June 30, 2009

Understanding Bible requires faith, intelligence

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Discovering the truth contained in the Bible about God and about each human person requires attentive reading and scholarship as well as a constant willingness to change one’s life, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“God gave us the Scriptures to teach us,” the pope said June 10 at his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square.

Reviewing the teaching of John Scotus Erigena, a ninth-century Irish theologian and philosopher, Pope Benedict said Erigena insisted on the fact that the only way to understand the Bible fully was with an approach that relied on intelligence and prayer at the same time and that the final result was not understanding, but contemplation.

An expert on the writings of the early Christian theologians of the East, Erigena said the purpose of the Bible is to help the human person “remember that which was impressed on his heart at the moment he was created in the image and likeness of God,” an understanding of God later clouded over by original sin, the pope said.

“The words of the Holy Scriptures purify our reason, which is somewhat blind, and help us remember that which we bear in our hearts as images of God,” Pope Benedict said.

For Erigena, the pope said, a Christian Has “the obligation to continue to seek the truth until one reaches an experience of silent adoration of God.”

The theologian taught that to know God people cannot start with their own ideas or intuitions, but must begin “with what God has said about himself in the Holy Scriptures,” Pope Benedict said.

Because God speaks only the truth,” Erigena “was convinced that authority and reason can never be in opposition and he was convinced that true religion and true philosophy coincide,” the pope said.

“This led him to draw certain consequences for interpreting the Scriptures, consequences that still today can indicate the correct path for reading
the Holy Scriptures,” the pope said.

This exercise consists in cultivating a constant readiness for conversion. To reach a deep understanding of the text, it is necessary to move simultaneously toward the conversion of heart and the correct conceptual analysis of the biblical passage,” the pope said.

Obviously, the closer a person comes to understanding the text and understanding God, the more one becomes aware of his or her weaknesses and limits, he said.

“The simple and sweet force of truth” pushes the studious believer to go even deeper, finally reaching the point of “adoring, silent recognition” of God,the pope said.

At the end of the audience, Pope Benedict greeted representatives of the Variety Club of France, which was organizing a benefit soccer match between former stars of French soccer and members of the Swiss Guard.

On behalf of the Variety Club, Marius Tresor, a French soccer star in the 1947s and 80s, gave the pope a team shirt and a Variety Club official gave. The pope a bottle of cognac from 1927, the year of the pope’s birth.

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