Augustine on the Bible

‘Sacred Scripture … is placed high on a throne.’

So said Augustine (354– 430) who, like other Patristic authors, believed without hesitation that God had caused the Bible to be written.

He accepted both its inspiration and its inerrancy. He thus used such terms as ‘inspire’ (inspirare) and ‘dictate’ (dictare) to stress that in the writing of Scripture the initiative is God’s alone and that He determined what was to be written in the pages of Holy Writ.