Verbum Domini 2

After the introduction, the first big section of Verbum Domini is called "God Who Speaks." Pope Benedict insists pretty strongly that those foundations he's already sketched out have very important concomitants.

...we would not yet sufficiently grasp the message of the Prologue of Saint John if we stopped at the fact that God enters into loving communion with us. In reality, the Word of God, through whom “all things were made”(Jn 1:3) and who “became flesh” (Jn 1:14), is the same Word who is “in the beginning” (Jn 1:1). If we realize that this is an allusion to the beginning of the book of Genesis (cf. Gen 1:1), we find ourselves faced with a beginning which is absolute and which speaks to us of the inner life of God. The Johannine Prologue makes us realize that the Logos is truly eternal, and from eternity is himself God. (VD, 6)

The absoluteness of the beginning of all that is made, and of the utter lack of beginning of the one who makes all things, are the great truths that define our horizon as creatures. "Jesus is God" is the great truth that defines our spiritual nature. Together, this truth grounds us in a reality of tangible love and purpose:

Created in the image and likeness of the God who is love, we can thus understand ourselves only in accepting the Word and in docility to the work of the Holy Spirit. In the light of the revelation made by God’s Word, the enigma of the human condition is definitively clarified. (6)

This kind of grounding cuts through all the esoteric angst of modernity, and gives us the means to unite our ordinary human suffering to Christ's. This kind of humility frees us to love:

For us, this proclamation is a word of freedom. Scripture tells us that everything that exists does not exist by chance but is willed by God and part of his plan, at whose center is the invitation to partake, in Christ, in the divine life. (8)

All the layers of Christ's own shape and nature, from His own "real, true, and substantial presence" in the Blessed Sacrament, to the other sacraments, the Church, Scripture and Tradition, our experience and interior illumination, and all the way down to the coherent reasonableness of other creatures -- all these layers make up this invitation "to partake... in the divine life." You might notice both that this is the "concentric model" of participation from Lumen Gentium, which we discussed recently; and also that this is the reverse of St. Hilarius's "ascent" from the basic rationality of creatures to the Creator. Neither of these similarities is accidental, as the quotes in #8 from Psalms, St. Bonaventure, and Dei Verbum make plain.

Given all this, the first two sentences in #9 are a whopper:

Reality, then is born of the word, as creatura Verbi, and everything is called to serve the word. Creation is the setting in which the entire history of the love between God and his creation develops; hence human salvation is the reason underlying everything. (9)

Every creature - angels, men, animals, trees, rocks and dirt - every creature is a creature "of the Word." The whole of creation, all of time and space, is therefore "the setting... of the love between God and his creation...". But in all that immense and wondrous creation, only we humans can respond freely to this gift of love. "Hence human salvation is the reason underlying everything." The whole of salvation exists, not just for us to use, but for us to use as means of responding to divine love. Everything about us and our culture and society is therefore, at root, profoundly Biblical (= Christological). And of course, if we say that, we can't avoid saying further that:

Jesus Christ then gives mankind the new law, the law of the Gospel, which takes up and eminently fulfils the natural law, setting us free from the law of sin... (9)

Verbum Domini, Introduction

You may have noticed that the Post-Synodal Exhortation, “Verbum Domini,” on the Word of God, was published yesterday. You should all find time to read it in the coming weeks. I keep harping on the deacon as “herald of the Gospel,” (believe what you read, preach what you believe, and practice what you preach; or, in the Extraordinary Form, Receive the power of reading the Gospels in the Church, as much for the living as for the dead) and therefore on our service as being shaped in a special way by the proclamation of the Good News. Pope Benedict is giving the same message to the whole Church in this document. It needs to shape our study of Scripture, of theology, of pastoral care, of liturgy, and of preaching.

