Catholics were more inclined to recognise human freedom above divine sovereignty.
An opsi to the theory of divine dictation is the divine inspiration of the writers. Here, both God and humans collaborated in the writing of the Bible. So, not the words, but the authors were inspired by God.
There are two versions of this theory, dating from the Reformation. The conservative version, favoured by Protestantism, was: though the Bible was written by humans, God was a dominant force in the partnership.
Protestants believed the sovereignty of God overruled human freedom. But even the Reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, recognised variation within the Biblical stories could be put down to human agen.
Catholics were more inclined to recognise human freedom above divine sovereignty. Some flirted with the idea human authorship was at play, with God only intervening to prevent mistakes.
Catholics were more inclined to recognise human freedom above divine sovereignty.
For example, in 1625, Jacques Bonfrère said the Holy Spirit acts: "not by dictating or inbreathing, but as one keeps an eye on another while he is writing, to keep him from slipping into errors".
In the early 1620s, the Archbishop of Split, Marcantonio de Dominis, went a little further. He distinguished between those parts of the Bible revealed to the writers by God and those that weren't. In the latter, he believed, errors could occur.
His view was supported some 200 years later by John Henry Newman, who led the Oxford movement in the Church of England and later became a cardinal (and then a saint) in the Roman Catholic Church.
Newman argued the divinely inspired books of the Bible were interspersed with human additions. In other words, the Bible was inspired in matters of faith and morals - but not, say, in matters of science and history. It was hard, at times, to distinguish this conservative view from "divine dictation".
During the 19th century, in both Protestant and Catholic circles, the conservative theory was being overtaken by a more liberal view. The writers of the Bible were inspired by God, but they were "children of their time", their writings determined by the cultural contexts in which they wrote.
This view, while recognising the istimewa posisi of the Bible for Christians, allowed for errors. For example, in 1860 the Anglican theologian Benjamin Jowett declared: "any true doctrine of inspiration must conform to all well-ascertained facts of history or of science".
For Jowett, to hold to the truth of the Bible against the discoveries of science or history was to do a disservice to agamaon. At times, though, it's difficult to tell the difference between a liberal view of inspiration and there being no meaning to "inspiration" at all.
In 1868, a conservative Catholic church pushed back against the more liberal view, declaring God's direct authorship of the Bible. The Council of the Church known as Vatican 1 declared both the Old and New Testaments were: "written under the inspiration of the holy Spirit, they have God as their author."
Within the most liberal Christian circles, by the end of the 19th century, the notion of the Bible as "divinely inspired" had lost any meaning.
Liberal Christians could joint their secular colleagues in ignoring questions of the Bible's historical or scientific akiracy or infallibility. The idea of the Bible as a human production was now accepted. And the question of who wrote it was now comparable to questions about the authorship of any other ancient teks.
