TRADITIONS AND MODERN SCIENCE. TRANSFORMATIONS OF UNDERSTANDING INSPIRATION AND INFALLIBILITY OF THE SCRIPTURE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

In this contribution the author deals with the question of the conception of inspiration in the Catholic Church at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The authority of the Bible as a sacred canonical text normative for the community and faith of the Church had to be confronted with findings of natural and social sciences knocking the traditional interpretation and questioning infallibility and even inspiration of the Scripture. One of the answers of biblical exegetes was searching for the new conception of inspiration, taking into consideration both the sacred character and divine origin of the Bible on the one hand, and the role of the sacred writer, the human co-author of the sacred text on the other. Thanks to the creative grasp of the conception of inspiration by Saint Thomas Aquinas and its modern application on the modern methods of the historical-critical method the crisis has been successfully overcome