SCRIPTURE

In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, "but as what it really is, the word of God". In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them (Catechism, 104).

God is the author of Sacred Scripture. "The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit...God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. To compose the sacred books, God chose certain people who, all the while God employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though God acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever God wanted written, and no more (Catechism, 105-106).

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to us 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. In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression (Catechism, 109-110).