Content deleted Content added
m →Terms and opinions: Typo fixing, replaced: from from → from |
Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit |
||
Line 41:
<blockquote>It seems to me that the most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that is to say that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us, and committed to writing, did put down in these books anything false. . . . If you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement ... there will not be left a single sentence of those books which, if appearing to any one difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away, as a statement in which, intentionally, . . . the author declared what was not true (''Letters of St Augustine'' 28.3).</blockquote>
<blockquote>For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the Ms. is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it. As to all other writings, in reading them, however great the superiority of the authors to myself in sanctity and learning, I do not accept their teaching as true on the mere ground of the opinion being held by them; but only because they have succeeded in convincing my judgment of in truth either by means of these canonical writings themselves, or by arguments addressed to my reason (''Letters of St Augustine'' 82.3).</blockquote>
By the time of the [[Reformation]], there was still no official doctrine of inerrancy. For [[Martin Luther]] (1483–1546), for example, "inspiration did not insure inerrancy in all details. Luther recognizes mistakes and inconsistencies in Scripture and treated them with lofty indifference because they did not touch the heart of the Gospel."<ref name="cambible">Bainton, "The Bible in the Reformation," in e.d. Greenslade, S.L., ''The Cambridge History of the Bible Vol 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present'', Cambridge University Press 1963, 12-13.</ref> When Matthew appears to confuse [[Book of Jeremiah|Jeremiah]] with [[Book of Zechariah|Zechariah]] in Matt. 27:9, Luther wrote that "Such points do not bother me particularly."<ref name="cambible" /> The [[Christian humanism|Christian humanist]] and one of the leading scholars of the [[northern Renaissance]], [[Erasmus]] (1466–1536), was also unconcerned with minor errors not impacting theology, and at one point, thought that Matthew mistook one word for another. In a letter to [[Johannes Eck]], Erasmus wrote that “Nor, in my view, would the authority of the whole of Scripture be instantly imperiled, as you suggest, if an evangelist by a slip of memory did put one name for another, Isaiah for instance instead of Jeremiah, for this is not a point on which anything turns.”<ref name="wood" /> The same point of view held true for [[John Calvin]] (1509–1564), who wrote that "It is well known that the Evangelists were not very concerned with observing the time sequences."<ref name="hendel" /> The doctrine of inerrancy, however, began to develop as a response to these Protestant attitudes. Whereas the [[Council of Trent]] only held that the Bible's authority was "in matters of faith and morales", the [[Jesuit]] and [[Cardinal (Catholic Church)|cardinal]] [[Robert Bellarmine]] (1542–1621) argued in his 1586 ''De verbo Dei'', the first volume of his multi-volume ''Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereticos'' that "There can be no error in Scripture, whether it deals with faith or whether it deals with morals/mores, or whether it states something general and common to the whole Church, or something particular and pertaining to only one person." Bellarmine's views were extremely important in his condemnation of Galileo and Catholic-Protestant debate, as the Protestant response was to also affirm his heightened understanding of inerrancy.<ref name="hendel" />
| |||