Sacred Scripture

Through Sacred Scripture, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them (Dei Verbum, 21). It is through the Bible that we meet the Person of Jesus Christ. We come to learn who He is, how He lived, what He taught, what He has done for us.

Why Scripture and Tradition? Why not Scripture only?

Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture flow from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For Sacred Scripture is the word of God in as much as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known.

Consequently it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence (Dei Verbum, 9)

In the written Word, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words (Dei Verbum, 21).