Theology for Teachers

[JESUS CHRIST]

The Christian claim is simply this: if God is, then God is love; and if God is love, then God is what Jesus is: total self-giving. Or, to put it even more starkly: if God isn’t what Jesus is, there is no God …

In Jesus we, as it were, encounter the impossible in the flesh: we encounter the victim of our hatred returning to us not as our just punishment, or even as our conditional pardon, but as our peace-bestowing mercy and reconciliation, our “salvation” (which actually means “healing”, from the Latin salve).

Jesus is what God looks like “in person”, in “human flesh”. Why? Because this is what absolute love actually looks like in a world marked by hatred, violence, resentment, fear and vengeance—in a word, sin and death. If this is not so, then there is no God.

In GNFL this understanding of Jesus is developed with these theological emphases:

• The doctrine of the incarnation is principally about us becoming one with God because God becomes one of us. As one of the earliest and strongest defenders of the doctrine of the incarnation, St Athanasius, put it: “God became human so that humanity might become God”. This is the point of the incarnation: human transformation, human divinisation.

• So, to say that “Jesus is Lord” is to say that if God is not what Jesus is, there is no God; and if God is what Jesus is, then God is love; and we are becoming what Jesus is by the power of that love, who is the Holy Spirit.

• The fact that Jesus is utterly human is of the very greatest importance to a properly Christian understanding of what it means that he is God incarnate.

• The fact that he was a Jew is crucial: he was steeped in the Hebrew Revelation, its liturgy and poetry and ethics, its bonds of community and covenant love.

• The fact that he suffered, worked, prayed, cared, healed, and ate with “sinners” and “righteous” alike; the fact that he befriended men and women, and called them into discipleship; the fact that he was a teacher, healer, worker—a “simple poor peasant” (as opposed to a priest, noble, imperial citizen, etc.)—all this is vital to who Jesus was, and therefore to the Revelation of who God is among us.

• For it is in and through his humanity—in all its particularity and “scandalous contingency”—that Jesus reveals what God is really like: self-emptying love.

• Jesus reveals love for what it really is: self-giving for the sake of the one who is loved. Love is not a feeling so much as a desire that the one who is loved should flourish: to love is to want what is good and best for another.

• Jesus is absolute love made real, made “flesh and blood”, revealing that absolute love is who God really is. How?

• By giving himself absolutely for those he loved—namely everyone, even those who hated him so much that they tortured him to death, betrayed him to his torturers (like the apostle Judas), denied they knew him (like St Peter, the first pope), abandoned him (like all the other apostles and most of his disciples) or simply ignored him (like the vast majority of people throughout history).

• His love for all of them was equal because it was absolute: he died for love of us all, and indeed, for each one of us personally. That is how he reveals and embodies the love that is God.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

Jesus - Video 

[GOD]

God is mystery. We can never fully grasp the meaning of this mystery. The only way we can talk about God (i.e., do theology, which literally means “God talk”) is in metaphor and by analogy with what exists. Since we human beings are living beings, “persons” who “exist”, our most complete metaphor for God is that God too is a personal, living being—although God is infinitely more than that. As St Thomas Aquinas said, “God is the subsistent act of ‘to be’ itself”. God is not so much “a” being as God is the very act of being.

The Christian faith asserts that this mystery (of being-in-itself at the heart of all being) loves all beings into being. In that sense God is “creator”—God loves us into being. And because this mystery loves us, it has a “name”, it is “personal”, it has an identity by which it relates to us, reveals itself to us, and it can therefore be (in some measure) known by us (i.e., to the extent that we are capable of knowing it).

What this means is that all theology (“God talk”) is very limited when it comes to saying anything definitive about God. The most that we can do, when speaking of God, is to speak by analogy and in metaphor. As St Thomas Aquinas put it: “We can never know what God is; we can only ever know what God is not”. Or, as St Augustine said in one of his sermons, “If you understand [it], it isn’t God”.

Apart from speaking of God analogically as personal, among the most important metaphors we use to speak of God is to say that “God is love”. Now, because God is love, “God” is a verb (a “doing word”) more than a noun (the name of something). Love is something that happens between the one who loves (“the loving Father”) and the one who is loved (“the beloved Son”), united by the love they share (“their Holy Spirit of love divine”)—for which the metaphor is “Holy Trinity”, the “three” who are one in the love that unites them.

In GNFL this understanding of God is developed with the aid of these theological emphases:

• The Catholic way to speak of God is by analogy and in metaphor.

• Almost all of the books in the Bible speak of God in metaphor; and almost all Catholic theology (of the academic kind) speaks of God by analogy.

• This way of speaking of God is in our terms (in human images, ideas and language) but it is on God’s terms (the way that God wishes to reveal himself to us).

