“Biblical theology will always remain an endangered species until the heavy-handed methodology of imaginary source criticism, history of tradition, and certain types of form criticism are arrested. …Consequently, the suddenness of the description of the Creation, the Fall of the first human couple, the universal extent of the Abrahamic promise, the priesthood of all Israel, or Isaiah’s depiction of the new heaven and the new earth ought not to startle us and be judged as impossible. Only the embarrassment of an overly refined spirit of modernity would feel obliged by some prior commitment to a philosophical principle or to a sociology of knowledge to adjudge such textual claims as impossible even before they were found guilty on the grounds of accepted canons of evidence.”
“The chief gain among the Christian exegetes has been the general acknowledgement not merely of the legitimacy but of the necessity of faith in anyone who approaches the Bible with the hope of receiving what it has to offer. They recognize now that coldly scientific—in the sense of rationalistic—objectivity is quite incapable of even perceiving, let alone exploiting, the religious values of Scripture. There must be first the commitment, the recognition by faith the divine origin and authority of the book; then the believer can properly and profitably apply all the most conscientious techniques of the subordinate sciences, without in the least infringing their due autonomy or being disloyal to the scientific ideal…The chief problem that still remains unsolved for them—and I would say it is insoluble as long as they do not recognize the living authority of the Church—is that of authority: What guarantees the Bible’s claim on our acceptance, and, in the last analysis, what guarantees a given interpretation of it? What criterion is to be used for distinguishing the less perfect from the more perfect? What about ‘demythologizing’? It is perfectly true that eternal truths must be disengaged and drawn clear of their presentation in terms of a particular language, culture, psychology, and so forth. But it is no good immediately reinvolving them, as Bultmann does, in the pseudo-scientific mythology of the twentieth century. The criterion for their ‘pure’ statement must be the living spirit of faith, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and that means, ultimately, the authority of the Church.”
“We speak then of the biblical theologian, and of biblical theology as that division of positive theology for which the materials are supplied by exegesis which is both scientific and guided by faith. But the very name of ‘biblical’ theology is somehow strange; it seems to be tautological. Any Christian of the Patristic period, of the Middle Ages, of the first millennium and a half of the Church’s history, would probably have inquired, ‘What other kind of theology is there?’ Certainly, St. Thomas would have been amazed at the suggestion that his Summa was somehow not biblical. As is plain the very first Questio, to him, sacra doctrina, sacra scriptura, and theologia were all—at least from his particular pedagogical point of view—one and the same thing. He aimed at systematizing and synthesizing, in easily intelligible form, the sum of revelation contained in the Word of God. And his magnificent accomplishment rests on a minute familiarity with the sacred text—in the Vulgate translation, naturally, and according to the exegetical science of his time.”
