00:00What is the word of God?
00:30What is the word of God?
01:00That's how it would have been.
01:02God in his infinite power was able to accomplish everything at once.
01:06For God, nothing is impossible.
01:09However, it must be clarified that these stories correspond to a particular style of the sacred author,
01:16at a specific time and to a specific town.
01:19To that we must add what we mentioned earlier about the traditions of the Bible and literary genres.
01:26In the light of reason, there will be things that we find unacceptable.
01:32In the light of faith, everything the word contains is true.
01:38A truth based on faith.
01:39And whose ultimate goal is to communicate to us the salvation offered by God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
01:47Everything we find in the Bible, everything we read in it, has been written down because God, in his perfect wisdom, considered it useful and necessary for our salvation.
02:01In his book, The Bible Is Not a Book, It Is a Person, José H. Prado tells us,
02:08Anything other than salvation is not essential in the Bible, but rather a vehicle for communicating the message of salvation.
02:17The one God who chooses a unique people for the blessing of all nations.
02:22Therefore, all statements that are confusing or contrary to reason or to the science of our day,
02:31They should be taken as a light that indicates to us that the fundamental thing is not in those words we read, but elsewhere.
02:40Therefore, our gaze must always be fixed on Christ, on Him who is the truth.
02:46This truth contained in the Bible has four characteristics that should always be taken into account.
02:54It is an oriental-style truth, that is, more than concepts and ideas, it expresses life with poetry and symbols.
03:03Through images and parables, he conveys the message that God proposes.
03:09It is a religious truth.
03:10The aspect in which the Bible commits to always telling the truth and not being wrong is only religious.
03:18He is never interested in writing a chronicle in a journalistic or historical style.
03:23but rather handles events according to the theological message it wants to convey, the history of salvation.
03:30It is a divine truth expressed in human words.
03:34The infallible and inexplicable nature of God is revealed to us through limited human language.
03:41No human words can adequately express what God is.
03:47The truth is in the entire Bible as a whole.
03:50Matthew tells the truth, but his message is complemented by reading John.
03:56to understand Paul and to know the prophets of the Old Testament.
04:00And for us, those who believe in Christ, the testimony of Jesus is more than evident.
04:06Science.
04:07Although the Bible is not a scientific book, we do not deny that its considerations in the field of science are true.
04:15The Bible is not an encyclopedia of all sciences, but the book of science.
04:21Certainly, we cannot classify it as a scientific book in the modern sense of the word.
04:27However, we also cannot go to the extreme of claiming that the Bible holds no truths for us regarding the human sciences.
04:37But faith is not the only element involved in accepting the truth contained in the Bible.
04:45For a correct assimilation of his message, we will also need reason.
04:50Man has a brain capable of reasoning, or what we call reason.
04:58We can consider things past, present, or future.
05:03Making judgments about them, funny things, sad things, true things, bad things, important or irrelevant things.
05:12We can, with reason, solve things, study them, test them, fix them in a way that makes sense to us.
05:22Logically, if we so desire.
05:25An atheist, for example, will use reason because it is in his own interest, just as a theist does.
05:33So there doesn't seem to be any inherent problem with reason and belief.
05:39To better understand this aspect, regarding the relationship between faith and reason, we quote some fragments from the catechesis of November 21, 2012,
05:50dictated by His Holiness, Benedict XVI, during the year of faith.
05:54From the beginning, Catholic tradition has rejected what is called fideism, which is the will to believe against reason.
06:05At the same time, God, with his grace, illuminates reason.
06:10It opens up new, immeasurable, and infinite horizons.
06:14Therefore, faith constitutes an incentive to always search, to never stop and to never become complacent in the inexhaustible discovery of truth and reality.
06:27The prejudice of certain modern thinkers, according to whom human reason is blocked by the dogmas of faith, is false.
06:35The exact opposite is true, as the great masters of the Catholic tradition have demonstrated.
06:43Saint Augustine, before his conversion, anxiously sought the truth through all available philosophies, finding them all unsatisfactory.
06:53His arduous rational search is for him a significant pedagogy for encountering the truth of Christ, when he says,
07:02Understand in order to believe, and believe in order to understand.
07:06It's as if he were recounting his own life experience.
07:09Catholic faith, intellect and faith, in the face of divine revelation, are not foreign or antagonistic, but both are a condition for understanding its meaning, for receiving its authentic message by approaching the threshold of the mystery.
07:26The Catholic faith is, therefore, reasonable and also fosters confidence in human reason.
07:32When we make judgments, accepting or rejecting things based on our senses, we usually tend to label them.
07:43The word of God does not ask us to build the bridge without a foundation, which is knowledge.
07:50Therefore, reason is not the enemy of trust; it is an essential part of the foundation.
07:56It is clear that the foundation must be solid, not made of deceptions or clever stories that later fade away.
08:06It must include the pure gospel of Jesus Christ.
08:09Therefore, the Bible should always be read with a Christological vision, that is, with Christ as the center of the message of salvation.
08:19Let us remember that the Lord himself tells us, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
