Questions about authority and truth run through today’s culture, and the Catholic Church has some real answers, said Bill Stevenson, who Jan. 20 will lead the first part of a four-part Faith and Culture Series presented by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
“We live in a culture that is, I think it’s fair to say, in a crisis. It’s having a crisis of authority,” Stevenson told Patrick Conley in a discussion about the series aired at 9 p.m. Jan. 15 on “Practicing Catholic,” a radio program on Relevant Radio 1330AM.
Bill Stevenson
“We talk about fake news all the time,” Stevenson said. “We want to know the truth about things. And having the truth about things is nowhere more important than when it concerns our relationship with God and our final destiny.”
An associate professor of dogmatic theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul, Stevenson added that “we want to know where can we go for solid and reliable truth about ultimate things, about the highest things.”
A primary source of truth and authority is Catholic teaching, Stevenson told Conley, “Practicing Catholic” host. The pillars of Catholic teaching are Scripture, tradition and the magisterium, which is the Church’s teaching authority, especially by bishops and the pope.
The Faith and Culture Series begins Jan. 20 and is part of preparing as an archdiocese for a Synod in 2022 that will address pastoral priorities in the archdiocese. Those priorities — forming parishes that are in the service of evangelization, forming missionary disciples who know Jesus’ love, and responding to his call and forming youth and young adults in and for a Church that is always young — were formulated in response to 30 general and focus Prayer and Listening Events held across the archdiocese between September 2019 and March 2020.
Many attendees shared that they hope to better understand Church teaching, archdiocesan leaders said. And having a basic understanding of what the Church teaches and the roots of that teaching will contribute to a fruitful conservation when people gather in their parishes and at the deanery level to discuss the pastoral priorities, as well as at the Synod itself, Archbishop Bernard Hebda has said.
Asked by Conley for an understanding of Catholic teaching sources, Stevenson said the word of God is the single source of Catholic teaching, and the Word incarnate. “But that Word is expressed in Scripture, tradition and magisterium,” he said.
He described the three as a three-legged stool. “Each is necessary,” he said. “And if you take one away, the stool falls over; it can’t support the faith. So, these are interrelated sources of Catholic teaching, but they’re ultimately rooted in the Word.”
Scripture is what is in the Bible, he said. “What we find there, ultimately, is an account of God’s dealings with the people that he has called,” he said. “And so it’s historical in nature. It’s (also) doctrinal in nature, but it has to be read in such a way that we see God as sort of the master teacher that, when man had fallen, that God begins a series of covenants, which he continues to expand. And, ultimately, that culminates in the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ, where God himself is the revelation.”
The ultimate purpose of tradition and magisterium is keeping safe God’s saving teaching in sacred Scripture, Stevenson said. There has to be a sure and certain way of communicating that saving truth to every generation, in every place, he said.
“And so tradition is part of the way that happens. But the magisterium is the living sort of voice of authority that mediates Scripture and tradition to us,” he said.
Stevenson emphasized that tradition is something that is alive, and as an organic living thing, it is constantly growing, staying what it always has been, but yet ever new.
Sacred tradition is the expression of the word of God as the Holy Spirit has illuminated over the past 2,000 years, Stevenson said.
“But tradition, again, is not just sort of found in books or … online, the sort of Catholic databases,” he said. “It has a living voice, and that living voice is the magisterium of the Church.”
Practicing Catholic on Relevant Radio 1330 AM is produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Other guest interviews on the Jan. 15 Practicing Catholic show are Archbishop Bernard Hebda, who discusses the upcoming Faith and Culture series, and Katie Walker and Maddie Schulte, who describe the Jan. 22 March for Life, Youth and Family Conference.
Listen to their interviews after they have aired:
soundcloud.com/practicingcatholic
Practicing Catholic on Spotify
Recent Comments