De locis theologicis

THE MOST SOLID FOUNDATION OF SACRED SCRIPTURE AND THE FOUR BATTERING RAMS BY WHICH IT IS ASSAILED

The first locus is unquestionably secure, resting on divine and supremely weighty authority. For we call those books sacred and canonical which the sacred authors received at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. Once it has been established that these books are such, we shall without doubt believe them to be most certain and most true; this is what Augustine teaches, repeats, and insists upon in De Civit. Dei II, ch. 3; Confess., ch. 15; Epist. 7 to Marcellinus; Epist. 19 to Jerome; De doct. Christi, book 1, ch. 37; De baptis. con. Donat., book 2, ch. 3; and the prooemium of De Trinit., book 3. And rightly so. For unless you lay this foundation faithfully, whatever you build upon it in theology will collapse; indeed, that city of God will collapse, whose foundations are on the holy mountains and in the writings of the princes who were in it. The author of these writings is not a human being but God. For the Lord will recount it in the writings of the peoples and of the princes who were in it. The Lord, therefore, upholds the authority of this locus, and the princes uphold it too. For it is the tower of David, from which a thousand shields hang, the whole armor of the strong. Since we shall explain this matter more fully in Book Thirteen, it will be enough to have touched on it briefly here. Yet this tower, fortified as it is in other respects, is commonly shaken by four battering rams. The first is that Sacred Scripture itself has reported that human beings were at times deceived by God; therefore it may be that the sacred authors are deceived by the Holy Spirit, and so any argument you draw from authors of this kind will be uncertain. The second is that it still seems unsettled which books are to be included in the canon of Sacred Scripture, since seven from the Old Testament and as many from the New are rejected

by men both learned and Catholic. Therefore, if a theologian draws an argument from them, it will be weak and will lack divine authority. The third argument is that, even if it were established for certain which books were such sacred books, it is still not established whether the Latin codices agree with the Greek and Hebrew ones. An argument drawn from a Latin copy will therefore be weak, since it rests on the meaning and understanding of the translator alone. The fourth argument is that, even if it were clear which copy should be followed above all, it is nevertheless not equally certain whether the apostles or prophets, in the testimonies that are cited from them, speak from the Spirit of God or from themselves, since the sacred authors seem to write some things in a human manner without divine revelation. Not all testimonies in the canonical books, then, have the authority of God such that they can establish certain belief. Nor will we pursue as fully as we can the explanation of these arguments, lest the whole discussion be spent in this one place. Rather, we shall strive to repel as briefly as possible these four battering rams with which some try to shake and demolish the walls of our religion. For we are not trying to bring in here material and a hodgepodge of many things, but to prescribe for the theologian a form of discourse. The shorter it is, the better it will be.