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Vatican Council II Document on Divine Revelation
DEI VERBUM
By Rev. Milton Walsh
"Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ" - St. Jerome

One of the graces of the Second Vatican Council is a greater hunger for the Word of God. Not that Catholic life before the Council was a wasteland where the Bible was concerned. We learned the stories of Scripture and its language informed our liturgical prayer and popular devotions. But for some, the Reformation "divorce" suggested a division of community property: we kept the altar, they got the pulpit. We proclaimed the Scriptures at Mass, but the Liturgy of the Word was secondary. How much richer is the vision of the Council:

"The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since from the table of both the word of God and of the body of Christ she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life..." (Constitution on Divine Revelation, #21).

When we speak of the "Word of God," we affirm that God is the author of our Scriptures. The Bible has human authors as well. How do the divine and human aspects of these writings come together? There are other religions whose beliefs are enshrined in sacred texts communicated to their founders as revelations from God: an ancient example would be the Koran, a recent one the Book of Mormon. The formation of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is very different from these. The Bible is the product of many centuries, written by many hands in many different communities. While in some instances what we read is presented in terms of a vision or divine command (such as the book of Revelation in the New Testament or the pronouncements of Old Testament prophets), there is much ordinary writing as well. St Paul did not write letters to his Corinthian community in some kind of ecstatic frenzy, taking dictation from a divine "voice." He was moved by very human emotions, and wrote in response to very concrete problems in the community. Subsequently, the Church came to realize that Paul's word to his community is also God's word to the Church.

A more complex example of this process may be seen in the Gospels. When we look at a painting, we know that the rich variety of hues is really a combination of three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. Similarly, our full-color Gospel portraits of Jesus were produced by combining three layers of tradition.

1) The first level is that of the life of Jesus himself, a Palestinian Jew of the early first century. We sometimes think naively that this level is self-evident, but we should remember that Jesus lived in a very different culture from our own, and if we wish to understand him and his message, we must become familiar with the world in which he lived.

2) The second level consists of the eye-witness accounts given by Jesus' followers after he rose from the dead. In their preaching, these disciples were interpreting the events of his ministry and death in light of their experience of his resurrection. They were also carrying the Gospel beyond Palestine to the cities of the Gentile world. This means they had to adapt the message of Christ to the language, customs and culture of their hearers.

3) Finally, there is the level of the written Gospels. These were produced many years after the events they record. Each account captures a unique view of Jesus shaped by the perspective of the community out of which a particular Gospel emerges. The written text comes at the end of a long process of experience and reflection, and no one picture exhausts the mystery of Christ.

What is true of the Gospels is true for the entire Bible: it is a product of the community of faith. This is an experience of encountering God in human terms; so it is appropriate that the expression of that encounter should be in human terms:

"For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as of old the Word of the eternal Father became like other people when he took to on the weak flesh of humanity" (Constitution on Divine Revelation, #13).

No golden tablets, no oracles or trances; rather, a humble God who chooses to speak to us in the words of our everyday life. The document on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, states:

"The books of scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted to put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation" (Constitution on Divine Revelation, #11).

Emphasis must be placed upon the "inerrancy" of the Bible in matters relevant to salvation insofar as God teach us the truth about God's plan for our lives. On the other hand, the Bible is not to be read as a text book of natural science or history. Although there is history in the Bible, that is not the purpose of the writing. The Bible is written to tell us who God was in the past and who God is for us in the present and who God continues to be for people in every age.

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