism and literalism are one and the same thing. That said, having made friends with fundamentalists and literalists, I find their arguments more sympathetic than I used to. They are far from stupid or ignorant. I think it was Philo who first argued against the more stupid literalism that some of the scriptures can, on the most literal reading, only be symbolic, and that literal inconsistencies demand a degree of allegory.
Fundamentalism is indeed a modern (American) dogma, formed if I am not mistaken in response to the liberal application of Darwinian evolution to scientific analysis of society. Racialism and eugenics owe far more to the Fabian mentality than to biblical rigourism. Yes, so-called Christian nationalists can use proof-texts to justify racism and sexism. But, to invoke once again the spirit of Karl Barth, one can make like charges against those advocates of natural theology who beat the drums for early twentieth century German nationalism, von Harnack and his Religionsgeschichtlicheschule among them. These too bear much of the blame for the "demythologisation" of Japanese Buddhism which left it ultimately impotent in standing up against the onslaught of Western modernity, with results that are surely questionable.
Surely the problem is that the fundamentalist, whether of the Islamic Brotherhood, Christian nationalism, or of the myth of progress, are fighting on the same field. Arguments about the length of the days of creation or how old the world is are held on grounds which are inimical to a prayerful approach to the Scriptures. The error of historical criticism, like the error of Calvinist legalism or fundamentalist historical literalism, seems to me to be judging the whole by the part rather than the reverse.
On a more personal note, for me, the historical critical approach has served only to make the Bible less interesting. I have managed to fall back in love with the Scriptures by reading them as inspired and expecting them to inspire me. They make far more sense to me when I understand that the Word born of Mary is the same Word who speaks in both Testaments, Old and New. The canonicity of the books of the Bible varies from church to church and has been controversial, so no doubt, we cannot reduce inspiration to that which happens to lie within the covers of any one print edition. That Luke, Paul and Peter used certain texts of the Old Testament apocrypha with no obvious difference in reverence from those later considered canonical suggests, on a strictly biblical basis, the propriety of a wider view of inspiration than that which Constantine or Gutenberg effected. But the admission that the Holy Spirit has a wider remit than any accepted canon does not refute the inspiration of any of those canons.
On a less personal note, historical criticism has not served the church well evangelistically, serving to increase doubts in her teachings, and leading to developments which militate against all that has been believed "semper et unique et ab omnibus." I do not need to make a list. The results in church adherence and the spiritual health of our hierarchs, clergy and people are not encouraging. The rhetoric works both ways, but the numbers, I would say, are firmly on one side.
Not sure you can invoke Barth for those positions. He says the Bible is not the word of God but attests the word of God. He also held that the Church has authority to remove matter from the Canon. I have not found personally that the biblical scholarship makes the Bible less interesting. Teaching the Bible as literature for 25 years, and focusing usually on Genesis and St Luke, I found that the historical-critical scholars constantly renewed my vision of these great summits of biblical literature. As far as I know it is only fundamentalists who go on about the length of the seven days of Creation. People with literary culture and sensibility recognize that this seven day structure is a literary device. Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead, talked about Genesis at Cambridge a few years ago and was upbraided by the students for blithely ignoring all the scholarship since the time of Wellhausen and Gunkel. The most telling criticism would have been to say that she makes Genesis boring, and uses it as a vehicle for her own modern American thoughts instead of wrestling with the Hebraica veritas as St Jerome would have encouraged. The argument from numbers is very feeble (numbers has given us Trump and Musk)-- and the dictum of semper et ubique et ab omnibus is one that failed massively when invoked against emerging insight into the development of doctrine (see Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge 1957).
I see: there is a doublet in some texts of Luke, in which not only Elizabeth but also the angel at 1:28 says "Blessed art thou amongstwomen", making 1:28 coincide perfectly with the opening lines of the Hail Mary. This is in the main text in the KJV but relegated to the footnotes in RSV and NRSV.
Do you find it in 1:28 in the main text in any modern translations? Did whoever composed the Hail Mary have that text of Luke? As you point out "Together, their words [Gabriel's and Elizabeth's] make up the first half of the Hail Mary," since in 1:42 Elizabeth's words are followed by "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." So the Hail Mary does not give grounds for attributing"Blessed are thou amongst women" to the angel as well, but would rather argue against it.
