God is the author of Scripture but the Spirit also carried along and worked through sinful human beings infallibly to reveal his inerrant Word and he did so in history. The Renaissance helped us to appreciate that reality again to the benefit of the church.

Since the literal sense is that which the author intends, and since the author of Holy Writ is God, Who by one act comprehends all things by His intellect, it is not unfitting, as Augustine says (Confess. xii), if, even according to the literal sense, one word in Holy Writ should have several senses.

—Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74), Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.), 1a 1.10 (resp. dic.).

One of the highlights of the spring term is the opportunity to read portions of  Thomas’Summa Theologica with students in the medieval seminar. This year, among the places we were considering was Thomas’ discussion of the interpretation of Scripture where he argued that Scripture has a fourfold sense (quadriga): literal, doctrinal (allegorical), tropological (moral), and the anagogical (eschatological). Contrary to the what one might expect, Thomas placed the emphasis on the literal. sense but he wanted to enlarge the literal sense.

In article 10 he defined the literal sense just as most traditional evangelical and Reformed interpreters would: the sense intended by the author. This is an important correction to the late-modern subjectivist move to elevate the reader and his subjective experience of the text over authorial intent. Thomas represents a broad classical and Christian consensus about how to regard authors and texts. Augustine had argued that reading a text according to the author’s intent was an act of charity, a way to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. For more on this see Warren C. Embree, “Ethics and Interpretation,” PhD Diss. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1991).  That this should be so is reasonably easy to demonstrate. Those who write books about deconstructing other people’s books intend the readers of their books to understand them according to the their intention. They only want us to deconstruct the books ofothers. Such an argument is little more than literary graffiti.

The second half of Thomas’ response is a little more difficult to accept without revision. There is no question whether God is the author of Holy Scripture. 2 Peter 1:19–21 and 2 Timothy 3:16 teach that the authors of Scripture wrote God’s Word as they were “carried along” and that the Scriptures themselves are “breathed out” by God himself through the agency of the human author. To say, however, as Thomas did that the author of Scripture is God and then to stop there, is to say too little.

This way of thinking of Scripture was truly ancient. When we look back at the way the Patristic and medieval interpreters understood Scripture we see that they often made the same assumption as Thomas. They were so focused on divine authorship that they thought about and talked about Scripture without accounting for the original, historical, cultural, and linguistic setting in which the various parts of Scripture were written. Scripture became utterly transcendent. There were exceptions. John Chrysostom (c. 349–407 AD) was keenly interested in the original setting, recipients, and the human authors of Scripture. As early church, however, began to emphasize the spiritual (figurative) senses this also contributed to the sense that Scripture is a revelation of timeless truths. Those (e.g., the early Jerome) who were influenced by Origen (d. 254 AD) tended to be more interested in the doctrinal and moral senses of Scripture. Gregory the Great (c. 540–604 AD) wrote a commentary on Job emphasizing the moral sense.

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