Authorial Intention in Scripture
Authorial Intention in Scripture is what the inspired human author means to communicate through the words, literary form, context, and composition of a biblical text under the Holy Spirit's principal authorship.[1]
The intention of the human author
Dei Verbum requires interpreters to investigate what the sacred writers intended to affirm. Intention is not a private psychological state recovered by imagination; it is publicly expressed through language, genre, argument, narrative design, historical convention, and the text's relation to its audience. Biographical evidence and compositional history can assist, but the inspired wording is the principal evidence. A claim about intention must be demonstrated from the work rather than asserted because it solves a theological difficulty.
Literary form determines how intention becomes assertion. A poet may intend a metaphorical truth, a narrator may report speech without endorsing it, a proverb may state a general pattern, and an apocalyptic seer may communicate through symbol. Literal does not mean literalistic. The Literal Sense of Scripture is the meaning conveyed through the words as soundly interpreted, including figurative meanings actually intended by the form.
Text, psychology, and communicative act
An author can communicate more than can be reduced to a conscious list of propositions while still intending the work as a whole. Implications, presuppositions, allusions, and narrative effects belong to communicative intention when grounded in the text and shared conventions. The interpreter should neither restrict meaning to a guessed mental diary nor detach it from every authorial norm. The canonical writing is a purposeful act of communication, not raw language that readers may make mean anything.
Divine intention and fuller meaning
God acts in and through the true human author. Divine intention cannot contradict what that author actually asserts, because the Holy Spirit is principal author of the same text. Yet God can order persons, events, institutions, and canonical relationships toward a fullness not exhaustively foreseen by one writer. Later inspired rereading, fulfilment in Christ, and the Church's definitive confession can disclose a Sensus Plenior grounded in divine authorship without reducing human words to an accidental shell.
The distinction must be handled carefully. Appeal to divine intention cannot rescue an interpretation that lacks textual, canonical, or doctrinal warrant. Nor may a historical reconstruction of conscious human foresight become a ceiling over God's providential economy. The fuller sense is recognized through canonical development, Apostolic Tradition, and authoritative teaching, not through private ingenuity. It deepens rather than reverses the literal assertion.[2]
Prophecy and fulfilment
A prophet speaks within a real historical crisis and may perceive aspects of a promise without comprehending its final scope. The first referent remains essential; christological fulfilment can surpass it because the same God governs history and canon. Responsible interpretation shows continuity between promise, type, and fulfilment. It does not claim that every ancient phrase was a consciously detailed prediction, nor does it confine revelation to what modern history can reconstruct about the prophet's horizon.[3]
Interpretive authority and limits
Authorial intention grounds assertion and therefore matters for Biblical Truth and Inerrancy. Scripture is protected from error in what the inspired writers actually affirm, not in every inference a reader draws from surface wording. Determining assertion can require textual criticism, philology, genre, and historical context. Where several readings remain possible, confidence should match evidence; pious preference does not settle syntax or literary convention.[4]
The Church may definitively judge a scriptural meaning bound to revelation without canonizing every surrounding historical theory. A dogmatic use can identify a true sense or implication while exegetes continue debating secondary questions. Conversely, an alleged intention cannot overturn a defined doctrine by isolating a passage from the canon and Tradition. Human and divine intention, literal and fuller sense, historical evidence and ecclesial judgment are distinguished so they can cooperate.
Against intentional fallacy and reader sovereignty
Modern literary theory rightly warns that a private report of intention does not control a work independently of its text. That warning need not eliminate authorship. Catholic exegesis locates communicative intention in the publicly available composition and its conventions. Reader response can reveal effects and applications, but a community does not create the inspired assertion. Meaning is received through disciplined interpretation before it is actualized in new circumstances.[5]
References
- Back to citation Dei Verbum, 11–13 and 21–25 — Vatican II on divine and human authorship, authorial intention and literary forms, canonical unity, living Tradition, the analogy of faith, and Scripture in the Church.
- Back to citation Catechism of the Catholic Church, 109–119 — The intention of the sacred authors, literary forms, reading in the Spirit, canonical unity, living Tradition, the analogy of faith, and literal and spiritual senses.
- Back to citation Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture — A detailed official study of Scripture's witness to inspiration and truth, divine and human authorship, the christological canon, literary expression, and difficult biblical passages.
- Back to citation Divino Afflante Spiritu — Pius XII on inspired original-language texts, textual criticism, ancient versions, historical circumstances, literary genres, interpretation, and the scholarly duties of Catholic exegetes.
- Back to citation Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Italian text) — The Church's principal modern survey of textual, historical, literary, rhetorical, narrative, canonical, traditional, and contextual methods and their proper contributions and limits.