Abstract
In the preface to his latest book, Gerald O’Collins expresses the hope that the work might ‘go some distance towards meeting [the] need’ for ‘an adequate treatise on biblical inspiration’ identified by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in 1980. In the several preceding pages, O’Collins quickly surveys the status quaestionis, as he perceives it, purportedly confirming his claim that, apart from a few standouts, biblical scholars and theologians alike have largely neglected the topic for the better part of the 20th century, and through the opening decades of the 21st. In addition to Barth (for the Protestants) and Raymond Collins (for the Catholics), he picks out Karl Rahner, Bruce Vawter (both Catholic), and Paul Achtemeier (Protestant) as apparently lonely voices prior to 1999. From 2000 onward, however, O’Collins finds only one serviceable and two more anemic exceptions, all Protestant.
Rather unfortunately for much of what follows, O’Collins maintains here a false premise, one no less egregious than it is puzzling. The fact is that Denis Farkasfalvy, O. Cist, published in 2010 a substantial monograph (250 pages) entirely devoted to the theological question of inspiration. This work, entitled Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture, treats the question thoroughly—one might even go so far as to say exhaustively, from a dogmatic perspective; but even granted that qualifier, the author, a longtime member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, exhibits a formidable command of past and current biblical scholarship as well as intimate familiarity with both patristic and medieval thinking on the subject—not to mention the Church’s official, developing position, beginning with the Council of Trent, passing through Vatican I, Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus and Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu, and concluding with an extended, trenchant assessment of Dei Verbum. This work and its sequel, A Theology of the Christian Bible: Revelation, Inspiration, Canon, published in 2018, constitute what amounts to the crowning achievement of a life’s work for Farkasfalvy, one which he traces back to encouraging personal exchanges in the mid-1960s with Henri de Lubac, Pierre Benoit, and Luis Alonso Schökel. O’Collins’s complete omission of reference within his argument (including footnotes) to Farkasfalvy’s work in general, and to Inspiration and Interpretation in particular, is hard to make sense of, especially as that book does make O’Collins’s bibliography. Given the exceptional quality of Farkasfalvy’s thought and of his scholarship, O’Collins’s omission seems to this reader to call for an explanation. Be that as it may. . ..
In light of Farkasfalvy’s work, then, along with another much earlier landmark work, also ignored by O’Collins (but again, included in his bibliography), The Inspired Word (1965) by Luis Alonso Schökel, what does the work under consideration contribute to the enormously complex theological problem of biblical inspiration?
O’Collins’s approach could be called, broadly, phenomenological; hence, his approbation of the so-called Wirkungsgeschichte, which he translates as ‘effective history or history of effects’ (p. 22). According to O’Collins this term ‘. . . should remind us that the original inspiration of the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit is followed up by the Spirit’s “inspiring” impact on readers and hearers. The powerful inspiration of the Holy Spirit affects both the writers and the readers (and hearers) of the Scriptures, or at least those readers open to the Spirit’s presence and power’ (p. 22). This is a key passage for O’Collins’s project as a whole. Over the next 20 pages (the remainder of chapter two), he proceeds to flesh out through numerous examples a fundamental two-sided epistemological stance, which may be framed without undue paraphrase: ‘. . . we know little or nothing about . . . but we know a lot about . . .’ (p. 22; cf. pp. 24, 25, 26, 31, 33, 42). In his final and apparently crowning example, O’Collins asserts that Ben Sira ‘is aware of his own authority as a teacher of wisdom. But he does not seem aware of being directed in his writing by the Holy Spirit. He writes “inspiring” Scripture and will be cited or echoed thirty-four times in the New Testament. But Ben Sira does not claim that he communicates the “inspired Word of God”’ (p. 42). In short, O’Collins avers that too little has been said about the distinction between inspiration as cause and as effect (p. 196), and that while we ‘have only a limited knowledge’ about the former, we ‘have considerable information’ about the latter (p. 195).