"We should have no hesitation in repeating those words, because they are God’s own." No, they are St Luke's, or possibly another author who added the infancy narrative to an earlier version of the gospel that began with the baptism, as some scholars think.
However, the shepherds, who are the first Christian missionaries, are described in 2:17-18 in the same language used to describe the apostolic mission in Acts of the Apostles, and this is a sign of Lucan authorship. Maybe Luke added the infancy narrative in a second edition of Luke-Acts or at the final stage in composing the immense double work. Since the infancy narrative is the most beautiful section of the New Testament, we may imagine him surpassing himself in a final inspired effort, inspired by the figure of Mary.
Greetings, Father. Thank you for a spirited reply!
The NKJV follows the KJV, which retains the verse to which you refer. The doublet was certainly familiar to St Bede, from whose commentary on Luke I found this idea: "Mary is blessed by Elisabeth with the same words as before by Gabriel, to show that she was to be reverenced both by men and angels."
I do not know who composed the Hail Mary, but its first half features in the Liturgy of St James, so that part at least is hardly a Western liturgical or para-liturgical innovation.
Whether the words are spoken by Elizabeth alone or by the angel as well, St Luke records that they were spoken when she was filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God, therefore I submit again that they are God's words. Were they pronounced also by the angel, a literal messenger of God, then that is doubly assured. But unless we are to abandon all doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scripture, then the very fact that those words are in the Gospel is enough to make them trustworthy. Lucan authorship by no means impedes their veracity. How much do we know of what Luke know and to whom he spoke? Are we really on firm enough ground to suppose that anything he wrote about Our Lady must be pious and imaginative fabrication, or might it have been verified by people who knew her rather better than we can, at a remove of 2000 years?
Forgive me for being so forthright, but I tire of taking the scalpel to the Scriptures as though we moderns might know better than their authors or than the witness of the Church which, also inspired by the Holy Spirit, has declared them to be true. Historical-critical methodology is good for keeping bread on the table of scholars who need to keep publishing works to refute their immediate predecessors, but far too much is left to surmise, based on limited data. I prefer to trust the ancients and the Church. If we trust neither the inspiration of Church nor Scripture, we are not left with very much, and open the faith to total revisionism.
I'm not suggesting for a minute that we switch off our brains: only that we bear in mind their limitations. Nonetheless, I quite agree with you that the infancy narrative is beautiful, and that is partly why I am moved to think it true. Have a blessed Christmas! Maranatha.
Believe it or not you provided an extra paragraph to my sermon this morning, quoted by name! Your info about the Liturgy of St James (4th cent.) and Bede (8th -- though I shocked the Bede scholar Jennifer O'Reilly by once casually referring to Bede as 6th century -- things tend to dim for me between 450 and 1250). This online report seems to misdate the first half (perhaps only counting occurrences in Latin): https://wedaretosay.com/where-did-the-hail-mary-prayer-come-from/#:~:text=These%20usually%20involved%20asking%20for,Pius%20V.
Needless to say I do not approve of your rejection of biblical hermeneutics, which leads straight to dangerous fundamentalism. Here is how I treated, rather unkindly, a Jesuit writer on the subject of inspiration: Gerald O'Connell, SJ. Inspiration: Towards a Christian Interpretation of Biblical Inspiration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 222. ISBN 978–0–19–882418–3 (Reviewed in Journal of Theological Studies 75 (2024):232-4.)
This book claims to break a silence that has prevailed for nearly half a century on the theme, though its bibliography names William J. Abraham (1998), Helmut Gabel (2011), and Timothy Ward (2002); Abraham also published The Divine Authority of Holy Scripture (Oxford University Press) in 1981 and Gabel published Inspirationsverhältnis im Wandel (Mainz: Grünewald) in 1991. These are serious scholars of the topic, as is Denis Farkasfalvy, A Theology of the Christian Bible (Catholic University of America Press, 2018, who addresses questions left unresolved in Karl Rahner’s influential Über die Schrift-Inspiration (Freiburg: Herder, 1958).
