A Theology of the Christian Bible: Revelation, Inspiration, Canon by Denis Farkasfalvy, O. Cist (review)

Denis Farkasfalvy, Hungarian Cistercian, displaced from the monastery of Zirc and longtime abbot of Our Lady of Dallas, mathematician, expert on Bernard of Clairvaux, translator of the Psalms and member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission for more than a decade (2002-13), was already in ill health when he died of Covid-19 on May 20, 2020. His passing interrupted work on one final, monumental project on the Gospel of Matthew. It is the theology of sacred Scripture, however, where his legacy is most assured. This final book, with the all-embracing, yet targeted subtitle, “Revelation, Inspiration, Canon,” caps a lifetime of reflection and personal engagement around these central theological themes. Out of this engagement comes Farkasfalvy’s considerable frustration over a standing ecclesial inability to enunciate the correct doctrine on these matters, as he sees it. This weariness blurs in these pages with a more systematic and detached account, and the book wavers among being a primer, a history of the conciliar era, and a kind of personal theological memoire.

While the dustjacket blurbs are true to form (“remarkable work,” “epochal,” “crowning achievement,” “brilliantly luminous”), Richard Ounsworth has captured another quite valid response in his entertaining and appreciative, yet sharp review in New Blackfriars. “This book is simultaneously excellent and rather frustrating, fascinating and puzzling, even at times infuriating, but nevertheless a must-read for anyone seeking to engage with the Bible as sacred scripture.” Farkasfalvy’s deep personal investment in his theme, and his equally deep disappointment at its travesty in modern Catholic thought, “seems to have caused him to lose the thread of his argument through large parts of the book.” “The structure of the book is opaque, the titles of the chapters offering very little clue as to where the argument is going.” In the end, the book is “very clear about what Farkasfalvy thinks is the wrong understanding of biblical inspiration, far less about what he thought was right.” The complaints are not without warrant.

What Ounsworth fails to observe in all this is that this book is, in fact, in many ways a more tangled version of and sequel to Farkasfalvy’s earlier, somewhat more disciplined effort, Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture (CUA Press, 2010). The present text is, accordingly, perhaps best read as a supplement to that initial work, almost in the form of a family of essays: a circular thinker’s imperfectly polished (practically) posthumous manuscript. The keys ideas and major insights, in any case, are very much the same in both these works. The fundamental error remains a misunderstanding of the double authorship of the sacred text, illuminated by Rahner’s Urheber/Verfasser distinction. God is not a literary author, we are repeatedly told. His action in the generation of the Scriptures is not to be plotted on the same level as the human veri auctores, for, if it were, every error and deficiency in the text would be charged to God’s account. The result would be either the collapse of the divine meaning of the Scriptures, or else a willful blindness to the genuine problems (both of which responses are today championed in various quarters).

Neo-Scholasticism, notably in the persons of Augustine Bea and Pierre Benoit, does not fare at all well in this account. Briefly, the model of inspiration advanced by these figures, which became at the time of the Second Vatican Council the doctrina communis—a view based on instrumental causality, joined to the Summa’s treatise of prophecy, and applied not only to prophets but to all scriptural authors or “hagiographers”—is, for Farkasfalvy, in large measure responsible for our present woes. “We must here repeat: Rahner’s succinct critique of the Neo-Thomistic concept of dual authorship is philosophically correct” (50). The abbot goes on to add, however...