I’ll call HBC reading the Bible as if it were any other text, and Faith as reading it as the word of God proclaimed by the Church.
Though the two are sometimes compatible, they differ in significant ways:
(1)
HBC: Parsimony demands giving natural explanations to supernatural reports wherever possible, perhaps at all costs. For example, where one can explain a miracle as a legend, it is more reasonable to do so, even though there are times when, despite all our best efforts, we must admit that the best report we have is a wonder-story.
Faith: Parsimony demands taking supernatural reports at face value and believing them as far as possible, perhaps at all costs. Where one can take a miracle as a more or less accurate report, it is more reasonable to do so.
(2)
HBC: Rational parsimony demands that anytime the Bible says P and not P it is a mistake, a set of competing doctrines, an abandonment of a previous doctrine, or at least an imperfection of expression.
Faith: As there is a contradiction in saying both “these words are divine” and “these words err” anytime the Bible says P and not P the reader believes, at minimum, that God is not communicating the same thing with both. If, for example, the chronological order of the temptations in Matthew is 123 and in Luke it is 132, then, at minimum, one must say that God does not intend both to communicate chronological order.
(3)
HBC: Events are reasonable and analogous to experience which tend to happen to the majority of people. Majority experience is paradigm experience that sees the world as it is.
Faith: Events are reasonable and analogous to experience which tend to happen to the saints of the Church. The experience of the saint is paradigm experience that sees the world as it is.
(4)
HBC: The historical character of the texts is thoroughly imperfect due to falling short of modern historical methods: by lacking citations of sources, clear attribution of authorship, multiple independent witnesses, and by the loss of texts in the centuries between us and the events.
Faith: The authority of the texts on anything they communicate is the highest possible authority, and has the most perfect guarantee of truth in all historical matters, due to their divine authorship.
(5a)
HBC: The standards before which any interpretation of Scripture must justify itself is a modern, peer-reviewed Biblical journal; a respected department at a modern research university; and the majority of scholars in both, though particularly the most contemporary ones. Refusal to do exegesis in this way makes one a crackpot, or as beholden to religious bias.
Faith: The standard before which any interpretation of Scripture must justify itself is the wisdom of the saints and doctors of the Church. Refusal to do so makes one a fool in the biblical sense.
(5b)
HBC: The life of Jesus is whatever a Jew, Catholic, Protestant and Agnostic could agree on, if locked in the basement at Harvard and forced to write a Vie de Jésus.
Faith: The life of Jesus is whatever the Saints could agree on about Jesus, particularly as expressed in the councils of the Church.
(6)
HBC: The chief goal in exegesis is to understand the experience of a community that disappeared long ago. Our own rational and enlightened community takes the authors of the Biblical text as distant from us, and as standing under our scrutiny.
Faith: The chief goal in exegesis is to incorporate ourselves more intimately with the community that produced the Biblical texts, to which we take ourselves to also belong. We see ourselves as one mystical body and mind with those who made the texts, and they with us.
(7)
HBC: “Faith” is a sort of bias, competing with objectivity. It is certainly the absence of evidence.
Faith: Faith is a light giving assent to something known to be true by God and the saints. It is the evidence of things hoped for.
Just Thomism 