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Scripture "Everyone can get something and no-one gets everything"
While filming for the new CaFE series “Believe – Reflections on the Creed” Archbishop Mark Coleridge from Canberra shared his thoughts.
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“How can the Scriptures written by men be the inspired Word of God?”
“How can I encounter the inspired Word of God through Scripture?” First of all you have got to have an open ear and believe that God communicates to us through these words. If you don’t believe that then I suspect that all you will see are just dead human words from once upon a time, something like looking at a beautiful butterfly that is dead and pinned down in a glass case. Reading the Bible is much more like chasing beautiful live butterflies all over the place with a net with holes in it, you can catch some of the butterflies but you are not going to get them all. When you read the Bible you have to be alert to a word that is here and now and it can come at you from the page when you least expect it, there is a freshness, an immediacy and a power, a living voice that somehow comes out of nowhere. There is an endless divine creativity in the Scriptures speaking to our hearts. “What is Tradition and where does it fit in?” Tradition is simply the community of the Church reading the Bible from generation to generation and discovering endlessly new treasures in the infinitive abyss of its words. The great treasures and insights from that journey of reading through time have become documents like The Catechisms of the Catholic Church, the Creeds of the Church and the Missal of the Church. The Creed is simply a distillation of the Church’s reading of the Bible over time. It’s what we have discovered and heard from the lips of God. It’s what we have seen of Jesus who is the Word of God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is again simply a reading of the Bible. It is not ‘helpful household hints’ or vapid moralising or dead empty words – do this, don’t do that. It represents the fruit of a discovery, the Church saying these are the treasures that we have discovered and we want to pass them on to those who come after us.
Archbishop Mark Coleridge shares more of his thoughts on the Tradition and the Teaching of the Church in the DVD ‘God Speaks Through the Church – Tradition, Vatican II and the teaching of Pope John Paul II’. These illuminating and practical insights draw on his many years experience working in the Vatican for Pope John Paul II. Talk 1: The Tradition of the Church “What about the Magisterium?”
For more information about “Believe – Reflections on the Creed” a six part DVD series narrated by David Payne and interviews with prominent men and women of faith or any of the CaFE resources please contact: Catholic Evangelisation Services PO Box 333, St Albans, Herts. AL2 1EL Tel: 01727 823803/Fax: 01727 822837 Email: resources(at)faithcafe.org Web-Site: www.faithcafe.org www.youthcafe.org
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The
Bible is unquestionably written by humans but at the heart of it all
there is a communication which is more than human words. It is the Word
of God in human words. The Bible was not written for scholars or by
scholars, it was written by people who were brilliant from a literary
and theological point of view, but it is a literature that is intended
to speak to everyone, the young, the old, the scholar and the uneducated.
The word of God is an infinite communication and our journey of reading
the Bible is an endless process of discovering more and more. Everyone
can get something from Scripture and no-one gets everything.
The
Church says that there is a truth, not just my truth or your truth,
but God’s Truth for the world. Jesus promised to send us the Spirit
of Truth because he knew that left to our own devices we could never
have discovered it for ourselves. We believe that this Spirit of Truth
is still speaking to the Church in all kinds of ways. As well as Scripture
and Tradition there is the Magisterium. This is the name given to certain
people in the Church who are anointed by the Spirit to ensure that the
Church’s reading of the Bible and the hearing of the Word of God
doesn’t go astray. The Pope and the Bishops (the Magisterium),
as successors of the Apostles, are those anointed by the Spirit to ensure
that the Word that the Church hears is the Word of God.