How God Speaks in Human Words
(Article 1 of 4)
This is the first in a four-part series of articles on the relationship between the human elements of the Scriptures and the divine elements. This article introduces the magisterial documents and teachings on biblical interpretation that uses historical methods and critical methods to interpret the sacred authors. The Catholic reader of the Scriptures should know how to navigate through how the human conditions of authorship was used by God to reveal Himself to humanity for the sake of salvation.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, “Let your loins be girt” (Luke 12:35). A modern reader might take this as an odd instruction about clothing. The first hearers would have pictured something else. Men in Jesus’ day wore long tunics, and a man tucked his tunic into his belt before he ran or did hard work. Jesus was telling his followers to be ready.
This small example raises a large question for Catholics. If a reader needs to know something about ancient clothing to understand one verse, what else does he need to know to read the Bible well? Some Catholics also worry that talk of “literary forms” is a polite way of saying that the Bible is less true than they were taught. The Church has answered both concerns. Because God chose to speak through human writers, a reader finds what God says by paying attention to how those writers wrote.
An Old Principle
Saint Thomas Aquinas taught in the thirteenth century that the plain meaning of a passage includes its figures of speech. “When Scripture speaks of God’s arm,” he wrote, “the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 10, ad 3). God has no body, so the verse is not asserting that God has an arm, but rather that God acts with power. Though it is a figure of speech, to the audience of the sacred author the meaning of “God’s arm” is “God’s power”, and this is still the literal sense, because it is what the writer intended by the figurative words he chose.
The Pontifical Biblical Commission later applied the same rule to Jesus’ words in Luke. It said that the literal sense of the verse is not the meaning “which flows immediately from a word-to-word translation” but “that which corresponds to the metaphorical use of these terms (‘Be ready for action’)” (Interpretation of the Bible in the Church II.B.1). The literal sense, then, is what the author meant. A reader reaches it by knowing how the author’s kind of language works.
Pius XII and the Human Writer
Fastforwarding to the Twentieth Century, modern teaching on biblical interpretation begins with Pope Pius XII’s letter Divino Afflante Spiritu, published in 1943. Pius XII started from the doctrine of inspiration and reasoned forwards from there. The sacred writer, he said, is “the living and reasonable instrument of the Holy Spirit” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 33). God used the writers’ minds, gifts, and personalities, so each book carries the marks of the man who wrote it.
From this Pius XII drew “the supreme rule” for every reader of Scripture: “the supreme rule of interpretation is to discover and define what the writer intended to express” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 34). He admitted that this is harder with ancient books than with modern ones. The meaning of an ancient Semitic writer is not always obvious, and grammar alone cannot uncover it. The reader must, in Pope Pius’ own words, “go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East” to learn “what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35).
Pius XII also addressed the very real fear that this kind of scholarship weakens the claims of the Bible and undermines the Faith. He compared the words of Scripture to Christ himself. “As the substantial Word of God became like to men in all things, ‘except sin,’” he wrote, “so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in every respect, except error” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 37). Christ is fully human and without sin, and Scripture is fully human speech and without error. The comparison rules out two mistakes: treating the Bible as if it were not really human writing, and treating its human features as flaws. Pius XII added that many supposed errors in the Bible turn out to be the normal ways ancient people spoke and wrote, and therefore such modes of speech should be “no more taxed with error than when they occur in the ordinary intercourse of daily life” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 38–39).
The Second Vatican Council
Twenty-two years later, the Second Vatican Council continued this line of thought in Dei Verbum, the Council’s document on divine revelation, which is a beautiful and powerful document (and is, in this author’s humble opinion, the very best document from the Council). The Council held two truths together. God is the author of the books of Scripture, and the men he chose to write them were also “true authors” who “made use of their powers and abilities” (Dei Verbum 11). This is divinity and humanity working not in competition, but in full union with one another to accomplish God’s purposes for His people.
The Council drew this conclusion about how this divine-human effort works. Whatever the human authors assert, the Holy Spirit asserts. For that reason Scripture teaches “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (Dei Verbum 11). This conclusion gives every biblical reader one central question to ask every single time the sacred page is opened: What is the given author asserting?
A poet does not assert things in the same way that a historian does, and a parable does not assert things in the same way that a law does. This is why the task of discernment of forms and genres, grammar and idiomatic expressions, are so very important. So the Council Fathers went on:
To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. (Dei Verbum 12)
The Council grounded this teaching in the mystery of the Incarnation. Quoting Saint John Chrysostom, it spoke of the “condescension” of God’s wisdom, by which God adapted his language to human weakness. It then repeated Pius XII’s comparison in its own words: 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” (13). To study the human side of Scripture is to take seriously the way God chose to reach his people, which is the same pattern he followed when the Word became flesh.
