Denver, Colo., Jul 16, 2010 / 17:21 pm
Scripture is “the one story that really matters” because it is the story of God’s “new creation,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput has said in a lecture on Friday morning. Calling on Christians to live their lives “in Christ,” he said Catholics should allow God’s “new creation” to take root in themselves.
Speaking on Friday at the Catholic Bible Conference at St. Thomas More Parish in the Denver suburb of Littleton, the Archbishop of Denver said the story of Scripture is “the greatest story ever told – a story of God’s creative power, man’s betrayal, God’s redemptive love; and a new destiny for humanity greater and more beautiful than anything any of us can imagine. What man has violated -- including himself -- God makes new and better.”
Criticizing a kind of “tamed” Christianity, he explained: “There’s nothing tepid or routine about a real encounter with Sacred Scripture … God’s Word is profoundly good, but it is never ‘tame’.”
When Jesus said “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled” (Lk. 12:49), the archbishop commented, “he spoke not as an interesting moral counselor, but as the restless, incarnate Word of God, the Scriptures in flesh and blood, on fire with his Father’s mission of salvation.”