Commentary
Pope Leo at a General Audience today has exhorted the faithful to read the word of God in its historical context to avoid lapsing into dangerous fundamentalist renderings of the texts.
I am in total agreement with the Holy Father on this one and I feel very much that this was a timely message on his part, especially to both the likes of the USCCB and the Spanish cohort of Catholic bishops,¹ since these have, at times unfortunately coloured their renderings of certain doctrinal thematics in the language and tropes of more fundamentalist or historically disembedded and decontextualized interpretations of sacred Scripture.
While I think very much that the sacred revelation of God’s love for His people and that of Jesus Christ as Healer and Redeemer are divinely inspired revelations to the point that they comprise all that is of the capital “R” Revelation, I do not believe that some uses of certain then-contemporary worldly idioms which make up scattered portions of the Biblical texts (and certainly comprise less than 20 percent of the total discourse), are divinely inspired but rather, these are part of the erroneous facet of the fallen humanity of the writers, remembering too, that while these writers are indeed God’s emissaries, they though, unlike their Master, were not without sin hence, like you encounter in the Gospels themselves, there were moments where their human faults and weaknesses stood out and I think, in the context of writing this very important narrative of Biblical events, such faults and weaknesses were going to, at times, show up in the way something was expressed. Even after Jesus died and rose from the dead, some of His closest disciples had trouble coming to terms with what really happened. The Road to Emmaus story exemplifies this really well. It’s called God’s permissive will. You see, sacred Scripture is comprised of both the illumination and perfect Revelation of God’s holy will alongside there being present, a smattering of His permissive will at times, amongst the narratives and stories themselves and language used to tell these stories or to convey what was told by our Lord in these stories.
And so, I am of the opinion that even during the recording in writing, of all the events in sacred Scripture (Old Testament included), these events, though sometimes imperfectly written due to the imperfect nature of human weakeness, do not in any way detract from the fact that the events themselves and the Revelation that stems from them, is perfect and inspired by God. This is because the ratio of perfection alluding to divine import, and redemptive hope alongside liberative and restorative promise in those narratives and stories far outweighs the smattering of imperfectly described or embellished texts. And this is particularly noticable in those facets of sacred Scripture, where it is found that much of the language itself expresses a sublime poetic desire on the part of the one writing it, to know fully, the vastness of the depth and breadth of God’s love as communicated through His holy will for their life and indeed for Life itself – we see this flowing forth most abundantly from the Book of Psalms. Some parts of the Gospels– especially those demonstrative of Jesus’ healing, liberative and restorative power, are exemplary too in this respect. And we see in the Epistles of St Paul for instance – take Acts 20 as an example – moments where the inspiration of the Holy Spirit really stands out, so much so that the very choice of words themselves reflects this most ardently, most purely. However, it’s not always the case that the choice of words is going to reflect the positive movement of the Holy Spirit because, as we can see, there are many odd instances, where language is used rather ambiguously or in a way that reflects much more of a certain worldly spirit of that particular age in which the text was written. Hence, we must be careful and diligently observing, so as to discern rightly the intentions and action of God in the choice of words, from those of mere men.
Supplementary Reference:
¹ See the following link to another post I wrote on a similar themed issue back in 2024. This concerned a rather controversial take which some Spanish bishops decided to endorse relative to generationally inherited illnesses, whether they be of the more spiritual nature or a predominantly physical one:
Discover more from My Catholic Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My Catholic Blog 