The Catechism
The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts this teaching into language for pastors and catechists teaching the faith to ordinary believers. It tells readers to take into account “the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current” (Catechism 110). Far from undermining the Faith, exploring these conditions and forms open up the Scriptures to people in a rich and deep way.
The Catechism also draws on a second principle, which is “no less important.” Scripture must also be read in the light of the Holy Spirit who inspired it (111). That means reading each passage within the unity of the whole Bible (what some scholars will call “Canonical Criticism”), within the living Tradition of the Church, and according to the “analogy of faith,” which the Catechism defines as “the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation” (112–114).
Attention to literary form is one part of discerning what the sacred author intended, and the author’s intention is itself only one half of serious reading and study for the Catholic. The Church never separates the divine author from the human author. God has no problem working through and with humanity to accomplish His goals. This is the very stuff of Providence. Yet, when it comes to the Scriptures, there is an impulse to reject the all-too-human side of the Bible, imagining it descended from the heavens untouched by human hands.
The Catechism also shows the two halves working together. It says that “the account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man” (Catechism 390). It says that “Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work’” (337). In both cases the literary form is figurative and the truth is historical and real. They do not cancel each other out. The literary form tells the reader how the truth is being told, and it is the task of the attentive reader to discern these forms and modes of speech to understand what the text is actually saying to us.
Two Studies from the Biblical Commission
The Pontifical Biblical Commission has published two longer studies on these questions, one in 1993 and one in 2014. They are useful, but they carry less authority than a papal letter, a council, or the Catechism. Cardinal Ratzinger’s preface to the 1993 document says plainly that the Commission “is not an organ of the teaching office.” Their value lies in their method and their examples.
The 1993 study draws a helpful line between the literal sense and what it calls the “literalist” reading of fundamentalism. A literalist reading takes every word at face value, as if “Let your loins be girt” were a rule about belts. The study warns of the very thing that plays out on YouTube debates between Christians and skeptics and among Christians, which is that fundamentalism “pays no attention to the literary forms and to the human ways of thinking to be found in the biblical texts” (Interpretation of the Bible in the Church I.F). The implicit assumption or explicit dogma of fundamentalist interpreters is that the inspiration of Scripture was direct divine dictation and that mode of dictation is what prevents error from entering the text. This of course annihilates the humanity from the text, reducing the sacred author to just a stenographer.
It also makes a point that some readers find unsettling: “when it is a question of a story, the literal sense does not necessarily imply belief that the facts recounted actually took place, for a story need not belong to the genre of history but be instead a work of imaginative fiction” (II.B.1). Jesus’ parables are the clearest example. No one thinks that the Good Samaritan’s Jericho road must have had a real robbery on it for the parable to be true. Whether any other story in the Bible is history or a teaching story is a question to settle by looking at the evidence in the text, and the third article in this series takes up that question directly.
(I gave a talk where I was highlighting how the Prodigal Son was a “made up story” of Jesus’ and that there were no two brothers and the father. This is an important point because it drives home how our Lord created this story to illustrate the radical mercy of the Father and the refusal of the Pharisees to receive home repentant sinners. This talk was to an ordinary parish crowd for a 3-day mission. Three folks came up to me upset that I would dare say Jesus made it up. They misunderstood the literary form of a parable and thought it history.)
The 2014 study, The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, offers a comparison anyone can test. It says that “the truth contained in a novel is different from that of a physics manual,” and it notes that the Bible’s poems, prophecies, stories, parables, and hymns each have “its own way of presenting the truth” (ITSS 104). A reader who takes a psalm as a news report makes the same kind of mistake as one who takes a novel as a textbook.
One Rule with Two Sides
Taken together, these documents give Catholics one rule with two dimensions. The first side is the human origin: the meaning of a passage is what its human author meant, expressed through the literary genres and forms he chose to employ. The sciences of history, anthropology, and archeology can greatly aid our understanding of socio-cultural of that time. The second side is the divine origin: every passage and book belongs to one inspired Bible, read within the Church, whose parts shed light on one another.
This teaching should reassure Catholics who fear that reading the Bible as literature means reading it as fiction. In the Church’s language, “literary form” is a tool for finding out what the Bible truly says. A reader who learns the forms will not believe less of Scripture. He will understand more of what he already believes, because he will hear each passage the way its author meant it to be heard. The next article looks at what those forms are and how they work in the stories and poems of the Bible.