by Fr Ian
(Part One here, Part Two here)
God's revelation of the truth about himself is available for us in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Christians must trust these sources above our personal opinions and ideas. God speaks to us, 'not to impart information, but to invite us to share his life and to elicit a response to his invitation'.
Saint Jerome, c. 342–347 – 420, the patron saint of biblical scholars:
'Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ'
B. The sources of Divine RevelationHaving given a very brief sketch of the pattern of God’s revelation of himself in the course of human history let’s turn now to the sources of Divine Revelation: Tradition and Scripture, with a few comments on the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church.
God inspires men to record his saving work
Over the centuries, through historical events, the preaching of the prophets and sometimes by way of God’s commissioning of particular individuals to carry out specific tasks, the Jewish people received a mysterious but unmistakable and ever-deepening knowledge of God and his intentions.
They were careful to record this knowledge in writing, and before long they came to understand that the writing itself would never have come into existence without God’s guidance and inspiration. Most of this writing became the Hebrew Scriptures, which form the greatest part of what we’ve come to call the Old Testament.
The Chosen People’s experiences of God, and the conclusions they drew from them, were also preserved in the practice of transmitting them, or handing then down from one generation to the next, a practice continued by the Christian community after Jesus’ resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit.
This process of handing on the truths of faith was given the label Tradition, from the Latin verb tradere: ‘to hand on to posterity’.
Of course Protestant and Catholic Christians differ substantially regarding this aspect God's self-revelation, but the Catholic view is that these two sources of knowledge provide unique and authoritative guidance in our relationship with God.
It’s important for us to accept them as authoritative guidance because the alternative is to allow our imagination to work overtime, or to rely too heavily on our own personal perceptions and experiences, in which case we’re in danger of ending up with a distorted and untruthful picture of God and his plans.
There are influences in our modern culture which make this a more acute danger now than in the past. The tendency at the moment is to value open-mindedness and flexibility and to react suspiciously to the idea of ‘dogmas’ or ‘orthodoxy’, which a lot of people see as being restrictions on freedom of thought. There’s also the individualist tendency which encourages people to place a high value on their own subjective ideas, opinions, tastes and preferences.
These attitudes aren’t a problem if we’re decorating our living room or choosing a mobile phone. But when it’s applied to the spiritual life and our relationship with God they very easily lead us on a wild goose chase and delay our progress, instead of guiding us into a deepening knowledge and love of the ‘living and true God’ (1 Thess 1:9).
Sacred Tradition: the Catholic understanding
From the earliest times the community of Jesus’ disciples recognised that, in the form of everything they had witnessed and experienced in their association with Jesus, God had embarked on a new and fuller revelation of himself. They could see that in the person and mission of Jesus God had carried out the decisive, final stage in his plan of salvation for humanity.
These truths of God’s new revelation had to be safeguarded and preserved, and the community’s understanding of them had to be interpreted correctly, developed and deepened.
A ‘deposit’ of Christian faith quickly began to take shape: fundamental beliefs such as that Jesus truly rose from the dead, based on the testimony of the eye-witnesses, but also Christian moral norms, as found in the accounts of Jesus’ teaching ministry in the Gospels and in the New Testament letters. Christian Tradition also came quickly to include particular practices, like the gathering for the celebration of the Eucharist every week on the day of Jesus’ resurrection, Sunday, the new Christian Sabbath.
The priority of Tradition
The second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles gives a picture of how the Christian Tradition of belief and practice developed from the earliest stages of the Church’s history.
The author, Saint Luke, records that the first converts to Christ ‘held steadfastly’ to the teaching of the apostles appointed by Jesus; to the fellowship, i.e. the spirit of fraternity and solidarity in Christian faith and discipleship; to the breaking of bread - the celebration of the Eucharist in keeping with Jesus’ command at the Last Supper - and to ‘the prayers’ (Acts 2:42).
In the same way, around the year 50 A.D. - some twenty or so years after Jesus’ death and resurrection - Saint Paul was already appealing to the members of the community he had founded at Thessalonica to ‘stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or in writing’ (2 Thess 2:15).