O’Collins takes a loose approach to the topic, positively courting a metabasis eis allo genos which is bound to confirm Richard Hanson’s diagnosis that “we still cling to the word... but we can give no meaning to it which does not alter it into an entirely different concept unconnected with the traditional one” (The Attractiveness of God [SPCK,, 1973], p. 21). That a text has been “inspiring” become evidence that it is “inspired”: “The opening chapters of Genesis, read within the context of community worship or beyond, have inspired innumerable insights into the human condition and our relationship with God” (p. 21). Sirach is another text inspired by previous literature including possible Stoic sources and the poet Theognis, and in turn inspiring: “cited or echoed thirty-four times in the New Testament” (p. 42). Amalgamation of the common artistic sense of inspiration with the technical theological claim runs rampant as we are told how the Bible has inspired liturgy, hymns, preaching (Ephrem, Chrysostom, Augustine, Leo the Great, Antony of Padua, Luther, Fox, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Wesley, Newman), prayer, theology, and conciliar texts, drama, art, music--Palestrina's “forty versions of the Magnificat’ and “the Masses composed by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms [sic], Byrd, Haydn, Mozart,” etc. (p. 70)--and even Bob Dylan, Bono, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. We are told twice that it inspired the poets Hopkins, Eliot, and Kevin Hart (pp. 83, 128). All that might prove that the Bible is an inspired literary text, rivaling Shakespeare or Milton. But we are happy to note that these great writers are sometimes uninspired, whereas all of Scripture is claimed to be divinely inspired.
It proceeds on the premise that divine inspiration “provides the grounds for” the authority of Scripture (p. vii). “The Bible was written under a special impulse of the Holy Spirit and, therefore, is true” (p. 131). This is the kind of high claim made in classic theologies of Inspiration, but its defence requires massive scholastic tracts, not a light and digressive work like this one.
O'Collins begins not with the Catholic tradition, in which discussion of divine and human authorship of Scripture matched the theology of Grace in complexity, as chronicled in James T. Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 (Cambridge University Press, 1969, but with Karl Barth (pp. 1-13). Barth marks a realistic distance between the biblical text and the Word of God: “it bears witness to God’s past revelation, and it is God’s past revelation in the form of attestation” (quoted, p. 8). Barth tends to tie the authority of Scripture to the Church’s effective encounter with it, when it “becomes revelation to us" and "grasps at us" (ib.), and indeed was not in principle opposed to the idea of removing from the Canon texts that failed to function in this way. “The fallible and faulty human word is used as such by God," and "has to be received and heard in spite of its human fallibility” (quoted, p. 11). One wonders if Barth’s subtle account of how Scripture works did not in fact open the door to the disappearance of the topic of Inspiration.
Writing in 1989 Raymond Collins “differs from Barth: inspiration is an intrinsic property or character of the Bible” (p. 13). If so, O’Collins urges, we must look at the biblical texts themselves to see inspiration in action. Well, if you define inspiration now one way, now another, you can stretch it to cover a lot of Scripture, but there will always be parts for which no claim of demonstrable inspiration , human or divine, is plausible. Should we claim inspiration for the Apocrypha or for the Septuagint, or for scribal errors and uncertain texts? Whereas inerrancy is falsifiable, inspiration becomes so vague a notion that nothing can discredit it. Newman, we were told at the start of the Scripture course (in 1969) thought that obiter dicta such as the wagging of Tobit's dog's tail were not covered by inspiration, but Leo XIII rejected this. Rahner provided relief from stressful dogma in 1956 with a social theory of inspiration (which is also one of the reasons for the disappearance of discussions of the topic). “The wonderful mighty deed of the God who bears witness to himself in history (in the prophets and in the Son) is the field within which Scripture arises and out of which--if it is Scripture--it arises in a predefined mode" (Über die Schrift-Inspiration [Freiburg: Herder, 1958], p. 66). Joseph Ratzinger echoes this: “The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject — the pilgrim people of God— and lives within this same subject” (Jesus of Nazareth [London: Bloomsbury, 2007],. p. xx).
O’Collins moves within this general entente, but attempts to reach out from it to a restoration of the older dogma, and at the same time muddies its coordinates by bringing in all sorts of associations that have little to do with the doctrine. That a text has been inspiring become evidence that it is inspired:
The “intense immediacy” of the call of the prophets (p. 35) might offer a more telling foothold for the claim of divine inspiration. The initial inspiration of Isaiah ben Amoz was developed further by “many anonymous authors in making subsequent additions, and related groups in editing the text” (p. 40) over centuries to produce the Book of Isaiah. But intra-biblical scenes of inspiration can hardly stretch to cover every jot and tittle. O'Collins is obliged to shift his ground, resorting to a kind of negative theology: inspiration need not mean this, or this, or this, so that in the end it becomes a matter of blind faith. What "inspired" positively means becomes blurred and its application to the texts is a dogmatic a priori with no real phenomenological warrant.
