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The Sensus Plenior of Sacred Scripture: A Dissertation is unavailable, but you can change that!

This work, published in 1955, is a dissertation Brown wrote at St. Mary’s University in Baltimore. It deals with the notion of sensus plenior or “fuller sense,” a term in biblical exegesis first used by Andres Fernandez, S.J. in the late 1920s. This new hermeneutic classification sparked a complicated dispute in Catholic circles in the years following, to which Brown adds his voice in this text....

scriptural.4 Van der Ploeg suggests its affinity to the Greek word πληρόω, so often used in the N. T. as “to fulfill, to render full,” the meaning of the O. T.5 The main objection to the term plenior or “fuller” is a logical one:6 “full” has no comparative—a thing that is full cannot really be fuller. And so some propose another title such as “plenary sense”7 or “evangelical sense.”8 But as Sutcliffe remarks, a thing can be fuller in the sense of approaching closer to an absolute fullness not already
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