Feb 15 Sun
Does the Sacred Scripture have a human dimension? Does it have a divine origin?
Today, we read Jesus stating, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not a single letter, … will disappear from the Law until all things have been accomplished."
The divine origin of the Bible is a truth of faith. This belief must be a starting point. When we read the Bible, we must remember that God is its author. Thus, we must search out what God wanted to manifest to us.
Even though the human writer (called the hagiographer) is involved in writing the sacred books, God is the primary author, the three divine Persons in one, but it is attributed to the Holy Spirit.
Oftentimes, the Fathers of the Church compared the action of God in inspiring Sacred Scripture to that of a writer using a pen, the human writer being analogous to the pen. The hagiographer was the instrument God used to write the Bible.
In every action caused with the use of an instrument, we can observe that there is a principal cause (or agent) and the instrumental cause (or instrument). The agent raises the instrument above its nature when the agent applies it to the action.
In the writing of the holy books, God is the principal cause, and the hagiographer is God’s instrument: He makes him capable of writing something beyond natural human capabilities.
Furthermore, any instrument has two actions: a proper action, according to its nature (to make strokes is proper of a pen); and an instrumental action, influenced by the main agent (to write a poem). In this way, the writer’s activity is at the service of God, without losing his particular traits.
The Sacred Scripture is “the Word of God in human words.”
Pope Leo told us recently:
“Sacred Scripture, read in the living Tradition of the Church, is a privileged space for encounter where God continues to speak to the men and women of every time, so that, by listening, they can know him and love him. In some cases, making oneself understood to others is the first act of love. This is why God chooses to speak using human languages and thus, various authors, inspired by the Holy Spirit, have written the texts of Sacred Scripture.”
“Therefore, not only in its content, but also in its language, the Scripture reveals God’s merciful condescension towards men, and his desire to be close to them.”
We must be aware of two deficient approaches to Scripture.
“A correct interpretation of the sacred texts cannot dispense with the historic environment in which they developed and the literary forms that were used; on the contrary, to renounce the study of the human words that God used risks leading to fundamentalist or spiritualist readings of the Scripture, which betray its meaning.”
“Equally reductive, on the other hand, is a reading of Scripture that neglects its divine origin and ends up understanding it as a mere human teaching, as something to be studied simply from a technical point of view or as a text ‘only of the past.’”
God gives us the essential nourishment of his Word; our lives must not obscure the love of God that is narrated in Scripture.