Faith, rightly understood, does not involve any surrender of one’s critical intellectual powers, nor is it tantamount to the acceptance of things on the basis of no evidence. ... Real faith is not infra-rational but rather supra-rational, that is to say, not below reason but above reason and inclusive of it. It is beyond reason precisely because it is a response to the God who has revealed himself, and God is, by definition, beyond our capacity to grasp, to see, fully to understand. It involves darkness to be sure, but the darkness that comes, not from an insufficiency of light, but from a surplus of light. If you are ever tempted to agree with Bill Maher on the nature of faith, I would invite you to read any page of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis, or G.K. Chesterton and honestly ask yourself the question, Does this sound like someone who has suspended his critical faculties? In its marvelous statement on Biblical interpretation, Dei Verbum, Vatican II says that the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men. That laconic statement ... clarifies why the fundamentalist strategy of Scriptural interpretation is always dysfunctional. God did not dictate the Scriptures word for word to people who received the message dumbly and automatically; rather, God spoke subtly and indirectly, precisely through human agents who employed distinctive literary techniques and who were conditioned by the cultures in which they found themselves and by the audiences they addressed... A further implication of Dei Verbum’s statement is that there is a distinction between what is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches. There are lots of things that are indeed in the pages of the Scriptures but that are not essential to the overarching message of the Scriptures, things that were in the cultural milieu of the human authors but that are not ingredient in the revelation that God intends to offer. A good example of this would be ... slavery ... [A]ttention to the great patterns and trajectories of the Bible as a whole reveals that the justification of slavery is not something that the Bible teaches, which is precisely why the fight against slavery in the western culture was led by people deeply shaped by the Scriptures.
Posted on: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:56:53 +0000
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