• Christians use the word “God” because we have no better one with which to point to the mystery we are trying to talk about.

• Using this poor little word saves us from falling prey to a delusion that by using bigger and more impressive words we’ve actually “got” God, that we “grasp” who and what God really is, for example, “The Supreme Being”, “The Absolute Reality”, “Pure Essence”, “Transcendent Ground of Being”. While all of these more exalted terms may have their uses, when it comes to actually defining God, all these abstractions are just as inadequate as the far more earthly biblical metaphors like “fortress and rock” (2 Samuel 22:2), “mother hen” (Matthew 23:37) and “gate for the sheep” (John 10:7).

• No definition of God’s essence or nature is possible—except perhaps the paradoxical one that deconstructs itself, and is therefore no definition at all: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).

• The “Christian God” is not just another god among other gods.

• The “Christian God” is rather the Christian way of speaking about this Mystery, which we experience as loving us and which is revealed in Jesus—that’s what makes it specifically Christian.

• The central Christian statement of faith is: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16); and that love is revealed in Jesus, who loved you and me and everyone so absolutely that he gave his life for each one of us personally and for all of us collectively.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

God - Video 

[CHURCH]

The Church is the “Body of Christ”, the “Temple of the Holy Spirit”, the “Bride of Christ”, the “People of God”, the “Sacrament of Christ”, the “Community of Faith”, the “Communion of Saints”, a “Priestly People”, etc. These are not sociological, political, psychological, philosophical, historical or “scientific” descriptors. They are theological images and metaphors whose meaning is discovered in love—not in our love, but in God’s love, which is revealed in Jesus.

The Church does not exist for itself. It is, by definition, called and sent—down into the depths of the Mystery that loves us, and out on mission to the margins of our world. Mission is not just something the Church does, then. Mission is what she is sent to be and do, because that is what Christ does and is: “good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, a time of the Lord’s favour”.

The Church’s identity is God’s gift to us in Christ because we are first and foremost God’s gift to Christ: “They were yours; you gave them to me” (John 17:6). And through us, as Christ’s Body, unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity continue to be God’s gift to the world: “so that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23). Our unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity is, then, the heart of our mission and thus of our identity: at once a call to be (one with God in Christ) and a sending out of ourselves into the whole world to live (in faith, with hope, and, above all, as love).

This call and this sending are the same act in Christ: we are called and sent through him, with him, and in him, united by his Spirit. Apart from a constant focus on Christ, being one, holy, catholic and apostolic would lose its vital meaning. Therefore, in Christ, as his Body, we profess that the Church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic”.

In GNFL this understanding of the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic is developed with these theological emphases:

• It is Christ who is one: completely and authentically himself, “fully integrated”, single-minded, wholehearted, and utterly alive. And as such, he is the unifying power of God at work in us through our sharing in his Spirit as his Body.

• It is Christ who is holy: divine, other, transcendent, marginal, and liminal (these are all part of the meaning of the word “holy” in Scripture). And as such, he is the sanctifying power who gives us his Holy Spirit, the only real source and meaning of the Church’s holiness.

• It is Christ who is catholic: one-with-God and one-with-us, whole-and-inclusive, open to all, and made up of all-into-one. And as such, he is the all-embracing opening up of the Triune God drawing us into the divine communion of love.

• It is Christ who is apostolic: coming from God, sent by God, and forever moving ahead of us leading us into God; and as such, the simultaneous act of grounding us in a living tradition and sending us out into the whole world to live and proclaim the gospel.

• Being one, holy, catholic and apostolic is the Church’s “radical tradition”.

• As we are called to integrity (“one”), wholeness (“holy”), and communion (“catholic”), so have we been sent in living continuity (“apostolic”) with all those who have gone before us (“tradition”), beginning with Christ himself (which is why this tradition is “radical”, from the Latin radix meaning “root”).

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

[SACRAMENTS]

“Sacrament” is traditionally defined as a sign that is itself what it signifies. A sacrament is not a mere representation, therefore, but is, in some sense, itself the very thing it represents, just as, for example, a hug not only signifies affection: it is affection. Sacraments not only show God’s love: they are that love in visible and concrete form.

Every sacrament has four inseparable parts to it:

1. it is an ordinary, earthly reality

2. that points beyond itself

3. making that to which it points truly and revealingly present in itself

4. thereby transforming those who receive it

To properly understand the Church’s sacraments we must start with Christ as the “sacrament of God”, and with the Church as the “sacrament of Christ”. Christ himself is the “sacrament of God” because he is the sign (of God) that is itself what it signifies (he is God), and transforms us who receive him (we become the Body of Christ, and so one-with-God). Just as Christ points to God and makes God’s presence real, transforming those who receive him, so the Church is a sacrament that points to Christ and makes his presence real, transforming the world that receives it. In the same way the seven sacraments of the Church point to the Church’s own real nature as the Body of Christ. These seven sacraments realise the Church’s true nature as Christ’s Body.

