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Reason Enlightened By Faith
By peace | June 22, 2007
Reason Enlightened By Faith
All of Christ’s teaching, all that Jesus has revealed to us, has been under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit — the third person of the Trinity — who constantly leads and guides the Church. The teaching of Christ has also been applied to the problems of every age. Through the Church’s teaching office, represented by the magisterium, the human condition and all the questions it poses have been confronted over and over again under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The solutions that have been offered and that form the Christian moral code are the result of reason enlightened by faith — applying the truth of God’s revelation, but always under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
It is one of the great gifts of Christ to his people that the Church can benefit from the fruit of two thousand years of examining the human condition under the guidance of the Holy Spirti as it offers a response to each situation. We can turn then both to the pages of Sacred Scripture and to the magisterial interpretation of those words in the living tradition of the Church to understand the teaching of Christ.
The Church has always taken this approach. Centuries ago, at the very beginning the Christian era, Justin Martyr saw his task as explaining the revelation of Christ to the people of his age — the Roman world — through the words of their culture, the mindset and frame of references they understood.
In effect, the first great apologist said to the Romans, “Let me tell you what Jesus is all about, but in your words, your language, your categories.” He even wrote to the emperor to prove that what we believe is not only salvific but also logical. His first and second Apology and Dialogue and Aristides’ Apology among others are examples of the effort to help people understand the truth about our faith in their own terms.
The task is the same for the apologists today — to translate the meaning of Christ and his revelation to our age in our categories, in our language, in our frame of reference, so that it can be truly understood and lived.
~ The Catholic Way, Faith for Living Today, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl
Topics: Faith, View All Post |
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