The thought may have occurred because I was en route from Rome to Krakow the day the Obamacare decision was handed down, traveling between the administrative center of Catholic Christianity and one of Catholicism’s most vibrant local churches. But whatever its provenance, the idea came to me, after reading Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, that those who applauded it and those who deplored it might both benefit from considering it through the lens of an old-fashioned theme in Catholic biblical interpretation — the idea that a scriptural text contains a sensus plenior, a fuller or deeper meaning, than can be apparent at first glance.
The American scholar Raymond E. Brown, one of the first Catholics in the Anglosphere to use the historical-critical method of biblical exegesis, nonetheless wrote a dissertation on the older exegetical notion of the sensus plenior, which he defined in these terms:
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