Verbum Domini part 1 section 3

The Interpretation of Sacred Scripture in the Church

• Without faith there is no key to throw open the Sacred text... It is impossible for anyone to attain knowledge of that truth unless he fist has infuse faith in Christ, which is the lamp, the gate and the foundation of all Scripture.

• We can never read Scripture on our own. We come up against too many closed doors and we slip too easily into error. It was written by the People of God for the People of God ... Only in this communion can we truly enter as a 'we' into the heart of the truth God wants to convey to us.

• Access to a proper understanding of bibcal texts is only granted to the person who has an affinity with what the text is saying on the basis of life experience

• "the study of the sacred page should be the very soul of theology"

• The history of salvation is not mythology, but a yrue history, and it should thus be studied with the methods of seious historical research.

• An attitude of respect, esteem, and love for the Jewish people is the onlyn truly Christian attitude in the present situation, which is a mysterious part of God's wholly positive plan.


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Verbum Domini part 1 section 2

Our response to the God who speaks

• We were created in the word and we live in the word; we cannot understand ourselves unless we are open to this dialogue.

• In this dialogue with God we come to understand ourselves and we discover an answer to our heart's deepest questions

• The Book of Psalms, where God gives us words to speak to him

• Man's sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear

• Our apostolic and pastoral work can never be effective unless we learn from Mary how to be shaped by the working of God within us.

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Verbum Domini part 1 section 1

The God Who Speaks

• There is no greater priority than this: to enable the people of our time once more to encounter God, the God who speaks to us and shares his love so that we might have life in abundance.

• The Word of God makes us change our concept of realism: the realist is the one who recognizes in the word of God the foundation of all things.

• This realism is particularly needed in our own time when many things in which we are tempted to put our hopes, prove ephemeral. Possesions, pleasures and power show themselves sooner or later to be incapable of fulfilling the deepest yearnings of the human heart.

• This 'condescension' of God is accomplished surpassingly in the incarnation of the Word. The eternal Word, expressed in creation and communicated in salvation history, in Christ became a man.

• The Son himself is the Word became small - small enough to fit in a manger. He became a child, so that the word could be grasped by us.

• From the beginning, Christians realized that in Christ the word of God is present as a person. The word of God is the true light that men and women need. In the resurrection the Son of God truly emerged as the light of the world. Now, by living with him and in him, we can live in the light.

• We can compare the cosmos to a 'book' -Galileo himself used this example- and consider it as "the work of an author who expresses himself through the 'symphony' of creation.

• Since he has given us his Son, his only word (for he posseses no other), he spoke everything at once in y¡this sole word - and he has no more to say...

• Private revelations... Whose mission is... to help live more fully bt it in a certain period of history.

• Private revelation is an aid to this faith, and it demonstrates its credibility precisely because it refers back to the one public revelation.

• We cannot come to understand the meaning of the word unless we are open to the working of the Paraclete

• Ultimately, it is the living Tradition of the Church which makes adequately understand Sacred Scripture as the word of God

• Althouth the word of God precedes and exceeds sacred Scripture... It contains the divine word "in an altogether singular way".

• Whenever our awareness of its inspiration grows weak, we risk reading Scripture as an object of historical curiosity and not as the work of the Holy Spirit in which we can hear the Lord himself speak

• Christ experienced the silence of the Father when He was on the Cross (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?)... God also speaks by his silence... Is the situation of all those who, having heard His word, must also comfront his silence. God's silence prolongs his earlier words.

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