In other words, two notable feature of the Church’s life from the very beginning were:
(a) the establishing of authoritative and unalterable truths about God’s plan of salvation, which had begun with Abraham and culminated in Jesus, and:
(b) the acceptance of these truths as a condition of Christian community membership and as the foundation for the life of Christian discipleship. The New Testament testifies to the formation of the Church’s Tradition from the earliest period of apostolic leadership, immediately following Jesus’ resurrection and ascension.
In that same early period the first followers of Jesus concluded resolutely that neglect or rejection of Sacred Tradition inevitably leads to spiritual confusion, disunity and separation from God - a theme that runs through the whole of Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
Sacred Scripture
The other source, or channel, of God’s revelation of himself is Sacred Scripture, in other words, the books of the Bible.
Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (the word of God), sets out a summary of traditional Catholic belief about the status and value of Sacred Scripture, and here I think there is less disagreement between Protestant and Catholic views:
- it was part of God’s plan for certain truths to be committed to writing;
- the resulting written works are to be considered as inspired by God himself and are not just the result of human speculation and imagination;
- Sacred Scripture consists of a definite, limited number of writings which are recognised as being divinely inspired (the ‘canon’ of Scripture); and
- the books of Scripture teach us ‘solidly, faithfully and without error’ the truths which God wanted to put into sacred writings ‘for the sake of salvation’ (DV art 11).
Of course the books of the Bible were written by human beings, but God is their principal and ultimate author: ‘In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted’ (DV art 11).
The Old Testament documents the way that God gradually guided the Chosen People into a deeper understanding of his nature and his purposes, and shows how the Covenant with Israel prepared the way for the coming of Christ and the fulfilment of God’s plan of salvation for the whole human race.
The New Testament witnesses to the incarnation of God the Son in the person of Jesus, the redemption won by Jesus’ ministry and passion and death, and the birth of the Church. God’s Spirit, given at Pentecost to the whole Christian community in a new and unique way, enabled the Church to determine which writings of the Old Testament and apostolic periods had to be regarded as inspired, and which had to be excluded from the canon.
Let’s note, finally, that Dei Verbum encourages Christians to study and meditate on Sacred Scripture as one of the best ways of nourishing their faith and strengthening their spiritual life (DV art 25).
The Church’s Magisterium
During his public ministry Jesus himself gave the apostles authority to carry on his role of teaching and leadership after his resurrection and ascension, and they in turn passed it onto their successors, who became known as ‘bishops’ (episcopos = ‘overseer’). Jesus also gave Saint Peter a unique role among the apostles, the origin of the pastoral authority of the papacy.
When it comes to understanding the role of the Magisterium we have to grasp the fact that the Church is the Body of Christ, who is risen and alive and active among his followers. The Church isn’t a purely man-made organisation.
In light of this fact we can see that the Church’s teaching authority is never a matter of some people exercising power over others in an arbitrary or dictatorial way, according to the dictates of fallen human nature. The proper working of the Magisterium depends entirely on everyone in the Church - teachers and taught, so to speak - submitting humbly and prayerfully to the guidance of the Holy Spirit so that we are all led to salvation, friendship with God and holiness of life.
It’s a basic Catholic conviction that we benefit ourselves when we allow our spiritual lives to be guided by Scripture and Tradition, accurately interpreted by the Church’s teaching authority. By the same token we deprive ourselves if we try to conduct our relationship with God relying mainly on our own capacities and insights, apart from these sources of divine truth.
Heart speaks to heart
Perhaps we can conclude this reflection by emphasising that cultivating a receptivity to Divine Revelation, to God’s manifestation of his nature, his will, his designs, is fundamental to Christian spiritual life.
God doesn’t communicate himself to us primarily in a list of facts and statistics. His communication is that of a Father who loves us and who longs for our salvation. He speaks to us, not to impart information, but to invite us to share his life and to elicit a response to his invitation.
So he addresses us, not with the kind of superficial conversation which forms no bond between persons, but in our innermost core where fundamental attitudes and motivations take shape - the level of being that the Bible calls the heart.