As for Bultmann (whose essay ‘Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?’ O’Collins cites favorably on p. 164, n. 31), and before him Schleiermacher, and before him Kant, so, too, it seems for O’Collins that only the phenomena can be known reliably by the human subject, not the thing in itself, whether that thing be natural or supernatural in its essence. Thus, while insisting that ‘close attention to the Scriptures themselves and to their reception yields much more insight into inspiration and its workings than abstract theorizing about its nature’ (p. viii), O’Collins is at the same time convinced that ‘the study of the Scriptures provides only a limited amount of knowledge about the divine causality involved in their writing (and reading)’ (p. viii), whereas ‘we enjoy abundant information about the impact of the inspired Scriptures’ (p. viii, my emphasis). It is, then, the straitjacketed modernist epistemology which frustratedly generates most of O’Collins’ grist. And so he proceeds in one of his longest chapters (chapter four: ‘The Reception and Inspiring History of the Scriptures’) to catalogue a variety of empirically demonstrable effects—Christian worship, hymns, preaching, drama, prayer, theological developments, Magisterial retrieval of forgotten texts, and literature—that allegedly verify the unseen cause of inspiration: the Holy Spirit’s original and ongoing divine self-communication in and through the Word of God. Nevertheless, O’Collins’s is a curiously modified modernism, in that he seems genuinely to recognize an objective, external, authoritative truth, vested in Scripture (p. 149; cf. his fourth principle for fashioning a treatise on biblical inspiration, p. 18): whether this truth can be found comprehensively accounted for by the Church’s teaching office is by no means so clear, at least from this rendition of his thought.
Indeed, to his credit, O’Collins is trying, I think, to escape the modernist agnostic bind so formidably shored up by Rudolf Bultmann. It is instructive here to recall the pithy account of ‘agnosticism’ in Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis, par. 6. O’Collins ultimately fails to break free of this bind, just insofar as he still essentially buys the modernist epistemological framework, no matter how much he tries—in good faith—to blur it around the edges, with his ‘special impulse(s)’ (pp. 17, 109, 114, 123–24) and rhetorical hesitancy (‘it seems . . .’ is everywhere). The upshot is that while O’Collins seems to want to maintain an essentially Catholic disposition descriptively, it is hard to avoid the impression that fideism lurks in the wings, if not explicit double-truth. This is the dilemma clearly and unsympathetically articulated in Pascendi: the Christian not only believes things that cannot be demonstrated empirically, but knows them. The Church emphatically rejects the reduction of such knowledge to the realm of mere opinion. No doubt O’Collins is convinced that good science can only confirm what the Church authoritatively teaches (and rest assured, he clearly believes himself to be using the tools of historical-criticism, and other users’ findings, with sufficient self-critical caution and application to avoid the many grave dangers inherent in their operation). However, given O’Collins’s scathing treatment of the category (not quite to say the content) of dogma much earlier in his publishing career (The Case Against Dogma, New York: Paulist, 1975), his conclusions seem oddly fortuitous.
A few more points should be made, somewhat ad hoc (congruent in that mode with O’Collins’s own empiricist leanings), in service of situating O’Collins’s project in view of the status quaestionis.
O’Collins overwhelmingly, and it appears to this reader somewhat uncritically, gives writing and reading primacy over speech and hearing in his account: if my reading is accurate, this is a grave theological error, given the topic itself. O’Collins attempts to justify his choice, I think, through his hard-and-fast distinction between revelation and inspiration (as part of a spirited effort in chapter five to articulate the precise relationships among ‘Revelation, Tradition, and Inspiration’): presumably God’s ‘self-revelation’ is in some sense ‘vocal,’ and indeed, O’Collins does refer to the ‘voice’ of the Holy Spirit, as well as of the authors of Scripture and even of tradition (p. 169 especially; cf. also his invoking of Augustine’s reading of the Psalms as a threefold relation between Christ and vox, p. 29). Nevertheless, as we have already seen, this divine voice is apparently now entirely inaccessible except indirectly, through the inspired human codification of the human author’s experience of that divine speaking. Here, O’Collins’s very limited reference to liturgy seems to bespeak a degree of theological tone-deafness to the constant re-vivifying of the divine Word in worship as the primary locus of God’s perpetual inspiration of the Church. In contrast with O’Collins’s presentation, this conviction of the centrality of the liturgical action for a proper reception and understanding of the divine Word stands at the heart of the relevant works by Alonso Schökel, Denis Farkasfalvy, and Joseph Ratzinger, not to mention Sacrosanctum Concilium and, most importantly, Dei Verbum, which begins: Dei verbum religiose audiens: ‘Hearing the Word of God religiously . . ..’ To be sure, O’Collins’s privileging of the written text generates a renewed grappling with many key passages pertinent to the matter at hand, in both Testaments (see especially chapters two and three). Furthermore, his introduction of a further distinction between foundational and dependent revelation (see especially pp. 95–96 for his meanings of ‘foundational’ and ‘dependent’), somewhat analogous to his cause–effect dichotomy, has potential for further fruitful theological development, though it seems prima facie likely to run afoul of the much older, unambiguously hierarchical distinction between public and private revelation. (For O’Collins, the limitations on the authority of dependent revelation are not clear). In any case, the seeming failure to recognize the ongoing liturgical locus of divine speech as foundational for a cogent understanding of inspiration leaves his overall theological account wanting.
