REVELATION AS THE HEART OF SCRIPTURE, TRADITION AND THEOLOGY
DEI VERBUM’S PARADIGM SHIFT AND ITS RECEPTION
Keywords:
Dei verbum, Interpretation of the Bible, Revelation, Scripture, Second Vatican Council, Tradition, Verbum dominiAbstract
This paper analyzes the Catholic Church’s historical progression of discourse on the particular role of revelation, scripture and tradition. Particularly, it explores how Dei Verbum in the ever history of the
Catholic Church, when it understands and reasonably expounds revelation as the “divine wellspring” from which the “sacred tradition and scripture…flow” in contrast to the ‘two-source theory’ of the Council
of Trent and the First Vatican Council enacts a paradigm shift. The first part of the paper briefly narrates the theological progression of the
subject-matter in the aforementioned two councils and then formulates the significance of this core topic that circumscribes Dei Verbum’s entire theological metamorphosis by way of pinpointing the specific role of the church, magisterium and theology in the contemporary period. The second part of the paper engages a theological appraisal of the reception
of this theme in the last fifty years. Based on this unfolding argument of lethargic reception, which resulted in ‘official thwarting’ if not a formal
forgetting, the concluding remarks open up certain challenges for the fruitful reception of this significant notion of Dei verbum.
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