The standard or norm which enables believers to determine what they must believe. The remote rule of faith is the revealed Word of God, as contained in Holy Scripture and Divine Tradition; the proximate rule of faith is the teaching of the Church drawn from both these sources. The Vatican Council has declared that:
"all those things are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and which the Church either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal teaching, proposes for belief as having been divinely revealed"