O’Collins gives rather short shrift to the question of whether the word ‘author’ (L. auctor) is rightly applied to God/the Holy Spirit, though his discussion appears to concur with the position of Farkasfalvy, and of Alonso Schökel before him, that the word is not to be understood in terms of strict literary authorship, but only analogously, as original ‘source’ of the numerous canonical works somehow dependently, yet freely, conceived and written by their various human authors (see pp. 15, 18; cf. Farkasfalvy Inspiration and Interpretation, esp. pp. 213, 214, but widely, including sustained engagement from p. 212 essentially to the end of the work, p. 240). In this context, O’Collins alludes even more cursorily to the significant question of verbal inspiration, which he dismisses, having incorrectly equated this notion with the doctrine of dictation (see pp. 15, 111. Contrast Farkasfalvy, who goes so far as to urge that ‘we must revisit the issue of a “verbal inspiration” which transcends both pre-critical naïveté and critical arrogance with a post-critical theological sobriety recognizing the importance of the canonical text’s accuracy and the Church’s ongoing vigilance over the scriptural text’ [p. 201]). But O’Collins’s under-treatment of these related issues is consistent with his Bultmannian (and, a fortiori, Kantian) epistemological presuppositions, and indeed with his overall anti-dogmatic and anti-metaphysical approach (contrast Farkasfalvy starkly here): in short, faced with the trendy post-VCII, post-Dei Verbum dictum, ‘God’s Word in human words,’ O’Collins seems like his Protestant counterparts to settle for humanistic analysis of the humanly linguistic (and particularly written) form of the biblical text.
On the crucial matter of the truth of the Scriptures and its relation to their inspiration, O’Collins, like Farkasfalvy and Alonso Schökel before him, insists on the one hand that Scripture really is true, and on the other, that we must resist reducing our account of this truth-value to the propositional or syllogistic. That said, in a conscientious treatment (chapter seven) which is as sensitive and nuanced as it is detailed, there is nevertheless little if anything that adds to what Alonso Schökel offered in his splendid, probing analysis of 1965, especially when combined with Farkasfalvy’s carefully distilled systematic handling in 2010. Moreover, at a few points (e.g., pp. 18, 104) O’Collins seems to endorse a position that has been definitively rejected by the Church, namely, the notion that Scripture also includes elements which are apparently not inspired. Farkasfalvy reminds us that the idea, first articulated by John Henry Newman, of the so-called obiter dicta, statements found in the biblical text made ‘on the side’ of matters of faith and morals and therefore exempt from the standard of inerrancy, was jettisoned by Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus in 1893.
Finally: Only once, in Chapter seven, ‘Five More Characteristics of Biblical Inspiration,’ and there only in oblique, negative terms, does O’Collins advert to the Incarnational analogy for understanding biblical inspiration (in ‘Church-founding Function,’ pp. 125–26)—an indispensable dimension of the subject, by the by, for both Alonso Schökel and Farkasfalvy, not to speak of St Augustine. Unlike Farkasfalvy, O’Collins makes no reference to the authoritative recognition of the truth of this analogy by the Second Vatican Council: ‘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’ (Dei Verbum, par. 13). From the current reader’s perspective, the problem with the Modernist epistemology is that it cannot in the end make sense of this analogy: instead, it must ultimately land one in a Nestorian, if not eventually an Adoptionist doctrine of inspiration, in keeping with one’s denial—open or implicit, conscious or not—of Chalcedonian Christology.
I might offer a meta-disciplinary observation as a concluding cautionary aside: On p. 176, as part of five of his ten principles for theologians interpreting the Scriptures, O’Collins flatly insists that ‘Theologians should respect the work of their professional colleagues in biblical studies.’ Not only does he fail to call for reciprocal respect anywhere in his text, but he effectively runs roughshod over not only the very old theological doctrine of verbal inspiration, but also over the Church’s persistent rejection of the radically apophatic modernist epistemologies of Kant and Bultmann, and, somewhat more subtly, of Karl Rahner and Raymond Brown (cf. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 1907)—not to mention completely ignoring Denis Farkasfalvy’s superb work on his subject. It seems to me that O’Collins’s treatment of the ecclesial theological enterprise, even if inadvertent, tends to compromise his laudable call for respect. That said, there is no doubt that O’Collins intends to engage the biblical text in the way persistently called for by Pope Benedict XVI: that is, always theologically. And intentions certainly do matter. In the final analysis, O’Collins’s book may be usefully read as a provocative methodological complement, albeit lacking comparable theological depth, to the major contributions on the subject by Alonso Schökel and Farkasfalvy.