The church's interpretational task, as Cardinal Carlo Martini of Milan has urged, is "always to go back and forth from the biblical text to the present, and from the present day experience to the text."
In this process of living dialogue between the past and present, which theologians call "reception', the people of God, according to Cardinal Jan Willebrands, "under the direction of the Holy Spirit recognize and accept new understandings, new witness to the truth and new expressions of theology, in line with apostolic tradition and in harmony with a sense of the faithful, of the whole church."
John Paul II has called this process a "sacrament of dialogue." It clearly embraces the relationship of science and religion, as the Pope taught in 1987. "Imagine," he wrote, "if the cosmologies of the Ancient Near Eastern world could be purified and assimilated into the first chapters of Genesis? Might not contemporary cosmology have something to offer to our reflections on creation? Does our evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear on theological anthropology? On the problem of Christology, and even upon the development of doctrine itself?. What, if any, are the eschatalogical implications of contemporary cosmology, especially in the light of the vast future of our universe?"