How Should I Understand This?

[Byzantine]

I'm reading my Church's catechetical series [i]Light for Life[/i] and I'm confused as to how to understand the following passage:

[quote]The evangelists do not present a photographic reproduction of Jesus words and deeds. They sketch a portrait of the meaning behind His words and deeds as understood by the Church enlightened through the Holy Spirit. Our understanding of the Gospels and the other Scriptures, as well as the whole pattern of God's dealings with humanity, is aided when we come to appreciate this stance.[/quote]
-[i]Light for Life Part One: The Mystery Believed,[/i] p. 49

It seems iffy to me. I think I might be understanding it wrong. Could someone clear up the first two sentences or so?

[cappie]

Sacred Scripture is truly divine, because it belongs to God truly and genuinely: God himself inspired it, God confirmed it, God spoke it through the sacred writers—Moses, the Prophets, the Evangelists, the Apostles—and, above all, through his Son, our only Lord, in both the Old and the New Testament.
It is true that the intensity and depth of the revelation varies [within the Bible], but there is not the least shadow of contradiction [between different parts of Scripture].
(Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Patres Ecclesiae,
January 2, 1980)

There are three points are essential to a basic understanding of the bible:[list]
[*]God is indeed the principal author of Sacred Scripture.
[*]God made use of specific people that wrote in a human language, and did so at a particular time and place in history.
[*]At times we have to work carefully to determine exactly what a sacred author is asserting to be true, distinguishing that from something he's using as an image to help us understand the truth more clearly.
[/list]
There is one essential point for a Catholic in understanding the Scriptures:
God chose to reveal to us certain truths for the sake of our salvation. This message of salvation is the set of revealed truths which we call the "deposit of faith," or Divine Revelation. The Bible is primarily concerned with telling us these truths, which are without error. God himself made sure of that.

The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) said it well: "everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit" (Dei Verbum, #11).

Now, remember that point as we look at some other details...

God made use of people to write the Bible

This is important: God did not "dictate" the Bible, word for word, to people who just wrote down his words. Instead, he did something......more amazing!

He made use of specific people to write the various sacred books of the Bible. And although God gave each author special grace to aid him in this work, each author wrote in a way that was natural to him.
This is also really important for a true Catholic understanding of the Bible. We have to understand this point completely, or we risk a serious misunderstanding!

The Second Vatican Council put it this way:
In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.
(Vatican II, Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), 11)

These writers used the language of their time, and they used words and wrote in a style that reflected their own personalities and educations.

summarize it this way:

These men had to work with the imperfections of human language and understanding.

Despite this limitation, the Holy Spirit still used them to write the message of salvation in a way that was completely accurate.

John Paul II made this point when he addressed the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1979:
"The language of the Bible is to some degree linked to language which changed over the course of time.... But this only reaffirms the paradox of the [Christian] proclamation of revelation: ...people and events at particular points in history become the bearers of an absolute and transcendent message."
(Pope John Paul II, Address, April 26, 1979)

This is really quite astonishing—God was willing to work through people to tell us his saving truth. He revealed his divine truths via historical acts, using events and people of his choosing.

And he did so using...Human language and knowledge

God also used human language and knowledge—with all of its limitations—to tell us his eternal truths.
He conveyed things to people through words and actions that made use of the ways of speaking and thinking that were common at the time. God worked this way so it would be possible for humans to write down or pass on these eternal truths.

The people who experienced these events and received God's divine messages either wrote them down later, or would pass them on in a reliable oral tradition that was later written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.