Raymond E. Brown - Scholarly Views

Scholarly Views

Brown was one of the first Catholic scholars in the United States to use the historical-critical method to study the Bible. In 1943, reversing the approach that had existed since Providentissimus Deus fifty years earlier, the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu expressed approval of historical-critical methods. For Brown, this was a "Magna Carta for biblical progress". In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church moved further in this direction, adopting the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, instead of the conservative schema "On the Sources of Revelation" that originally had been submitted. While it stated that Scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation," Brown points out the ambiguity of this statement, which opened the way for a new interpretation of inerrancy by shifting from a literal interpretation of the text towards a focus on "the extent to which it conforms to the salvific purpose of God". He saw this as the Church 'turning the corner' on inerrancy, while adopting a face-saving wording: "the Roman Catholic Church does not change her official stance in a blunt way. Past statements are not rejected but are requoted with praise and then reinterpreted at the same time. ... What was really going on was an attempt gracefully to retain what was salvageable from the past and to move in a new direction at the same time". While the document cited the two earlier encyclicals, it was clear to observers that much had changed. The Second Vatican Council, one scholar observed, “raised biblical exegesis from the status of second-class citizenship to which it had been reduced among Catholics by an overreaction to the Protestant claim for its autonomy”.