A Kaleidoscope of Biblical Articles

Antony Campbell

• Publisher: ATF Press Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781925679380
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Dei Verbum: Literary Forms and Vatican II—an Old Testament Perspective

(Original: God’s Word and the Church’s Council)

The invitation offered by the fiftieth anniversary of a Council document is a marvellous opportunity to look at the nature of an ecumenical council (such as Vatican II) and the nature of its documents. The nature of neither can be taken for granted. In days gone by, Council documents culminated in a series of propositions, each ending with ‘anathema sit’,—let any person holding this view be considered anathema, an outsider. Vatican II did not do this. At the earlier Councils, it was probably felt that the anathema would hold its force for all time. The passage of time would make clear that with the changing circumstances of Church and culture that was not the case. ‘Anathema sit’ might be best understood as ‘we’re really serious about this.’ It is the responsibility of historians to determine how long that seriousness lasted. It is also the responsibility of historians to determine whether Council documents were a base from which the future might be developed or a culminating crown summing up the preceding developments or a stopgap while a process of theological reflection continued. Which was Dei Verbum and how does it look fifty years later?

John O’Malley is emphatic that the literary form of the documents from Vatican II is radically different from what preceded it, going back to the beginning with the Council of Nicaea.¹ Most of the documents of Vatican II sought to address the world; those of its predecessors addressed the Church. The code for the former would be ‘pastoral’; for the latter, ‘legislative and judicial’. The two must therefore be used quite differently. As a rule, in the ‘legislative and judicial’, the Council laid down the law for what was to be believed and condemned the errors opposed to that belief. The ‘pastoral’ quality of the Vatican II documents means that quite opposed positions can be found within the same document because quite opposed positions could be found within the same Church.

Dei Verbum provides as good an example of this as any. Early in the piece (1962), dissatisfaction with the initial schema for discussion was registered at sixty percent. In 1965, after four years of stubborn resistance from a group favouring tradition over scripture as the primary vehicle of revelation, the final vote was almost unanimous, 2344 in favour and six against. One side was not massively outvoted; the stubborn minority had not seen the light and caved in under pressure; instead, the text was such that both sides could vote for it. As one participant put it: ‘We must not simply substitute the declaration of a different school of thought, but rather produce something acceptable to all’.² Congar clearly understood ‘that Paul VI wanted to secure a large consensus of the Fathers and that that presupposed compromise.’³ These Vatican II documents must be read very differently from their predecessors.

It is standard practice for Latin documents emerging from the Vatican to be known by their opening words. In this case, Dei Verbum (Word of God) can be misleading. The document is a Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, as it is correctly entitled. It is not exclusively concerned with the inspired word of scripture, as the title Dei Verbum might suggest. Its concern goes beyond the biblical word to touch on the many ways in which God is revealed to God’s creatures, some dealt with in detail and some in a passing reference.

Close inspection makes clear that Dei Verbum intends to affirm an overall image of the past and encourage a sure march into the future. In its own words: ‘Following in the footsteps of the councils of Trent and of First Vatican, this present Council wishes to set forth the authentic teaching about divine revelation and about how it is handed on’ (DV, #1).⁴ The document Dei Filius from Vatican I leaves open the possibility of access to God by reason. Vatican II affirms it bluntly: ‘God . . . can be known with certainty from created reality, by the light of human reason’ (DV, #6). On the complex question of scripture and tradition, Trent’s ‘scripture and tradition’ [et] is dealt with far more extensively by Vatican II (DV, ##7–10].

It is desirable that space should be given to the issue of scripture and tradition. It was a major sticking point at the time of the Reformation; Luther’s ‘sola Scriptura’ [scripture alone] was a rallying cry of significance. A proposal at Vatican I affirmed that revealed truth was to be found partly in scripture and partly in tradition (partim . . . partim). The Council rejected this formulation, because the evidence for it was not there; instead it adopted the alternative more flexible, formulation ‘scripture and tradition’ [et].⁵ I have seen a ‘penny catechism’ from the archdiocese of Sydney in the 1930s, that asked the question whether all revelation was to be found in scripture. In flat contradiction to Trent, it replied: certainly not; divine revelation was to be found partly in scripture and partly in tradition. Within the Roman Catholic Church of those days, Sydney was probably not alone in knowing what to do when it was a question of denying Protestantism or adhering to Trent. Let the Protestants lose.

That Trent’s idea was right is clear; that its formulation was unsatisfactory is evident. Given the importance of the matter, it is small wonder that Vatican II devoted considerable effort on the issue. Anyone with ecclesial experience of ecumenism will be well aware that the Roman Catholic Church’s approach to issues of divine revelation will often be different from that of other Churches. That difference can be summed up globally by the term ‘tradition’. Exegetes (aka. biblical interpreters) may struggle with words, sentences, or passages; Churches more often grapple with matters of greater weight. Of course, tradition plays a role, along with scripture, in keeping faith alive and well—and moving in the right direction.

At this point it is time for a moment to take a look at the reality of an ecumenical council. It is not a wondrous gathering of mystical truth-sayers who have the insight and intelligence to guide the Roman Catholic Church securely for the next century or two. It is a cross-section of the present-day Roman Catholic Church, with its conservative factions and its liberal factions, with its wise folk and its weirdos. The leadership will be tugged forward and backward. The future of the Church will be reflected in that tugging.