God inspires men to record his saving work
Over the centuries, through historical events, the preaching of the prophets and sometimes by way of God’s commissioning of particular individuals to carry out specific tasks, the Jewish people received a mysterious but unmistakable and ever-deepening knowledge of God and his intentions.
They were careful to record this knowledge in writing, and before long they came to understand that the writing itself would never have come into existence without God’s guidance and inspiration. Most of this writing became the Hebrew Scriptures, which form the greatest part of what we’ve come to call the Old Testament.
The Chosen People’s experiences of God, and the conclusions they drew from them, were also preserved in the practice of transmitting them, or handing then down from one generation to the next, a practice continued by the Christian community after Jesus’ resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit.
This process of handing on the truths of faith was given the label Tradition, from the Latin verb tradere: ‘to hand on to posterity’.
Of course Protestant and Catholic Christians differ substantially regarding this aspect God's self-revelation, but the Catholic view is that these two sources of knowledge provide unique and authoritative guidance in our relationship with God.
It’s important for us to accept them as authoritative guidance because the alternative is to allow our imagination to work overtime, or to rely too heavily on our own personal perceptions and experiences, in which case we’re in danger of ending up with a distorted and untruthful picture of God and his plans.
There are influences in our modern culture which make this a more acute danger now than in the past. The tendency at the moment is to value open-mindedness and flexibility and to react suspiciously to the idea of ‘dogmas’ or ‘orthodoxy’, which a lot of people see as being restrictions on freedom of thought. There’s also the individualist tendency which encourages people to place a high value on their own subjective ideas, opinions, tastes and preferences.
These attitudes aren’t a problem if we’re decorating our living room or choosing a mobile phone. But when it’s applied to the spiritual life and our relationship with God they very easily lead us on a wild goose chase and delay our progress, instead of guiding us into a deepening knowledge and love of the ‘living and true God’ (1 Thess 1:9).
Sacred Tradition: the Catholic understanding
From the earliest times the community of Jesus’ disciples recognised that, in the form of everything they had witnessed and experienced in their association with Jesus, God had embarked on a new and fuller revelation of himself. They could see that in the person and mission of Jesus God had carried out the decisive, final stage in his plan of salvation for humanity.
These truths of God’s new revelation had to be safeguarded and preserved, and the community’s understanding of them had to be interpreted correctly, developed and deepened.
A ‘deposit’ of Christian faith quickly began to take shape: fundamental beliefs such as that Jesus truly rose from the dead, based on the testimony of the eye-witnesses, but also Christian moral norms, as found in the accounts of Jesus’ teaching ministry in the Gospels and in the New Testament letters. Christian Tradition also came quickly to include particular practices, like the gathering for the celebration of the Eucharist every week on the day of Jesus’ resurrection, Sunday, the new Christian Sabbath.
The priority of Tradition
The second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles gives a picture of how the Christian Tradition of belief and practice developed from the earliest stages of the Church’s history.
The author, Saint Luke, records that the first converts to Christ ‘held steadfastly’ to the teaching of the apostles appointed by Jesus; to the fellowship, i.e. the spirit of fraternity and solidarity in Christian faith and discipleship; to the breaking of bread - the celebration of the Eucharist in keeping with Jesus’ command at the Last Supper - and to ‘the prayers’ (Acts 2:42).
In the same way, around the year 50 A.D. - some twenty or so years after Jesus’ death and resurrection - Saint Paul was already appealing to the members of the community he had founded at Thessalonica to ‘stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or in writing’ (2 Thess 2:15).
In other words, two notable feature of the Church’s life from the very beginning were:
(a) the establishing of authoritative and unalterable truths about God’s plan of salvation, which had begun with Abraham and culminated in Jesus, and:
(b) the acceptance of these truths as a condition of Christian community membership and as the foundation for the life of Christian discipleship. The New Testament testifies to the formation of the Church’s Tradition from the earliest period of apostolic leadership, immediately following Jesus’ resurrection and ascension.
