1. God reveals Himself through Scripture and Tradition, speaking through human authors under divine inspiration. 2. Revelation is definitively fulfilled through Christ and the Gospels, and received by individuals through the Holy Spirit. 3. The Old and New Testaments together form part of the single deposit of divine revelation, with the Old Testament preparing for and pointing to the fulfillment of revelation in Christ.

1. Opening the Old Testament
• Welcome
• Amenities
• Structure of the course
• Assessment
• Questions

2. Why should we use the Old Testament
any way?
• Answers on the board
• Now behold, two of them were traveling that same day to a village
called Emmaus, which was seven miles[a] from Jerusalem. 14 And
they talked together of all these things which had happened. 15 So it
was, while they conversed and reasoned, that Jesus Himself drew
near and went with them. 16 But their eyes were restrained, so that
they did not know Him.
17 And He said to them, “What kind of conversation is this that you
have with one another as you walk and are sad?”[b]
18 Then the one whose name was Cleopas answered and said to
Him, “Are You the only stranger in Jerusalem, and have You not
known the things which happened there in these days?”
19 And He said to them, “What things?”

3. Emmaus
• So they said to Him, “The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who
was a Prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the
people, 20 and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to
be condemned to death, and crucified Him. 21 But we were hoping
that it was He who was going to redeem Israel. Indeed, besides all
this, today is the third day since these things happened. 22 Yes, and
certain women of our company, who arrived at the tomb
early, astonished us. 23 When they did not find His body, they came
saying that they had also seen a vision of angels who said He was
alive. 24 And certain of those who were with us went to the tomb
and found it just as the women had said; but Him they did not see.”
25 Then He said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to
believe in all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Ought not the Christ
to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” 27 And
beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in
all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.

4. OT in the NT
• 2 Timothy 3:16 - All scripture is inspired by
God and profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, and for training in
righteousness,
• There is around 350 OT quotes in the NT
• Jesus quotes the OT

5. Marcionism
• AD 140:
Marcion, a businessman in Rome, taught that
there were two Gods:
Yahweh, the cruel God of the Old
Testament, and Abba, the kind father of the
New Testament. Marcion eliminated the Old
Testament as scriptures and, since he was anti-
Semitic, kept from the New Testament only 10
letters of Paul and 2/3 of Luke's gospel (he
deleted references to Jesus's Jewishness).

6. What is the Old Testament?
• How would you describe the Old Testament?
• The Word of God
• Sacred Scripture (Sacra Scriptura)
• Part of the Bible

7. The Bible
• What does the word The Bible mean?
• to βιβλίον
• τὰ βιβλία
• What does Testament mean?
• The Latin word testamentum translates the
Hebrew word for "covenant," berith.
• Language is very important!

8. Why do we trust the Bible?
• Answers on the board
• So we have established that Jesus used the OT
and that the Bible comes from the early
Church. But still why should we trust that this
is the revelation of God to Humanity?
• The question is: What is revelation?

9. Revelation?
How Does God Communicate to the
Human Family?

10. Topics
• The context
• The Basis of Revelation
• Scripture and Tradition

11. Context
• What is Revelation?

12. The Basis of Revelation
• The Shema “Hear”
• God is a God who speaks (Dei Verbum)
• God speaking through creation (Humanity)
• Rom 1:19. “For what can be known about God is
perfectly pain to them, since God has made it plain
to them: ever since the creation of the world, the
invisible existence of God and his ever lasting power
have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding
of created things.”

13. Through Creation
• C.S Lewis: “God has impressed some sort of likeness to
Himself… in all that he has made. Space and time, in their own
way, mirror His Greatness; all life His fecundity; animal life His
activity. Man has a more important likeness by being rational.”
• Jean Danielou, “…the stars and the regularity of their
courses, the rock and its stillness, the dew and its blessing-are
so many hierophanies, visible manifestations through each of
which an aspect of God is revealed. This revelation has
another basis too, a metaphysical one, on the general analogy
of being; according to this, all being is a participation in
God, and bears some traces of Him.”

