Читать книгу Catholicism For Dummies - Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Страница 33

Catholic faith involves more than just believing that God exists. It’s about believing in God as well as whatever God has revealed. Objectively, you can look at faith as the sum total of the truths God reveals, which form the basis for the doctrines of the Church and are often called the deposit of faith — the doctrines of the Church. Subjectively, you can consider faith as your personal response (assent) to those revealed truths.

We hear ya: “But what do you mean by revealed truths? And, for that matter, just what are God’s revealed truths?” By revealed truths, we mean revelations, God’s unveiling of supernatural truths necessary for human salvation. (The word revelation comes from the Latin revelare, meaning “to unveil.”) Some of these are truths that you could never know by science or philosophy; the human mind is incapable of knowing them without divine intervention, so God revealed them to mere mortals. For example, the revealed truth of the Holy Trinity is that there is only one God but three persons (not three gods, mind you). This truth is something that the human intellect could never discover on its own; God had to tell that one Himself.

Other revelations, such as the existence of God, can be known by using human reason alone (see the later section “Backing Up Your Faith with Reason: Summa Theologica”), but God reveals these truths directly anyway because not everyone understands them at the same time and in the same way. The essence of these revelations can be — and is presumed to be — knowable to anyone with the use of reason; so, for example, someone can’t claim he didn’t know it was wrong to commit murder. But because of original sin (see Chapter 8), some of the applications and distinctions of these basic truths require more reasoning and thinking. To even out the playing field, God revealed some important truths so that even those people who aren’t intelligent or quick-minded won’t be caught off guard.

As for what God’s revealed truths are, the most concise answer is His word. The Word of God is the revelation of God to His people. What is the Word of God? Catholics believe that the Word of God comes in two forms:

 The written word: Known also as Scripture or the Bible

 The spoken word: Also called the unwritten word or Sacred Tradition

Both the spoken and the written word come from the same source and communicate the same message — the truth. The written word and the spoken word of God are not in competition with one another, nor do Catholics believe one at the expense of the other. Rather, the written word and the spoken word have a mutual partnership. Whenever and wherever the Bible is silent on an issue or its meaning is ambiguous or disputed, the spoken word (Sacred Tradition) steps in to clarify the matter. Catholics believe that God’s word reflects what’s in His mind, and because God is all truth and all good, His word conveys truth and goodness. Catholics have deep respect for and devotion to the Word of God.