I was intrigued to find sections in Rahner's book Foundations which support the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture as doctrines of the Catholic church.
Rahner makes a telling comment I think about Protestant doctrines of scripture:
...the old Reformation doctrine of scripture alone, which was necessarily and intrinsically connected with the notion of a verbal inspiration of scripture, is untenable from a historical point of view, nor is it taught any longer in contemporary Evangelical (ie Lutheran) theology...Only when scripture is understood as the one and only product which comes immediately from God independently of any historical and very differentiated process of becoming can I ascribe to scripure an authority which makes it completely independent of the living testimony of the church. But basically, one cannot abandon the principle of an absolute verbal inspiration of scripture, as in fact has happened, and still maintain the principle of scripture alone in the sense which it had in the time of the Reformation.... p. 362
I think this is quite perceptive. Verbal inspiration is quite a costly doctrine to jettison if you are trying to hold to a principle of scripture alone...
2 comments:
Thank you for that, Michael.
Interesting indeed.
As I'm sure you know, I think, Tony Lane has shown that Sola Scriptura is in fact a post-reformation slogan and that what the Reformers where upholding was the supremacy of scripture, not its complete independance from any human reason or tradition of the church.
that's exactly right: like 'total depravity' it can be badly misconstrued...
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