This short volume, finished just before Denis Farkasfalvy’s death in 2020, serves effectively as his last theological testament. Throughout his scholarly career, Farkasfalvy aimed to reconcile and unite theological disciplines that had increasingly become isolated from each other, most notably the biblical, patristic, and systematic. In A Biblical Path to the Triune God, the Cistercian abbot identifies the earliest biblical witnesses to the Church’s teaching about God, formulated at the Council of Nicaea, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus’ famous praise of the Father, found almost word-for-word in Matthew 11:25-27 and Luke 10:21-22, is Farkasfalvy’s point of departure for his bold assertion that in the earliest sources, we find abundant evidence that “it was not Jesus who revealed his own divine sonship; rather, the Father revealed it to those whom Jesus had chosen and were open to respond in faith.” Farkasfalvy demonstrates that Jesus reveals his relationship to the Father in terms of intimate and experiential knowledge, transforming the procreative metaphor of filiation from the physical (as in the Psalms and 2 Samuel 7) to the epistemological realm of knowledge, what he calls “love within cognitive dimensions.” Just decades after Jesus’ ministry, numerous independent apostolic witnesses, from the Synoptic Gospels and John to Paul (especially Romans 1:1-4 and Galatians 1:15-16), indicate a robust and widespread understanding of the Father’s self-disclosure in Jesus the Son. Farkasfalvy concludes his brief but intense reflection by outlining how a single organic process of revelation binds together the Father and the Son, and then extends that loving communion to believers in the Spirit, a communion made possible only by the incarnate Son’s crucifixion and subsequent glorification. This book accomplishes the admirable feat of showing that far from being the invention of later centuries, the Trinitarian doctrine of the Church is firmly rooted in the very first reflections on Jesus’ ministry and mystery by the biblical authors.

Inspiration and Interpretation provides readers with a much needed general theological introduction to the study of Sacred Scripture.

A Theology of the Christian Bible is built upon the thesis that divine revelation, the inspiration and canonization of Scripture should be viewed as “sequentially linked movements” of a single process wherein God reveals his Word in history and ensures permanent accessibility of revelation for his People, both of Israel and of the Church. The starting point is the view expressed in the Second Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum that revelation consists of the “words and realities” of Salvation History. This marks a shift away from the neo-scholastic concept that approached revelation primarily as a set of propositional truths. Farkasfalvy begins with the notion of revelation as a historical process: God reveals his Word in a “salvation history,” which culminates in the Incarnation. The transmission of revelation always involves human mediation by chosen individuals or, in the language of the biblical and patristic tradition, “Prophets and Apostles.” Farkasfalvy then moves on to review some of the major contributors to the theology of inspiration around the time of Vatican II (Bea, Rahner, Alonso-Schökel), the teaching of Dei Verbum proper, and finally the 2014 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and biblical inspiration and the truth of the Bible, treating each of these in its individual context. According to Farkasfalvy, the theology of inspiration was greatly handicapped by the neo-scholastic notion of God as a “literary author” of the scriptural texts. Advocating God as true and genuine “author” of Scripture, but in a non-literary sense, Farkasfalvy also reviews afresh the tradition inspiration-incarnation analogy. Scripture should be thought of in light of God progressively revealing himself in limited and located contexts to chosen human beings, through whom revelation is transmitted in verbal and, eventually, written form. God guides the complex compositional processes of the biblical books so that his word becomes accessibly and permanently preserved in writing for his people, the Church. The final chapters of A Theology of the Christian Bible take up the extension of these dynamics into canonization. These largely exegetical and historical chapters focus on the transmission of the revelation in Christ through both Testaments by means of Jesus’ Apostles, embracing the Hebrew Scriptures and setting in motion the formation and, in early patristics, the canonization of the New Testament.