That the New Testament was often inspired by the Old can be viewed (making an appeal to hermeneutic generosity) as illustrating divine inspiration in action. Jesus “exemplified par excellence the presence and power of prophetic inspiration. But recording the Jesus story in written texts under the impact of biblical inspiration was left to others” (p. 52).
Theological seriousness is attempted in a discussion of revelation (unveiling) in Scripture, and of tradition (as in the successive reframing of stories of Moses). Tradition is rooted in faith-encounters with the self-revealing God and is the matrix within which inspired Scripture emerges (p. 94). “Tradition is much more extensive than Scripture” (p. 100).
Continued:
O'Collins offers a fairly realistic account of objections to the idea that every part of Scripture is inspired (pp. 103-7). With reference to God killing 70,000 people by sending a pestilence and to Jephthah's daughter, he remarks: “There is a sad truth in what these and other passages record under the impulse of divine inspiration” (p. 136), and the “other passages” no doubt cover the instances of divinely sanctioned herem, not otherwise mentioned. From a 2014 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, he draws the conclusion that “while saying that the Scriptures were all written under the divine inspiration, we should, nevertheless, acknowledge how not infrequently they record what comes from human beings in their cultural and religious diversity” (p. 107). Inspiration is “a ‘spiritual’ influence from God that empowers human beings to think, speak, or act in ways which go beyond their normal capacity” (p. 108).
He gives ten characteristics of inspired scriptures (pp. 110-29): 1. role of the Spirit, 2. special charism of the human authors, who are reliable in their narrations of history, 3. and sometimes literarily gifted, but inspiration covers the dull writers too, 4. as is also the case with their varying religious power. 5. Inspiration is not uniform and extends even to non-Israelite sources: "Through the foreknowledge and activity of God, what they wrote was already earmarked for its place in the Sacred Scriptures of Israel. It seems necessary to recognize some degree of divine inspiration at work in advance when the kings (and their scribes), those who addressed letters to them, an Egyptian wisdom writer, one or more Canaanites, and Theognis composed their texts, which provided source material for three canonical books of the Old Testament" (p. 115). O'Connell picks out a “quite isolated” remark in the PBC text, agreeing that “the charism of inspiration was not uniform for ‘all the authors of the biblical books.’ It was only ‘analogously the same’” (p. 117). 6. Consciousness of being inspired is not usual. 7. It may take the form of a special impulse to write in one or another genre. 8. The inspired authors worked within traditions. 9. They sometimes had a church-founding function. Echoing Rahner, O'Collins states that “the charism of inspiration was communicated primarily to the community” (p. 126). This important principle should have been enunciated more prominently and not in this random way. 10. The inspired writings inspire others in turn. The rest of the book discusses canon-formation, authorial intention, and ten very broad principles for interpreting Scripture (faithful and active hearing, the community and its creed, biblical convergence, contemporary consensus, etc.).
A firmer hold on the dominant literary characteristics of Scripture might have enabled O’Collins to see Scripture as using tried and tested rhetorical machineries for generating pious recollection of the divine and for allowing God to speak in Law and Prophecy. The machinery does not always work and sometimes works in a dangerous way. A seasoned assessment of all this is not helped by clinging to the categories of Leo XIII. The rich biblical and patristic language about inspiration is cramped when used to square the realities of history with the demands of dogmas upheld in a context of post-Cartesian epistemology. It is in spite of these dogmas, not because of them, that Scripture is sufficiently treasured and revered today in the churches and in the scholarly world.
.
Angels (messengers) figure in two recurrent literary contexts: annunciations of birth (in Luke 1-2 for example) and as interpreting angels (Luke 24 and Acts 1 for example) -- I believe that Luke uses them in this way, perhaps with full consciousness that they are not meant to be literally the case. The very varied angelic appearances in Mk 16, Mt 28, Jn 20 as well absolve readers of the task of reconciling contradictory details -- Scripture breathes more wonderfully when released from the straitjacket of literalism. Origen vacillates between excruciating literalism -- three sets of blind men at the entry into Jericho to reconcile the details of the Synoptics on one hand and sweeping declaration of the non-historicity of John 2, read as an allegory of the descent of the Logos and his energies into the world on the other. To say the Fathers knew better than modern scholars is untenable, not only in terms of their cosmology (long surpassed by science) but in terms of their allegoresis (so often wildly tangential to the historical realities as scholars and archeologists have painfully retrieved them) and in terms of moral perception in regard to texts used to support slavery, antisemitism, subordination of women, homophobia, etc. There are more fundamentalists on the march today than in the ancient world -- it is in many ways a specifically modern dogmatism. It was innocent of the Fathers to think the world was 4-5,000 years old. It is not innocent now. It was innocent to see blacks as the descendants of Ham, under some kind of curse. It is not innocent now. etc.
