By Fr Nicholas Crowe, OP
Theology, in contrast to other more
philosophical attempts to deal with the mystery of God, is only possible
because God has spoken. The fact that God made us and made the world we live in
means that it is in theory possible to deduce, simply by thinking long enough
and hard enough, that God exists and that he must be one, simple, good,
omnipotent and so on.
However, whilst we can know that God exists from
his actions and effects using our natural powers of reasoning alone, we cannot
reach beyond the knowledge gained from our senses to know who God is
without God’s help. There is no way for us to independently reach up to God and
discover what he is like. If we are to come to know God, then, God must come to
us. God must make himself accessible to us. God must communicate with us. We
call God’s self-communication to us revelation, that is, the ‘revealing’
of something to us that is otherwise hidden or covered up. And what God has
freely chosen to reveal to us is the extent of His love for us.
So how exactly does God communicate his love to
us? Let’s start by thinking through how human beings reveal their love for one
another. The most direct way to tell someone that we love them is simply to
tell them. But we all know that communication is about
much more than words alone. The way we use words, our tone and our body
language and so on adds nuance and meaning to what we say, as does the way we
live our lives more broadly. Our words become meaningless if they are not
matched by deeds. But if our words do in fact correspond with our actions then
they can help the other person to see the true significance of our behaviour.
Our words can help other people to make sense of what we are doing. So we can
say that human beings communicate love to one another by what we say, how we
say it, and what we do.
Now God’s love is even more mysterious than
human love, but again we can say that God communicates His love through words
and deeds, and that the words of God help us to understand the meaning of God’s
loving actions. Now of course, God does not speak and act in the same manner as
a human being. Instead, in the Old Testament we find God speaking through
the prophets, and we see God speaking in the events of Israel’s history
itself. So just as human beings communicate their love through words and
actions, God also speaks through the inspired words of the prophets which are
recorded for us in the Old Testament, and through His providential ordering of
the revelatory events of Israel’s history.
The Prophets and the Old Testament
I think it is this interconnection of words
and deeds that first led Israel to trust their Sacred Scriptures. The prophets
were not speaking into a vacuum. The Sacred Scriptures did not appear suddenly
and out of nowhere. Instead, they emerged in the context of a community that
was trying to make sense of its relationship with God. In time, the Scriptures
would gain a privileged and authoritative place in the life of the people of
Israel precisely because these writings, inspired by the Holy Spirit, led men
and women into a more profound relationship with the living God. Israel learned
to trust the Sacred Scriptures because they found, through experience and
prayer, that these texts led them to God.
Nevertheless, neither the words of the great prophets, nor the
revelatory events of Israel’s history are fully able to communicate the love of
God. Full communication demands full communion: and so it was fitting that the
Word of God, which had been spoken through the prophets, and was inscribed in
the history of Israel, became flesh and dwelt among us.
Jesus and the New Testament
In Jesus, God spoke of His love for humanity
using the full range of human communication. Jesus revealed God’s love to us in
who He was, what He said, and what He did - especially through his free choice
to sacrifice Himself for our sake on the cross. Once again, then, we have the
love of God communicated to us in words and deeds. This time, however, the love
of God was revealed to mankind by a man: Jesus loves us as one of us. He loves
us in a human way and so opens up the possibility of us loving Him in a human way. The
coming of Jesus, the Word made flesh, opened up the possibility of a new kind of
relationship with God whereby God makes His love known to us through the Sacred
Humanity of Jesus.
Now it was the Apostles who were most fully
immersed in this revelatory relationship with God through the Sacred Humanity
of Jesus. It was the apostles who lived closest to Him and shared His life most
intimately during his public ministry, and on the day of Pentecost it was the
apostles who were filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Jesus commissioned
these apostles to hand on to the four corners of the world what they had seen
and heard so that the revelation of the Word made flesh might be received by
every tribe and people and nation. Once the apostolic preaching mission was
well under way the apostles and their associates, under the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit, began to commit their preaching and teaching about Jesus to
writing. These writings make up what we now call the ‘New Testament’.
Why did the early Church accept these New
Testament writings as Sacred Scripture? Why does the Church continue to this
day to trust that these writings are inspired by God? It seems to me that once
again this interconnection of words and deeds is key. The New Testament emerged
from an encounter with the Word made flesh, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Through
prayer and meditation Christians have found that these texts lead back to an
encounter with the same Risen Lord. Our trust in the Sacred Scriptures, then,
is inseparably bound up with our faith in the Word made flesh who inspired
these writings, and our confidence in His mystical Body the Church which draws
its life from Christ’s bodily presence among us under Sacramental signs. We
trust in the Sacred Scriptures because we recognise within their pages the
voice of the Lord who is alive and dwelling amongst us: the Bible speaks to us
of God and our relationship with God, and in its Truth Christians in every
generation have found freedom.
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