When a couple of thousand bishops, archbishops, and cardinals meet in a single place (St Peter’s) for a relatively short period of time (four sessions) for a major ecumenical Council, it is a moment of massive significance for the whole of Western Christendom. The participants in such a gathering will reflect a wide range of people—as for believers, so for bishops—from astute front ends of thoroughbreds at one extreme of the range to the rear ends of hard-working draught horses at the other. An ecumenical council is not a gathering of learned theologians; it is not a gathering of naïve believers; it is not a gathering of specialist guides to lead the faithful toward the future. Far from it. A council is a mirror of the Church it represents. Its role is to reflect on where that Church is now and where it might best be going in living to the full the good news of Jesus Christ, of God’s love for us in the ordinariness of our lives. It is a gathering of a couple of thousand leaders, reflecting a billion or so believers, including the learned and the naïve, the high-power administrators and the pastorally committed, the elite and the common-or-garden, the wise and the stupid. It is precisely the wide-ranging complexity of this variety that makes this gathering of such massive significance.

Vatican II was summoned by the much-loved Pope John XXIII. The word primarily associated with both Pope and Council was aggiornamento. Modernisation, up-dating, bringing up to date are all accurate enough as translations go but a bit facile. It is not easy to catch the force of the image. It is not a matter of throwing open the doors and windows and letting daylight into the structure. The force of the image is day rather than light. Left untouched by the word is whether doors and windows are thrown open to invite ‘day’ into the structure or to invite the contents and people within the structure to move out into the ‘day’. When revelation is under scrutiny, the issue then is whether the forces of day are to enter the structure and further burnish the understanding of revelation or whether the occupants of the structure are freed to move out into the day and inspect the revelation that is being understood out there. This may be very abstract imagistic language. What it points to is highly significant. Where is revelation to be sought? Inside the bureaucracy of the Church or outside the bureaucracy among the believing faithful? The answer ‘both’ is easy; articulating what this answer means is not easy at all. It is this ‘aggiornamento’, this openness of the church to its surrounds, that is probably the high point and lasting contribution of Vatican II.

The dogmatic constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, as its readers will gratefully acknowledge, casts its net wide, embracing whatever is of value to those who believe. So, for example, the document speaks early on of God buoying us up with the hope of salvation, with ‘His promise of redemption’ and it quotes Genesis 3:15 (DV, #3). A little later on, it insists that attention must be paid, among other things, to literary genres (DV, #12). In the reference to Genesis 3:15 as a promise of redemption and in the reference to the importance of literary genres for understanding the meaning of a text, Dei Verbum invokes two widely different approaches to the understanding of biblical text, approaches as different as the front and rear ends of a thoroughbred. For the historical-critical exegete, Genesis 3:15 has as its purpose ‘to describe the phenomenon that enmity exists not merely in a determined situation but has grown to a continual state, something like an institution’.⁶ Tradition, on the other hand, reaches back to Irenaeus (second century) for an understanding of the passage as a prophecy about Christ (seed of Mary) and the devil (seed of the serpent). Says Westermann, a relatively conservative modern exegete, ‘there are two main reasons that do not allow such an interpretation’⁷—which we will pass over here.

Irenaeus was the second bishop of Lyons, in France, and was a major figure in the writings of the early Church; he lived a couple of hundred yards down the road from where, for four years, I lived and studied theology. It is said that Irenaeus first moved the interpretation of Genesis 3:15 from Eve’s descendants and snakes to Jesus and Satan. This is a perfect example of what, since the term was coined in 1925, has been called sensus plenior. In the New Jerome Biblical Commentary (NJBC, #71.50) the sensus plenior is described as ‘the deeper meaning intended by God but not clearly intended by the human author, that is seen to exist in the words of Scripture when they are studied in the light of further revelation or of development in the understanding of revelation.’ Its discussion peaked in the work of Fr Raymond Brown, SS;⁸ interestingly, there has been almost no discussion of sensus plenior since 1970. Further comment in the NJBC, almost certainly from Ray Brown, goes on to say: ‘the fact that advocacy of the SPlen [that is, sensus plenior] had its roots in distrust of excesses in patristic typology and allegory gave SPlen exegesis a more cerebral and cautionary aura. Reasonable homogeneity with the literal sense was insisted on, and the SPlen was seldom invoked even by strong supporters.’ Two points can be underlined: (i) the sensus plenior was distinguished from the literal sense; (ii) reasonable homogeneity with the literal sense was insisted on.

There is a notion that recurs almost as a mantra in various formulations in a hugely important book on the Eucharist, In Breaking of Bread: ‘The heritage of our belief is unsatisfactory, but that does not stop it from being revered.’⁹ That applies precisely to what Dei Verbum has done in this case: it combines an unsatisfactory interpretation of Genesis 3:15 that is part of a past to be revered with an insistence a little later on the importance of attention to literary genres.¹⁰

This not an isolated example. The document, Dei Verbum, quietly insists on the reverence owed to tradition and equally quietly insists on the openness to the future owed to biblical studies.

The Council has done what it had to do and what has such massive significance. It has dressed the vine in such a way as to yield maximum fruit to the members of its Church, both learned exegetes and generalist believers. There are some, for example, who find the bridal la...