How can we recognise divine revelation?

The following text is the transcript of our Youtube video How can we recognise divine revelation?.

This video is part of a series on “The Sources of Faith”. You can find all the videos in the series here.

Welcome to Catholic Hub. I’m David and I’m here to talk to you about Catholicism and what it means to be a Catholic in the modern world. Today, in this video, I want to talk to you about the motives of credibility for the Catholic faith.

In the last video, I talked about how faith requires that you believe something that is not evident on the word of another. What this involves is that there is some kind of credential or some kind of proof that the thing that has been said comes from a specific person.

In the case of divine faith, which is when we believe something because it comes from God, there has to be some kind of proof that the proposition that we believe really does come from God. Now, in this case, the only credentials or motives of credibility that are sufficient to prove that a message truly came from God are those of miracles and of prophecies.

As you know, miracles are extraordinary works which cannot be done by the powers of nature but only by the omnipotence of God.

Similarly, a prophecy is a clear and definite foretelling of an event which cannot be known except by God because it either depends on the free will of God or on the free will of man.

If God gives miraculous power to some human being or if he allows him to look into the secrets of the future, then we can safely say, without any hesitation, that that person has really been sent by God.

If we go back to divine revelation, which is all of the things which God wished us to know for our salvation, these things were handed down to us by the Patriarchs and the Prophets and above all by Jesus Christ himself and his Apostles. Jesus Christ not only claimed to be a messenger of God but to be the Son of God himself. He proved this claim first of all by the supreme holiness of his own life, by the miracles and prophecies which he performed during his life on Earth, including the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament, and above all by the crowning miracle of his resurrection.

By all of these things, Jesus Christ guaranteed the divine origin of the revelations made by the patriarchs and the prophets and also those which he gave us himself through his apostles. The miracles that he performed and the prophecies that he both made and fulfilled are irrefutable credentials of the authenticity of divine revelation.

Before I end, it’s important to note that these motives of credibility, which we’ve just discussed, are not to be confused with proofs of one or the other of the articles of faith. The motives of credibility only guarantee the origin of a message as coming from God. They’re not the reason why we believe the articles of faith.

The formal object of faith, as we’ve said before, is God himself, who is the supreme truth and who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

Again, the reason why we believe divine revelation is because it has come from God. The reasons why we believe it has come from God are the motives of credibility, which, as we said, are the miracles and the prophecies fulfilled by Jesus Christ.

That’s all for today. In the next video, I’m going to talk about how God’s revelation was handed down and transmitted to us all the way to the present day. So please do like and subscribe for more. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.