14. Analogia Entis
• Aristotle: Unmoved mover, first cause (not
Christian as it is not personal)
• Something of the cause is in the effect. We
see the painter in the paining
• Tension must be held between God as
immanent and transcendent.

15. Reality of Analogy
• Danilou “God and Us” p5 “Origen used to say that it
is always dangerous to speak of God. It is true that all
we say of Him seems utterly unworthy, in
comparison with what He is; …He is, says Pseudo-
Dionysius, all that is and nothing that is.”
• CCC The dissimilarity out ways the similarity

16. Personal Revelation
• It is to the person that God speaks. To every person
always.
• St Augustine; “and lo you were within me and I
outside.”
• Revelation needs to be received, this is ultimately the
work of the Holy Spirit. (Hear)
• St Basil says that “The Spirit alone knows the depths
of God, and creatures receive from him the
revelation of his mysteries.”

17. The Phenomenon of Religion
• Ethics and religion are universal

18. What has this to do with Scripture?
• How is Scripture the revelation of God?
• How is this different to personal or general
revelation?

19. Scripture and Tradition
• What is the Christian understanding of
Revelation?
• History as Revelation
• First Covenant
• Final Covenant

20. Dei Verbum
• 2. In His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make
known to us the hidden purpose of His will by which, through Christ, the
Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father
and come to share in the divine nature. Through this
revelation, therefore, the invisible God out of the abundance of His love
speaks to men as friends, and lives among them, so that He may invite and
take them into fellowship with Himself.
• This plan of revelation is realized by deeds and words having in inner
unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and
confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words
proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them. By this
revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man
shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness
of all revelation.

21. The First Covenant
• 3 Through the patriarchs, and after them
through Moses and the prophets, He taught
this people to acknowledge Himself the one
living and true God, provident father and just
judge, and to wait for the Savior promised by
Him, and in this manner prepared the way for
the Gospel down through the centuries.

22. The Final Covenant
• 4. Then, after speaking in many and varied ways
through the prophets, "now at last in these days God
has spoken to us in His Son" (Heb. 1:1-2).
• For this reason Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling
it through his whole work of making Himself present
and manifesting Himself: through His words and
deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through
His death and glorious resurrection from the dead
and final sending of the Spirit of truth.

23. Scripture and Tradition
• The words of the holy fathers witness to the
presence of this living tradition, whose wealth is
poured into the practice and life of the believing and
praying Church. Through the same tradition the
Church's full canon of the sacred books is
known, and the sacred writings themselves are more
profoundly understood and unceasingly made active
in her

24. Inspiration
• 11(Scripture is ) written under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit (and) have God as their
author… In composing the sacred books God
chose men, and while employed by Him they
made use of their powers and abilities, so with
him acting in them and through them, they, as
true authors, consigned to writing everything
and only those things which He wanted.

25. Scripture
• 12. However, since God speaks in Sacred
Scripture through men in human fashion, the
interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see
clearly what God wanted to communicate to
us, should carefully investigate what meaning
the sacred writers really intended, and what
God wanted to manifest by means of their
words.

26. The Unity of Scripture
• But, since Holy Scripture must be read and
interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was
written, (9) no less serious attention must be
given to the content and unity of the whole of
Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is
to be correctly worked out.

27. Place of Scripture
• 21. The Church has always venerated the
divine Scriptures just as she venerates the
body of the Lord, since, especially in the
sacred liturgy, she unceasingly receives and
offers to the faithful the bread of life from the
table both of God's word and of Christ's body.

