Dei Verbum - The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation
The document Dei Verbum (Word of God) is one of only two dogmatic constitutions issued by the Second Vatican Council, the other being Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.
Its purpose is to spell out the Church’s understanding of the nature of revelation, that is, the process whereby God communicates with human beings. As such it touches on questions about Scripture, tradition and the teaching authority of the Church.
“Throughout, Dei Verbum states very clearly that the Bible is the word of God and is intended for the people, all of the people, in all times and in all places. It only makes sense, that if God is speaking to people; he needs to speak in a human fashion. Otherwise, the intended reader could never read the word of God.
In order, to accomplish that objective, God worked through human authors. The human authors did not know in most cases, that their writings would become part of something called the Bible and be so widely distributed and used. Instead, they wrote with much more modest objective. They were writing to a particular group, in a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular setting, in a particular language for a particular objective, with their particular background and with a particular style to meet all objectives. In some cases, their message was a verbal message and only written down many years later.
As a result, they wrote in various literary forms, languages, they use the historical settings that they found themselves in and using the references, and social conventions of their particular day for only that way would they be able to deliver the Lord’s message and to have it understood and accepted by the group that they were writing for. The texts took on various forms such as historical, prophetic, poetic or other forms of discourse. The writer was using the then contemporary literary forms.
But all these variations of literary forms and historical and cultural settings present a problem to us in our historical and cultural settings. Dei Verbum is making it clear that the interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and then express in terms of his contemporary literary culture of his own time.”
( , accessed 1.9.12)
Consider [passage of scripture from the Old Testament]
From what you know about life at the time this was written what do you think is the main message of this text? Why did the author write about it in this way?
What would people living at the time of Jesus have understood from this passage of scripture?
What message does it have for us today?
What do we need to know of the context in which it was written to understand its message today?
Does it speak to us without knowing the background?