Verbum Domini

THAT’S the title of a recent Vatican document, officially described as a post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Benedict, a fruit of the 2008 Synod of Bishops that took up the theme of the Word of the Lord, which is what Verbum Domini means.

It’s a long document, obviously not easy to read especially for the ordinary Juan in the street. But I must say that it’s a relevant work that all of us should try to study and understand.

That’s because the Word of God, if we follow by our faith, is the very foundation of all reality. St. John said it in the prologue of his gospel, “All things were made by him (God’s Word), and without him was made nothing that was made.”

If we believe that, we can never exaggerate the importance of God’s Word in our life. Nothing less than compromising our ability to know and get in touch with reality happens if we dare to separate ourselves from the orbit of the divine word.

And so, hard as it may be, we just have to try to plow this up-to-now wild ground of understanding God’s Word, hoping it becomes soft enough for us to plant the seed of our Christian life, cultivate it to maturity, and avoid getting lost in the seas and mountains of the world.

We cannot deny the fact that for many people, the Word of God as the foundation of reality is hardly known, let alone, lived. Many think it’s simply reason, science, ideologies that constitute the ultimate basis of reality.

There is a lot of clarification and correction to be done in this fundamental aspect of our life. The task will not be easy. It will be accompanied by a lot of debate and dispute, expectedly acrimonious. But it will just have to be done.

The document provides a good material for this purpose. That’s why it really has to be studied, understood and disseminated. Hopefully, biblical scholars and the clergy would take the lead. Schools and centers of higher learning should be tapped.

Toward that end, I plan to make a series of commentaries, perhaps dedicating one column a month. At least, they can serve to acquaint readers of the salient features of the document.

A portion in that document tells us, for example, what the Word of the Lord can refer to. It strikes me as very interesting and enlightening, since most of the time we simply mean the Bible when we think of the Word of God.

That part tells us that the Word of God has an analogical sense, as contrasted to a univocal meaning. That is to say, it can admit of a number of meanings, and can refer to a number of things other than just the written book.

We have to remember that our knowledge of God is also analogical, since we cannot fully put the essence of God into just one word or concept. We can define God, alright, but it’s a definition that is very dynamic and open-ended, and we use human concepts that need to be stretched to infinity.

When Moses, for example, asked the voice in the burning bush who he was, the reply was simply, “I am who am.” God, that voice, cannot be confined and frozen into a single word.

So we use many concepts to describe and define God, purifying them of their limitations and stretching the relevant parts to the infinite to apply them to God. We just try to blend them together to approximate the essence of God.

God is love, St. John defines divinity. But then again to define love is to engage in an endless spiral, since love has endless aspects even if its core essence can be identified.

The same with what we mean by the Word of the Lord. The document says that the term can have a number of meanings that are interrelated. It can refer to the Second Person (¨Logos¨) of the Blessed Trinity; to Jesus Christ, the Son of God who became man, and started to preach.

It can also refer to the “book of nature,” since every creature exists through God’s Word and somehow proclaims it. It also refers to the preaching of the apostles now handed down to us through Tradition.

It also refers to the written Sacred Scripture, or the Bible, that has to be read not merely as a book but precisely as the Word of the living God.

To integrate them properly, the living faith of the Church is made as the primary setting.