 Collection of books  Tells us one story  History of God’s plan for our salvation  Tells us what we need in order to be saved  What do we learn?  God chose the people of Israel to bring nations back to himself  Work is completed through Jesus Christ  Learn the truth about the end of history

 Inspired word of God through Scripture  Living Word of God comes through Scripture and Tradition  Infallible Word of God solely entrusted to the Magisterium of the Church Teaching authority of the church

 Inspired: “breathed in”  God guided the human hands  Only wrote what God wanted  Took place over thousands of years  Inerrant: It does not err (may be misunderstood by US though)

 Holy Spirit enlightened the intellects of many authors so they could conceive all that God wanted them to write and nothing more  God = principle author; human = authors

 Scripture is the way we come to know who Jesus is  St. Jerome declared, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” If you want to feel at home in the Kingdom of God, then the Bible is your map. If you want to understand whom you receive in Holy Communion, then you need to understand how God was preparing his people for centuries before he finally gave us the Bread of Life in the Eucharistic Liturgy.

 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, and in other forms of literary expression.

 Bible writers don't write history the way we write history. We see history as a list of important events (wars, treaties, inventions etc.) The main characters in our history are Kings, Presidents..  There is one point of view that is completely unbiased  Gods point of view. God sees everything exactly the way it is. The Bible writers tell history from God’s point of view.  To the Bible writers the important thing in history is to tell us about God’s relationship with his people. Most of the important characters in Bible history seem to be ordinary people – not emperors, kings, etc. Jesus as the Son of God looked like an ordinary carpenters son. Those ordinary people carried God’s message and that made them more important

 The history of how God’s plan to save us unfolded through the ages  We can look at all salvation history as a series of seven covenants between God and his people.  From the beginning of time God had a plan to save us all from our sin. The Bible is this story of how God’s plan to save us worked out over thousands of years  Salvation history deals with the past and the future. Because God’s Word has been revealed to us, we know how the plan of salvation will keep working until the end of time.

 One good way of looking at salvation history is to see it as a series of covenants between God and us.  In the Old Testament, a covenant was an agreement between God and mankind made through individual persons.  A covenant is similar to a contract...but is much more  A covenant establishes bonds of sacred kinship: it unites the participants in a family relation.  A contract is a temporary business agreement, meant to last as long as current circumstances make it necessary. Gods covenant unites persons in a union that is meant to last  Contract example: Corporation  Covenant Example: Marriage

 Salvation history is the story of how we (sinners),have been brought into God’s covenant family.  We can see 7 covenants between God and us in salvation history. (the # 7 is a symbol of covenant completeness in Scripture)  Each covenant is made through a covenant mediator – although each covenant reflects a promise God makes to all humanity – each covenant takes the form of a wider social relationship.

 How the Bible is written is only half the story. Many other books were written during that time besides the ones that ended up in the Bible  The “canon” is the answer.  Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church came up with a list, or “canon of approved books.  The inclusion of a book meant it was divinely inspired. Other books were rejected because they were not divinely inspired.