The Vatican II document Dei Verbum (Constitution on Divine Revelation) has often been overlooked in favor of Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), and Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty). Karim Schelkens draws attention back to Vatican II's major document on scripture by studying the two-year drafting process preceding the Council. Famously, in November 1962 bishops rejected the initial draft, De fontibus revelationis (On the Sources of Revelation). This move is often regarded as the moment when bishops finally asserted themselves against Roman officials, an action that led to a fresh start which ended in Dei Verbum.

In documenting the history of the initial draft, this book underscores tensions among distinct Catholic approaches to divine revelation. The Roman battle against “modernism,” which Pope Pius X condemned in 1910, and the subsequent rise of the nouvelle theologie and historical-critical methods in biblical scholarship each shaped the rejected schema. Thus, De fontibus revelationis, as Schelkens puts it, “was not the product of a one-sided battle of convictions, but rather of an actual theological debate” among clashing approaches. Consequently, “several theologies of revelation can be identified side by side in the text” (276). Along with the sense that Roman authorities were pushing bishops into accepting the proposed draft, the text incited fatal complaints about incoherence and the absence of a pastoral voice in the text. In addition to gaining an understanding the origins of a conciliar constitution, one might be struck by the stark differences between various mid-twentieth-century Catholic approaches to revelation and Fundamentalist Protestant approaches simultaneously on the rise. For defining the battle lines within the Catholic community and suggesting the dissonance with other contemporary interpretative frames, this is a very useful book.