Thank you for posting your article on O'Collins, which I suppose ended in the previous comment. It is not clear to me how the claim that all holy Scripture is inspired necessarily leads to fundamentalism, nor that fundamentalism and literalism are one and the same thing. That said, having made friends with fundamentalists and literalists, I find their arguments more sympathetic than I used to. They are far from stupid or ignorant. I think it was Philo who first argued against the more stupid literalism that some of the scriptures can, on the most literal reading, only be symbolic, and that literal inconsistencies demand a degree of allegory.
Fundamentalism is indeed a modern (American) dogma, formed if I am not mistaken in response to the liberal application of Darwinian evolution to scientific analysis of society. Racialism and eugenics owe far more to the Fabian mentality than to biblical rigourism. Yes, so-called Christian nationalists can use proof-texts to justify racism and sexism. But, to invoke once again the spirit of Karl Barth, one can make like charges against those advocates of natural theology who beat the drums for early twentieth century German nationalism, von Harnack and his Religionsgeschichtlicheschule among them. These too bear much of the blame for the "demythologisation" of Japanese Buddhism which left it ultimately impotent in standing up against the onslaught of Western modernity, with results that are surely questionable.
Surely the problem is that the fundamentalist, whether of the Islamic Brotherhood, Christian nationalism, or of the myth of progress, are fighting on the same field. Arguments about the length of the days of creation or how old the world is are held on grounds which are inimical to a prayerful approach to the Scriptures. The error of historical criticism, like the error of Calvinist legalism or fundamentalist historical literalism, seems to me to be judging the whole by the part rather than the reverse.
On a more personal note, for me, the historical critical approach has served only to make the Bible less interesting. I have managed to fall back in love with the Scriptures by reading them as inspired and expecting them to inspire me. They make far more sense to me when I understand that the Word born of Mary is the same Word who speaks in both Testaments, Old and New. The canonicity of the books of the Bible varies from church to church and has been controversial, so no doubt, we cannot reduce inspiration to that which happens to lie within the covers of any one print edition. That Luke, Paul and Peter used certain texts of the Old Testament apocrypha with no obvious difference in reverence from those later considered canonical suggests, on a strictly biblical basis, the propriety of a wider view of inspiration than that which Constantine or Gutenberg effected. But the admission that the Holy Spirit has a wider remit than any accepted canon does not refute the inspiration of any of those canons.
On a less personal note, historical criticism has not served the church well evangelistically, serving to increase doubts in her teachings, and leading to developments which militate against all that has been believed "semper et unique et ab omnibus." I do not need to make a list. The results in church adherence and the spiritual health of our hierarchs, clergy and people are not encouraging. The rhetoric works both ways, but the numbers, I would say, are firmly on one side.
Not sure you can invoke Barth for those positions. He says the Bible is not the word of God but attests the word of God. He also held that the Church has authority to remove matter from the Canon. I have not found personally that the biblical scholarship makes the Bible less interesting. Teaching the Bible as literature for 25 years, and focusing usually on Genesis and St Luke, I found that the historical-critical scholars constantly renewed my vision of these great summits of biblical literature. As far as I know it is only fundamentalists who go on about the length of the seven days of Creation. People with literary culture and sensibility recognize that this seven day structure is a literary device. Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead, talked about Genesis at Cambridge a few years ago and was upbraided by the students for blithely ignoring all the scholarship since the time of Wellhausen and Gunkel. The most telling criticism would have been to say that she makes Genesis boring, and uses it as a vehicle for her own modern American thoughts instead of wrestling with the Hebraica veritas as St Jerome would have encouraged. The argument from numbers is very feeble (numbers has given us Trump and Musk)-- and the dictum of semper et ubique et ab omnibus is one that failed massively when invoked against emerging insight into the development of doctrine (see Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge 1957).