The Church has “seven” sacraments because seven is the biblical number of completeness, or “perfection”. In the Catechism they are grouped in three categories:

A. Sacraments of Initiation:

(1) Baptism

(2) Confirmation

(3) Eucharist

B. Sacraments of Healing:

(4) Anointing of the sick

(5) Reconciliation

C. Sacraments of Commitment in the Service of Communion:

(6) Holy Matrimony

(7) Holy Orders

The seven sacraments of the Church are celebrated liturgically. The word “liturgy” means “public work”, and so refers to the actual celebration of the sacraments ritually, in a public way and for the sake of the world. The word “ritual” refers to a repeated and communally understood set of meaningful actions, which is the way in which we celebrate the Church’s sacraments liturgically.

In GNFL this understanding of sacraments is developed with these theological emphases:

• Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist are called sacraments of initiation.

• They initiate us (lead us into) the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, which reveals to us that God is the communion of love we call Trinity.

• Therefore they also lead us into the mystery of the Church, the community of all those who believe in Christ and know themselves as loved by God.

• It is through these sacraments that the Church becomes Christ’s earthly presence, his own sacrament.

• The sacraments of healing, that is, Reconciliation and Anointing, are about enabling us to remain baptised, confirmed, united.

• They heal evil done (sin), through Reconciliation, and evil suffered (sickness), through Anointing.

• Reconciliation brings us back into right relationship with God, which begins the healing process of bringing us back into right relationship with other people, the world and even our own inner self.

• Anointing unites us in our suffering with the suffering Christ (the “anointed one”), revealing the potential transformation of suffering into holiness and wholeness, into compassion and love.

• The sacraments of commitment in the service of communion, that is, Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders, are there to remind us that our freedom is to grow in love in commitment and service.

• Holy Matrimony celebrates the life-giving nature of particular love, showing us that God loves us and invites us to love God with the spousal love that gives birth to life in the world.

• Holy Orders celebrates the self-giving nature of love as service to all humanity, thus revealing God’s universal love for all in order to rightly order all things towards their ultimate good: union with God and one another in God.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

[CHRISTIAN LIFE]

The entire Christian spiritual, ethical and moral “system” is Christian insofar as it begins with God loving us in and through Christ, and ends in our becoming one with that Love, which is nothing less than God’s own self, given to us and known by us as the Holy Spirit. How we address all the spiritual, ethical and moral questions in life as Christians is what happens in between. Or, as St Augustine put it: “Love, and then do what you will”.

Real love is about moving out of oneself towards another in self-gift, while at the same time opening oneself up to another’s gift of themselves to oneself. Christian spirituality and Christian ethics/morality are both grounded in real love really lived.

Real love is about vulnerability, which takes an enormous amount of courage, strength and commitment (or “fortitude”). Real love begins in a kind of wonder before the awe-inspiring, indeed terrifying, mystery of another who loves us. It grows and takes possession of one’s whole being with a profound sense of respect, indeed reverence, for the Other who loves us. And this awe and this reverence are what give rise to the courage, the “fortitude”, to risk everything in committed giving of oneself to that Other in love—which is precisely what is meant by Christian spirituality and ethics/morality, or “the Christian life”.

Real love is about desiring the good of those we love, wanting and working towards the very best for them, desiring that they may flourish according to their nature as the image of God.

In GNFL this understanding of Christian life is developed with emphasis on these theological and anthropological principles:

• Christian ethics/morality is one with Christian spirituality; and both are grounded in the God who loves us, and who therefore enables us to grow in love.

• Real love—God’s love—costs. Real love isn’t cheap. Real love costs, but it is God whom it costs. And God “pays the price”, as it were, in person: Jesus, giving himself even unto death for love of us.

• At its deepest core, the Christian life (spirituality and ethics/morality) is about God and the Spirit.

• Our ethics/morality flows from our spirituality, our encounter with God in Christ; it flows from who we are as Christians, from our life in Christ, from who we are as creatures alive through and with and in the Holy Spirit, the very Self and Life of God loving us.

• To speak of Christian life in a meaningful way, to do Christian moral and mystical theology properly, or to work out a genuinely Christian ethics, we must always begin where we mean to end: in God loving us.