This is a quick look at the document, with my first impressions. I'll go section by section, to make it manageable. Pope Benedict starts with the basics. The Church has received the Good News from Christ, the Word of God Incarnate, and an unchanging mission to proclaim it:

…we find ourselves before the mystery of God, who has made himself known through the gift of his word. This word, which abides forever, entered into time. God spoke his eternal Word humanly; his Word “ became flesh ” (Jn 1:14). This is the good news. This is the proclamation which has come down the centuries to us today. (Verbum Domini, 1)

So the Word is at the heart of everything the Church does (“Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”), like a “wellspring”:

In this way I wish to point out certain fundamental approaches to a rediscovery of God’s word in the life of the Church as a wellspring of constant renewal. At the same time I express my hope that the word will be ever more fully at the heart of every ecclesial activity. (1)

I don’t think this point can be stressed enough.

Pope Benedict goes on to remind us that this Word is not just an object of faith, but a gift, a person, and a communion of us with Him:

Called to communion with God and among ourselves, we must proclaim this gift. From this kerygmatic standpoint, the synodal assembly was a testimony, before the Church and before the world, to the immense beauty of encountering the word of God in the communion of the Church. For this reason I encourage all the faithful to renew their personal and communal encounter with Christ, the word of life made visible, and to become his heralds, so that the gift of divine life – communion – can spread ever more fully throughout the world. Indeed, sharing in the life of God, a Trinity of love, is complete joy (cf. 1 Jn 1:4). And it is the Church’s gift and unescapable duty to communicate that joy, born of an encounter with the person of Christ, the Word of God in our midst. (2)

If we meet and know Jesus by receiving the kerygma in the Gospel, our reception of Him as gift brings “complete joy,” and a burning desire to share that complete union with others. Our love for Him needs to be infectious, the more so since it is precisely the absence of Christ which makes modern life seem so difficult to bear:

There is no greater priority than this: to enable the people of our time once more to encounter God, the God who speaks to us and shares his love so that we might have life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10). (2)

(These are still the basics.) Growing in union with Christ is our purpose as human creatures. This is why God made each of us. We can’t fulfill that end without a personal encounter with the Word.

This next move is totally characteristic of Benedict’s ministry as Holy Father. As the Church has grappled more and more concretely with the modern world over the last 125 years or so, the necessary mode of the centrality of this personal encounter with Christ the Word has become more and more clear. (In the past, the encounter was often through poverty and asceticism, for example; but only in certain contexts through the Word in Scripture directly.) The foundation of his idea of a “hermeneutic of continuity” is the unchanging nature of this encounter, now being deployed by the Church in ways both old and new, to make it more available to people in this age:

Beginning with the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII, we can say that there has been a crescendo of interventions aimed at an increased awareness of the importance of the word of God and the study of the Bible in the life of the Church, culminating in the Second Vatican Council and specifically in the promulgation of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum. The latter represented a milestone in the Church’s history… Everyone is aware of the great impulse which the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum gave to the revival of interest in the word of God in the life of the Church… By celebrating this Synod, the Church, conscious of her continuing journey under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, felt called to further reflection on the theme of God’s word, in order to review the implementation of the Council’s directives, and to confront the new challenges which the present time sets before Christian believers. (3)

This 2008 Synod, then, and this document which is its fruit (guided by the Holy Spirit), is part of that trajectory of continuity of living faith, and of the same goal of bringing the personal encounter with Christ the Word to the front of the Church’s activities in the world, for evangelization and the salvation of souls.

This last point in the Introduction I’d like to note connects with my talk on St. Hilarius from a couple of weeks ago, at our Fall Day of Reflection. St. Hilarius used the Prologue of the Gospel of John as the foundation for his development of a Trinitarian theology, and for his spirituality as I described. Pope Benedict does the same thing here, and draws the same conclusion St. Hilary did: our whole spiritual life needs to “lean on the bosom of Christ, like St. John:”

I would like to present and develop the labours of the Synod by making constant reference to the Prologue of John’s Gospel (Jn 1:1-18), which makes known to us the basis of our life: the Word… May John, who “ saw and believed ” (cf. Jn 20:8) also help us to lean on the breast of Christ (cf. Jn 13:25), the source of the blood and water (cf. Jn 19:34) which are symbols of the Church’s sacraments.(5)