How Newman read the Bible

Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB describes the cardinal’s response to the challenges of modern exegesis

26 February 2010

Photo courtesy of the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory

The 19th century was a period of a great opening into ancient history and literature, and especially that of the Bible. Major archaeological work and discoveries in the Near East were constantly raising new questions about the factual accuracy of the Bible.

Despite his own limitations in foreign languages, John Henry Newman was sufficiently in touch with currents in Oxford to be well aware of these, as is shown particularly in Tract 85, which devoted two chapters to historical difficulties in the Bible. In those lectures, delivered in the university in 1838, he uses as an illustration – seemingly familiar to his hearers – the difference between the two Creation narratives in Genesis, distinguishing them by the name used for the deity, “God” or “Lord God”, or as modern exegesis would say, the Elohist and the Yahwist.

However, 20 years later the less well-informed educated world was thrown into confusion by the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Within two years (March 1860) appeared the volume Essays and Reviews, consisting of essays by seven well- known churchmen whose objective was to “encourage free and open discussion of biblical topics” (said the editor, William Temple, then headmaster of Rugby later Archbishop of Canterbury) in view of the new discoveries. The public reaction to their frankness was shock and horror. The consequent upset boiled over into the famous Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (June 1860) at which Bishop Wilberforce insultingly asked Thomas Huxley whether he claimed descent from an ape on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. To Newman all this came as no surprise. One of the authors of Essays and Reviews, Mark Pattison, describes a chance meeting with Newman: “Happening to come down from town in the train with Father, since Cardinal, Newman, whom I had not seen for a long time, I was in terror as to how he would regard me in consequence of what I had written. My fears were quickly relieved. He blamed severely the throwing of such speculations broadcast upon the general public. It was, he said, unsettling their faith without offering them anything else to rest upon.”

But he had no word of censure for the latitude of theological speculation assumed by the essay, provided it had been addressed ad clerum, or put out, not as a public appeal, but as a scholastic dissertation addressed to learned theologians. Newman duly wrote a friendly letter of congratulation the follow- ing year, when Pattison was elected rector of Lincoln College. The controversy, however, turned Newman’s own thoughts again to the question of the inerrancy, and therefore the inspiration, of Scripture.

The chief problem arises first from the obvious inaccuracy of many of the statements of Scripture; how can it then be God’s revelatory word?

Another problem had been raised already by Origen, who held that the real, inspired sense of Scripture is not necessarily the literal sense.

Indeed, he held that some statements of Scripture have no literal sense but only a mystical sense. Did he mean by this that the inspired meaning of such statements is not their obvious, literal meaning? He does, after all, complain that it is of no interest to him that Abraham was standing under a tree, before he sets about elucidating the meaning of the tree under which Abraham stood, thus opening the way to his allegorical interpretations.

The first problem is the extent of inspiration of Scripture. Newman’s answer was that inerrancy does not touch the obiter dicta of Scripture. On this he frequently quotes the example of the casual time- marker, when Nabuchodonosor was King of Nineveh (Judith 1.1), though in fact he was King of Babylon. This was certainly a “throw-away remark”, an obiter dictum, by the biblical writer, by which he was not enunciating a deep truth of revelation but merely locating (incorrectly, as it turns out) a particular character. Could it therefore be dismissed as incorrect? On occasion Newman also asks whether Paul could have been wrong in saying that he left his cloak with Carpus (2 Tim. 4.13). If in fact he had left it with Eutychus, would we have to admit that the Scripture was not inspired? The problem then becomes how far these obiter dicta are to be held to extend.

In his final writings on inspiration, essays written in 1884, Newman first simply alludes to the opinion that in the early Church God, being auctor utriusque testamenti (author of both testaments), was for long understood to mean principally that God is the author of both dispensations, the old and the new, so the originator, founder, primary cause. The Greek word for “testament” or “dispensation” is the same diatheke. This would say nothing about the literary authorship of the books of the Bible.

On the matter of inerrancy, instead of using his former argument, excluding obiter dicta from inerrancy, Newman goes on to deal with the problem of historical inaccuracies by working in the other direction, attaching inerrancy to faith and morals, though not limiting it to these matters. He explains that the Councils both of Trent and of the Vatican “specify ‘faith and moral conduct’ as the drift of that teaching which has the guarantee of inspiration”, and that they say nothing about the records of historical fact: it is remarkable that they do not say a word directly as to its inspiration in matters of fact. Yet are we therefore to conclude that the record of facts in Scripture does not come under the guarantee of its inspiration? We are not so to conclude.”

In his second essay he again insists that “the Scriptures are inspired, and inspired throughout... they are inspired in all matters of faith and morals, meaning thereby, not only theological doctrine, but also the historical and prophetical narratives which they contain”. He continues: “I am not here affirming or denying that Scripture is inspired in matters of astronomy and chronology as well as in faith and morals; but I certainly do not see that because Inspiration is given for the latter subjects, therefore it extends to the former.” He is not, therefore, liable to the criticism made later, after his death, in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893), against those who confine inspiration to matters of faith and morals. These criticisms were made directly against the theories of Salvatore di Bartolo, published in 1888. He continues, however, to be worried about questions of historical accuracy in biblical matters, as appears from several letters he wrote to Bishop William Clifford. On January 7 1883 he asks whether it is necessary to hold that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes. A month later he is worried (“I have no confidence in myself,” he writes) a book about presenting the book of Judith as a drama.

The Use and Abuse of the Bible: Brief History of Biblical Interpretation by Fr Henry Wansbrough is published by T & T Clark Ltd, priced £14.99