Abstract
Thomas Aquinas claims that “God is the author of holy Scripture” in ST Ia. 1, 10. While often characterized as venerable, reverent, or honorific, it is easy to set aside his judgment as theologically vacuous or detrimental for apprehending the creatureliness of Scripture’s literal sense. By contrast, this thesis advances the Christian doctrine of Scripture by showing that the goodness of God makes divine authorship of Scripture and the creatureliness of the literal sense theologically coherent and intelligible. I pursue this argument by examining divine goodness in a select set of Psalms primarily with Thomas Aquinas, supported by key insights from Augustine. The Psalms are apt for this inquiry because they posit a close relation between God and Scripture in the idiom of divine goodness. Thomas’s exegetical reasoning unfolds a network of theological judgments that make the God-Scripture relation understandable: divine goodness, participatory creatures, and Scripture as an intimate and unique creature of God. This thesis argues that the doctrine of the divine goodness and its consequences for the doctrine of creation underpin and make intelligible divine authorship and Scripture’s created nature in relation to God, thereby advancing contemporary bibliology.
This thesis makes three key points to show the intelligibility of God’s authorship and Scripture’s created nature: 1) God’s goodness is complete and giving. 2) Divine authorship of Scripture refers to God’s goodness intending and causing Scripture’s literal sense, and the non-literal senses therein. 3) The literal sense participates in the divine goodness, and, as such, it is complete to give the goodness of God to believers as the way to beatitude. To apprehend the intelligibility and coherence of these judgments, the thesis proceeds in three parts. Part I offers a close reading of ST Ia. 1, 10 to demonstrate the theological substructure underwriting divine authorship: God, participatory creatures, and the literal sense in relation to God. It then demonstrates the fittingness of the Psalms with Augustine and Thomas for this systematic contribution. A selective foray into Augustine’s Exposition of the Psalms shows a similar theological network in the idiom of divine goodness: God is good, creatures participate in God, and Scripture forms believers for God. However, as Augustine develops neither divine authorship nor Scripture’s ontology in his comments on the Psalms, I turn to divine goodness with Aquinas to show that the doctrine of God is essential for a coherent bibliology. In his Prologue to the Psalms and comments on Psalm 18(19), Thomas teaches divine authorship in relation to the created ontology of the Psalter in the larger context of divine goodness, uniting the insight of Article 10 with Augustine: God is good, so he authors Scripture’s literal sense as a participation in the divine goodness.
Part II builds upon this synthesis by expounding Thomas’s exegesis of divine goodness in three Psalms, thereby demonstrating the connection between goodness, authorship, and the literal sense’s participatory nature and purpose. These soundings show, from different angles, the intelligibility of the three points that make God’s authorship of Scripture intelligible. In doing so, divine goodness in Psalms 15(16), 24(25), and 30(31) makes sense of three central aspects of ST Ia. 1, 10: 1) the creatureliness of the literal sense, 2) its capaciousness and restraint, 3) God’s intent and authorship, and the consequential completeness of Holy Writ. Following Thomas’s exegetical reasoning, this thesis primarily focuses on the literal sense, not to the denigration of the non-literal senses, but to underscore that God is the source, shape, and end of the literal sense. Thus, Part II establishes that the goodness of God, in the literal sense of the Psalms, is the reason God’s authorship and Scripture’s created ontology is theologically coherent and generative.
Finally, Part III underscores the uniqueness of Thomas’s contribution to the doctrine of God and bibliology by comparing Aquinas’s rendering of God’s goodness, creatures, and Scripture, as disclosed in the Psalms, with the thought of John Webster and Katherine Sonderegger. It illustrates the advancement this thesis makes to the Christian doctrine of God and Scripture. Therefore, as bibliology is a consequence of the goodness of God, this thesis advances that divine authorship of Sacred Scripture is not detrimental or hollow; rather, it is a generative theological judgment for the doctrine of Scripture.