In that same early period the first followers of Jesus concluded resolutely that neglect or rejection of Sacred Tradition inevitably leads to spiritual confusion, disunity and separation from God - a theme that runs through the whole of Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
Sacred Scripture
The other source, or channel, of God’s revelation of himself is Sacred Scripture, in other words, the books of the Bible.
Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (the word of God), sets out a summary of traditional Catholic belief about the status and value of Sacred Scripture, and here I think there is less disagreement between Protestant and Catholic views:
- it was part of God’s plan for certain truths to be committed to writing;
- the resulting written works are to be considered as inspired by God himself and are not just the result of human speculation and imagination;
- Sacred Scripture consists of a definite, limited number of writings which are recognised as being divinely inspired (the ‘canon’ of Scripture); and
- the books of Scripture teach us ‘solidly, faithfully and without error’ the truths which God wanted to put into sacred writings ‘for the sake of salvation’ (DV art 11).
Of course the books of the Bible were written by human beings, but God is their principal and ultimate author: ‘In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted’ (DV art 11).
The Old Testament documents the way that God gradually guided the Chosen People into a deeper understanding of his nature and his purposes, and shows how the Covenant with Israel prepared the way for the coming of Christ and the fulfilment of God’s plan of salvation for the whole human race.
The New Testament witnesses to the incarnation of God the Son in the person of Jesus, the redemption won by Jesus’ ministry and passion and death, and the birth of the Church. God’s Spirit, given at Pentecost to the whole Christian community in a new and unique way, enabled the Church to determine which writings of the Old Testament and apostolic periods had to be regarded as inspired, and which had to be excluded from the canon.
Let’s note, finally, that Dei Verbum encourages Christians to study and meditate on Sacred Scripture as one of the best ways of nourishing their faith and strengthening their spiritual life (DV art 25).
The Church’s Magisterium
During his public ministry Jesus himself gave the apostles authority to carry on his role of teaching and leadership after his resurrection and ascension, and they in turn passed it onto their successors, who became known as ‘bishops’ (episcopos = ‘overseer’). Jesus also gave Saint Peter a unique role among the apostles, the origin of the pastoral authority of the papacy.
The Council of Jerusalem, described in Acts of the Apostles chapter 15,
was the first major example of decisive collegial teaching in the history of the Church
From the beginning the Church community understood that God had given the gift of his Spirit to these apostolic leaders in order to offer accurate and authoritative interpretations of both Scripture and Tradition, so as not to leave believers floundering among a variety of different, possibly erroneous and misleading, opinions. We only need to read Paul’s letters to see how many of these were flying around in the first few decades of the Church’s life.
When it comes to understanding the role of the Magisterium we have to grasp the fact that the Church is the Body of Christ, who is risen and alive and active among his followers. The Church isn’t a purely man-made organisation.
In light of this fact we can see that the Church’s teaching authority is never a matter of some people exercising power over others in an arbitrary or dictatorial way, according to the dictates of fallen human nature. The proper working of the Magisterium depends entirely on everyone in the Church - teachers and taught, so to speak - submitting humbly and prayerfully to the guidance of the Holy Spirit so that we are all led to salvation, friendship with God and holiness of life.
It’s a basic Catholic conviction that we benefit ourselves when we allow our spiritual lives to be guided by Scripture and Tradition, accurately interpreted by the Church’s teaching authority. By the same token we deprive ourselves if we try to conduct our relationship with God relying mainly on our own capacities and insights, apart from these sources of divine truth.
Heart speaks to heart
Perhaps we can conclude this reflection by emphasising that cultivating a receptivity to Divine Revelation, to God’s manifestation of his nature, his will, his designs, is fundamental to Christian spiritual life.
God doesn’t communicate himself to us primarily in a list of facts and statistics. His communication is that of a Father who loves us and who longs for our salvation. He speaks to us, not to impart information, but to invite us to share his life and to elicit a response to his invitation.
So he addresses us, not with the kind of superficial conversation which forms no bond between persons, but in our innermost core where fundamental attitudes and motivations take shape - the level of being that the Bible calls the heart.
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