28. Modern Reception
• What do people say about the possibility of
revelation?

29. Response to Dei Verbum
• Rahner says that revelation is; “…the history of that… relation
between man and God, which is constituted by God’s self-
revelation…”
• Ratzinger ask of the Protestant, “Can the word be posited as
independent without thereby delivering it up to the caprice of
exegetes, evacuating it of meaning in the controversies of
historians and so robbing it of binding force?”
• Ratzinger goes on to say that the relationship of word to
Church is crucial, as, “The Catholic will say that the Lord
himself has delivered it to the Church.”

30. Dynamic Relationship
• God Speaks through Christ
• God inhabits the Church guiding it (Body)
• God acts in the person to receive revelation
• “Revelation is in fact fully present only when, in
addition to the material statements which testify to
it, its own inner reality is itself operative in the form
of faith.”

31. Revelation as Love: Hans Urs von
Balthasar
• “God’s word must interpret itself and wishes to do so. And if it
does so, then one thing is clear from the outset; it will not be
found to contain what man has thought out for himself about
himself or God…”
• “…only when the pure gratuity of love has been recognized
can one speak of it in terms of fulfillment.

32. Love and Beauty
• “The two related poles are surpassed in
Revelation, where the divine Logos descends
to manifest and interpret himself as love, as
agape, and therein as the Glory.”

33. God is Love
• “To believe that there is love, absolute
love, and that there is nothing beyond it.”

34. God
• “In the light of the sign of God who annihilated
himself to become man and to die forsaken, it
becomes possible to perceive why God came forth
from himself and became the creator of the world;
expressing his absolute being and revealing as
unfathomable love his perfect freedom, which is not
an absolute beyond being, but the height, the
depths, the length and breadth of being itself.”

35. Summary
1. God reveals Himself through the creation of the
universe, and particularly in the human person
2. God reveals himself definitively through Christ
3. God inspires the scriptures, guides the Church in
interpretation through the “living” tradition.
4. God enables the reception of His very self by the
person through the Holy Spirit
5. Love is the inner dynamism of this revelation and is
alone capable of reaching humanity

36. Dei Verbum
• 10. Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form
one sacred deposit of the word of
God, committed to the Church.
• Holding fast to this deposit the entire holy people
united with their shepherds remain always
steadfast in the teaching of the Apostles, in
• the common life,
• in the breaking of the bread
• and in prayers (see Acts 2, 42, Greek text),

37. Dei Verbum
• so that holding to, practicing and professing
the heritage of the faith, it becomes on the
part of the bishops and faithful a single
common effort. (7)

38. Dei Verbum (Old Testament)
• 14. In carefully planning and preparing the salvation of the whole
human race the God of infinite love, by a special
dispensation, chose for Himself a people to whom He would entrust
His promises.
• First He entered into a covenant with Abraham (see Gen. 15:18)
and, through Moses, with the people of Israel (see Ex. 24:8).
• To this people which He had acquired for Himself, He so manifested
Himself through words and deeds as the one true and living God
that Israel came to know by experience the ways of God with men.
• Then too, when God Himself spoke to them through the mouth of
the prophets, Israel daily gained a deeper and clearer
understanding of His ways and made them more widely known
among the nations (see Ps. 21:29; 95:1-3; Is. 2:1-5; Jer. 3:17).
• Development of Revelation

39. Dei Verbum
• 15. The principal purpose to which the plan of the old
covenant was directed was to prepare for the coming of
Christ, the redeemer of all and of the messianic
kingdom, to announce this coming by prophecy (see Luke
24:44; John 5:39; 1 Peter 1:10),
• and to indicate its meaning through various types (see 1
Cor. 10:12).
• Now the books of the Old Testament, in accordance with
the state of mankind before the time of salvation
established by Christ, reveal to all men the knowledge of
God and of man and the ways in which God, just and
merciful, deals with men.
• Three implications of Revelation

40. Dei Verbum
• 15 These books, though they also contain
some things which are incomplete and
temporary, nevertheless show us true divine
pedagogy.
• 16. God, the inspirer and author of both
Testaments, wisely arranged that the New
Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old
be made manifest in the New.