I have been attempting to present our Church’s understanding of the role of God and man in the Sacred Scripture. As I have shown, the word inspiration has been used to signal that it is our belief that God Himself inspired Sacred Scripture and therefore that God is the author. This means that he inspired the human authors, acting in and through them. Thus, God ensured that the authors taught, without error, those truths necessary for our salvation. Inspiration is the word used for the divine assistance given to the human authors of the books of Scripture. This means that guided by the Holy Spirit, the human authors made full use of their talents and abilities while, at the same time, writing what God intended. There are many in our modern society who find incredible the belief that Scripture contains the inspired word of God and so reject the Bible as a collection of stories and myths. There are others who profess belief in the Triune God and are even identified as Scripture Scholars who work to demythologize the Scriptures, that is, they remove or explain away the miraculous as well as references to God’s revealing words and actions. There are still others who think that God dictated each word of the Scriptures and the authors served only as scribes. It is important to understand in the face of such challenges to Scripture that it is not simply the work of human authors as some critics allege, but truly the Word and work of God in concert with human authors.

When interpreting Scripture, we should be attentive to what God wanted to reveal through the authors for our salvation. We need to see Scripture as a unified whole with Jesus Christ at the center. We must also read Scripture within the Living Tradition of the whole Church, so that we may come to grasp a true interpretation of the Scriptures.

The Church recognizes two senses of Scripture, the literal and the spiritual. In probing the literal meaning of the texts, it is necessary to determine their literary form, such as history, hymns, wisdom sayings, poetry, parable or other forms of figurative language. The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, -the study of the words, phrases, expressions and use of these during the time that they were written – in accord with very definite rules of sound interpretation. This can only be done by using texts their original languages.