This is not my first time reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church because I studied at a private, Catholic school for most of my life. Although, I did gain a new understanding of many words while reading the passages assigned for homework.
One of these phrases is “proofs of God’s existence.” These proofs are arguments for His revealed truth or His relationship with human beings. I appreciated the way the CCC spoke about the existence of God in saying, “the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things.” (37). This quote speaks to the necessity of faith in God to fully understand the relations between God and man because these relations cannot be seen or proved. With this phrase, the CCC concisely captured the complexity of the relations between God and man. Creation and human beings help convey the existence of God and His ways of working within our lives. I was also unaware that the “Apostolic Tradition” was another name for the New Testament. “New Testament itself demonstrates the process of living Tradition.” (83).
The line, “The Old Testament prepares for the New and the New Testament fulfils the Old; the two shed light on each other; both are true Word of God” (140) is persuasive to me. This phrase speaks to the Testaments’ dependence on one another, and how the story of our faith cannot be understood without both Testaments. I thought the way the CCC spoke about how God cannot be described with the human language was persuasive. It was very clear to me from the readings that we cannot capture what God is, but we can compare Him to the world around us. The readings effectively communicated to me that God is a mystery, and “our limited language cannot exhaust the mystery.”(48). The definition of divine revelation was also persuasive to me. Divine revelation is God’s way of revealing His will for human beings that reaches its peak in His decision to send His only son, Jesus, to live among us. Jesus is the beginning and end of Divine Revelation.
The fullness of divine revelation is a bit unclear to me. “It is not their (private revelations) role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history.” To help the divine revelation live more fully, to me, sounds like an improvement.
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