FRIDAY POTPOURRI: I TOLD YOU SO

Paragraph 3 of Dei Verbum

 

Do you remember Mike, the young man from Monday diary?  No matter where he looked, he did not see God.  He knew there was not such “thing” as God.  How odd it is then that for the attentive believer, it is difficult to look and not see God.  He reveals a bit of Himself in all of creation just like the artists reveals a bit of himself in his artwork.  He not only reveals Himself in His works, but through His deeds. 

 

Mike will buy anything scientific that such people tell him.  He does not have to see it, taste it, hear it, feel it, or smell it personally, but because scientists tell him that it is so and he trusts them and he “believes” it.  (Thus is he a man of faith and dogma.)  I understand that in theory he could do all the experiments to prove it to himself, though it would take a great many lifetimes. 

 

In a similar way, the Testaments are chuck full of people telling us that God does exist because they (heard Him, touched Him, saw Him . . .).  For some reason, these persons are easy to discount.  Whereas scientists may less likely be discounted, people of faith, in Mike’s world, almost always are.  Anyone before the modern era is considered inferior intellectually and could never recount phenomena accurately.  (What will future generations say of us?  How primitive and barbaric we may seem those in the future!  But are there not truths we can know now?  Can we not know there is more to life than what we can touch, feel, see, taste, and hear?  Is not the universe so much bigger than what we can put at the end of a telescope?)

 

And through this relationship with God, we have been told to expect Savior right from the first moment we needed one beginning with the proto-Gospel of Genesis 3:15 and continually throughout the Old Testament making Christ the only founder of a major religion that was foretold by prophets.

 

As St. Thomas said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.  To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”