CATECHISM ON MODERNISM – PART I – THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF THE MODERNISTS – III. SACRED SCRIPTURE INSPIRATION

PART I
THE ERRORS OF THE MODERNISTS

CHAPTER IV

THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF THE MODERNISTS
(Continued) BRANCHES OF THE FAITH
I. DOGMA
II. WORSHIP
III. SACRED SCRIPTURE INSPIRATION

Q. What, for the Modernist theologians, are the Sacred Scriptures?

A. ‘We have already touched upon the nature and origin of the Sacred Books. According to the principles of the Modernists, they may be rightly described
as a summary of experiences, not, indeed, of the kind that may now and again come to anybody, but those extraordinary and striking experiences which are the possession of every religion.’

Q. But does this description apply also to our Sacred Scriptures?

A. ‘This is precisely what they teach about our books of the Old and New Testament.’

Q. Experience is always concerned with the present; but the Sacred Scriptures contain the history of the past and prophecies of the future. How, then, can the Modernists call them summaries of experience?

A. ‘To suit their own theories they note with remarkable ingenuity that, although experience is some thing belonging to the present, still it may draw its material in like manner from the past and the future, inasmuch as the believer by memory lives the past over again after the manner of the present, and lives the future already by anticipation. This explains how it is that the historical and apocalyptic books are included among the Sacred Writings.’

Q. Are not the Sacred Scriptures the word of God?

A. ‘God does indeed speak in these books through the medium of the believer, but, according to Modernist theology, only by immanence and vital permanence.

Q. What, then, becomes of inspiration?

A. ‘Inspiration, they reply, is in nowise distinguished from that impulse which stimulates the believer to reveal the faith that is in him by words or writing, except perhaps by its vehemence. It is something like that which happens in poetical inspiration, of which it has been said : ” There is a God in us, and when He stirreth He sets us afire.” It is in this sense that God is said to be the origin of the inspiration of the Sacred Books.’

Q. Do they say that inspiration is general ? And what of inspiration, from the Catholic point of view ?

A. The Modernists affirm concerning this inspiration, that there is nothing in the Sacred Books which is devoid of it. In this respect some might be disposed
to consider them as more orthodox than certain writers in recent times who somewhat restrict inspiration, as, for instance, in what have been put forward as so-called tacit citations. But in all this we have mere verbal conjuring ; for if we take the Bible according to the standards of agnosticism, namely, as a human
work, made by men for men, albeit the theologian is allowed to proclaim that it is divine by immanence what room is there left in it for inspiration ? The Modernists assert a general inspiration of the Sacred Books, but they admit no inspiration in the Catholic sense.’

IV. THE CHURCH: HER ORIGIN, HER NATURE, AND HER RIGHTS

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