March 16, 2025 - Pastor Message
March 30, 2025JUBILEE 2025 DEI VERBUM (cont.)
JUBILEE 2025
DEI VERBUM (cont.)
“Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the Sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:14-17).
Continuing our reflection on divine revelation as taught by Vatican Council II’s Dei Verbum, we recall that God reveals himself and his saving will to us through a dynamic interplay of actions and words. God interacts with human beings in history, through his covenant with Abraham, for example, and then inspires human authors through the Holy Spirit to record these events and their meaning in writing, as in the stories about Abraham in the book of Genesis. Under the influence of the same Holy Spirit, God then moves the faith community to embrace these writings as authentic revelation. They are then added to the body of revealed texts we call Sacred Scripture.
While this process may sound simple, it is actually the work of centuries, even millenia, as the faith community received and discerned the many written texts circulating over that same time with the help of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ promised would lead us to all truth. Some texts were accepted and became part of what we call the canon of Scripture; others were rejected. This accounts for the many non-canonical writings that we find out there today, like the Gospel of Thomas. But trusting in the Holy Spirit, we know that, if they were rejected and not accepted into Scripture, there was a good reason.
We also believe that the books that were accepted as part of the canon of Scripture “firmly, faithfully, and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures” (Dei Verbum 11). This is what we mean by the inerrancy of Scripture, that the Bible not only is not, but cannot, be wrong in matters necessary for our salvation. Does that mean that every bit of information in the Bible is 100% historically, factually, and scientifically true according to the most modern standards of proof? Of course not. It is not a modern history or science book; it is a collection of ancient texts written to lead us to salvation, not to teach us the square root of 472. But in all matters necessary for our salvation, it is 100% true and cannot be false.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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