Hi everyone. Welcome to this bonus episode of Daily Gospel Exegesis. This is going to be a question

and answer episode where I'll do my best to answer some of the listener questions that have come in recently.

We try and do these Q&A episodes every now and then.

And thank you so much to those who are writing into the ministry with your questions and comments.

Often this is the best way for us to learn about the Bible and theology is by engaging

specific questions. So let's start with a question from Carol who emailed in. My relative who is a

believer says that we should only use the term brothers and sisters for those who are believers,

not non-believers. Can you give more clarification on this?

So this is an interesting idea. Who do we have the right to call brothers and sisters? It does

depend on how you use the term, and it's probably, you know, the meaning of the term brother and

sister is different in different cultures and in different time periods. Biblically speaking, roughly,

that is accurate. We should refer particularly to other Christians as our brothers and sisters.

There is a sense in which all people are brothers in terms of like a broad brotherhood of man

kind of view, but that's not really the biblical view. The biblical view is we have a

preferential treatment for those who are in the family of God. And who is in the family of God?

In Catholic theology, when you become a Christian, you become an adopted member of God's family,

which means that all Christians are brothers and sisters of each other. And that is the way

the church documents, recent church

documents have used the term rather than saying that all people are our brothers and sisters.

So it's probably one of those ones where it's acceptable both ways, but in a specific

denotative sense, if we want to be specific, brothers and sisters should really be reserved

for other Christians.

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