Dei verbum

And so he concludes saying, "...therefore it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and the apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation." In other words, we're all agreed that the Word of God has primacy, and especially the written Word of God is the fundamental starting point for doing theology.

And Dei Verbum, the document from Vatican II, is very firm on this.

The written Word of God is the starting point for all theology.

However, we do have this reality that everybody seems to interpret the Bible in their own way.

The, um, you know, basically everything that we're standing on comes from an understanding what's in our futures from the Word of God.

I just wanted to read this little line from Dei Verbum just to re- just to, uh, really have confidence in the power of the Word of God.

It says, "Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted to put into s- the sacred writings."

Mm-hmm.

And then, actually, the third and final point to mention here is before the Church steps in, in a top-down way with the Magisterium, the first way that we come to know which books belong in the Bible is through tradition.

And Vatican II is actually explicit about this in Dei Verbum, that one of the clearest reasons why you need tradition in addition to Scripture alone is because Scripture alone doesn't tell you which books belong in Scripture, so it doesn't work as a principle.

The early Christians recognized which books came from the apostles because they knew the apostles had written those things.

And they passed on that knowledge to other Christians.

And I think that's an especially good tie-in to where we're going here, talking about the book, Divine Revelation, the Bible According to Vatican II.

Because of course, when we're thinking about Dei Verbum, it's no secret, a lot of people know that the future Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, had an influence, a great influence on the drafting of what became Dei Verbum, which is the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation.

But also, de Lubac did, obviously.

I mean, he, you know, the whole kind of movement that de Lubac was a part of led in many ways to the way the church, you know, came to articulate its understanding of God's revelation to the world.

Really, maybe you could just tell us what this book is for our listeners and viewers who haven't seen it yet.

Certainly.

Well, as we may know, our Dei Verbum itself consists of a preface and six chapters.

But de Lubac's book only covers the preface and chapter one.

Now, there had been earlier explanations of what these concepts meant, but the most recent highly authoritative one is from the Second Vatican Council.

The document in question is called Dei Verbum, which is Latin for the Word of God, and the whole document is devoted to the Word of God, including the Bible.

But it should be noted, not just the Bible, because in addition to the Bible being the Word of God, God's Word is also transmitted by Christian preaching.

You know, when the apostles went out and preached to people, they were preaching the Word of God.

where it's overwhelmingly used is for the preaching of God's message.

And therefore, since it's not limited to what's found in Scripture, the Word of God is also expressed in what you could call tradition or apostolic tradition.

And so the Second Vatican Council document, Dei Verbum, discusses the Word of God in general, both as it's expressed in Scripture and as it's expressed in tradition.

And one of the things that distinguishes Scripture from tradition is Scripture has a fixed form.

That's not academically rigorous." But in fact, what the Catechism is doing is basically applying what Vatican II taught in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, especially there in Article 12, where you have these three rules that are identified, three theological criteria.

And then what's so striking is, quoting Vatican II, quoting Dei verbum in Article 119, it is the task of what? Mystics to work-

No

...

Right.

And I don't wanna get bogged down, but I wanna, I wanna show how he borrows Hamilton's definition of typology in a way that we would all find helpful.

Typology is, quote, "Canonical exegesis." So you're reading the content and unity of all of scripture just as Dei verbum.

Dei verbum's rule one.