Dear People Whom God Loves,
We Catholics have a religious tradition. It grew out of the Jewish religious tradition. With the coming of Jesus, some of that Jewish tradition was retained, some was not, and new tradition came forth. We believe that the Spirit of God was active in this process and still is active today.
Our Sacred Scriptures are the fundamental records of how God was experienced by the Jews and then by the early followers of Jesus. The Sacred Scriptures have a foundational place in our tradition.
We don’t believe that the Spirit dictated the words of Scripture. We believe that God was truly revealing. At the same time, we believe that God’s revelation was experienced by human persons and that their experience of God was written down with human concepts and words. This, in turn, was influenced by the thinking and culture in which the writers lived. We also believe that the Spirit was mysteriously present to this process. The action of the Spirit is mysterious. We must be humble enough to acknowledge that we can never fully understand how God acts. God’s ways are not our ways.
We also believe that the Spirit didn’t leave us after the beginning. The canonical Scriptures have a primary place. That is why they are foundational. People continued to plumb that early experience of God and Jesus and to make it able to influence the lives of people of many different cultures. This, of course, is a challenge because we must try to communicate that early experience in a way that makes it possible for people of vastly different times and cultures to receive that experience. We believe that Spirit is still active in this process. We also believe that the Spirit’s presence is mysterious. I personally believe that we need to trust God even though we don’t know just how God operates.
Next time we will look at two ways that it is common for us to look at tradition that are not helpful.
Smile, God Loves You,
Father Clay
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