• To do anything less than that—to start with principles, ideals, the law, virtue, values (even “gospel values”), etc.—is to focus on ourselves as though we were anything less than loved-by-God, anything less than destined for communion with God, and with one another in God. To start with any of these things is to reduce our ethics to ideology, our morality to legalism, our spirituality to selfishness, and therefore our theology to idolatry, by reducing ourselves to our egos, and our lives to a meaningless existence between the cradle and the grave.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

[CHRISTIAN PRAYER]

Prayer is to Christianity what water is to the ocean, what breath is to life, what love is to life’s meaning. Prayer simply is our relationship with God become conscious, deliberate and concrete. It is more a way of being than something we do.

That is why prayer needs to permeate the entire Catholic curriculum; and function in the RE curriculum the way RE functions in the Catholic curriculum overall. Why? Because unless there is a lived experience of encounter with God on God’s terms—and that is what Christian prayer is—then it is simply impossible to talk meaningfully about God in a Catholic educational context.

Prayer is vital. That is why God wants us to pray: because God desires to draw us into a fuller relationship; and praying is simply how that is done consciously, deliberately and concretely in and for us.

At its most basic and essential, the word pray means “to ask”. Learning to ask for what we truly need, when we are ready to receive it, is the key to life and true happiness. Because everything that is, is a free and beautiful gift, grace, learning to ask and receive is the most important lesson we have to learn.

Asking and receiving the gift that is life, being and meaning is the heart of our relationship with God, because grace—God’s gift of himself to us—is the purpose and meaning of life. Prayer therefore points to the deepest truth about human nature itself: we are made for the gift of union with God.

In GNFL this understanding of prayer is developed with emphasis on these theological principles:

• Prayer is about desire—ultimate desire: the desire to become one with God. In prayer we enter into a relationship with the One who intensifies our desire for being. In prayer we find ourselves loved into being in a way that invites us to participate in our own coming-into-being by liberating our desire from all fear, rivalry, selfishness, violence and malice—and therefore, from the power of death itself. Prayer must always be honest if it is to be true prayer, because by praying honestly we discover ever more deeply the ultimate nature of our desire, the desire for God.

• Prayer is our way of participating in God’s work of uniting us with himself. The ultimate expression of that work is the liturgy, “the work of God”, the public act of the Church’s communal prayer as thanks and praise, “the source and summit of the Church’s actions”.

• The central prayer of the Church is the Eucharist. At the most profound level, the Eucharist has to do with Christ alone, who prays for us: he puts his prayer on our lips, for only he can say, “This is my Body … This is my Blood”.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

Prayer - Video 

[SCRIPTURE]

The word “Bible” comes from the Greek word biblia, which is the plural form of the word for “scroll”. The Bible is, in fact, not a single book but a collection of various and disparate texts. The Christian Bible is composed of two major parts, traditionally called the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Catholic version of the Old Testament is very similar to (but not identical with) the Jewish Sacred Scriptures (known as the Tanak, or “the Hebrew Bible”, and which is identical with the Protestant version of the Old Testament). It tells the story of God’s dealings with God’s people Israel. The New Testament is the specifically and uniquely Christian part of the Bible; and it is solely concerned with the person and message of Jesus.

The Bible is an adult book; and should be introduced to children with great care, emphasising to them that it is an adult book they need to grow into understanding in the adult way in which it was intended to be understood. Children need to be alerted to the fact that the Bible is very difficult to understand and very easy to misunderstand.

As adults, teachers need to be aware that the Bible is easily abused, often ambiguous, and even scandalous at times. It touches our humanity at some of its most sensitive places. And it has a great deal to do with life, death, violence, justice, beauty, suffering, meaning, and (of course) love.

Apart from its theological significance, the Bible contains profound anthropological, psychological, cultural and philosophical insights, which have implications for us personally and collectively. It deserves serious engagement at sociological, political, cultural and even aesthetic and artistic levels. Theology takes all of these (and many others) into consideration when it asks, “What does the Bible say about God?—and about us in God?”

In GNFL this understanding of the Scriptures is developed with these theological emphases:

• The Bible is the Church’s book.

• Over the course of many centuries the Church came to recognise that some of the sacred texts of our Jewish ancestors in the faith (the Old Testament) and some of the early Christian texts (especially the Gospels and Epistles) are inspired and inspiring, and revealed and revealing. God’s Spirit (“inspired” = “in-spirited”) breathes life in and through these texts in a unique and lasting way; and they are revealed because they lead us into a truth that is simply beyond our capacity to imagine or come up with on our own.

• The Catholic Church holds the Bible in very high esteem and reads it with great reverence; but it does not teach that God either wrote or dictated it.

• The human writers of the biblical books were fully involved in the work of producing these texts.

• God inspired the biblical authors, and gifted them with the talents of great writers, legislators, poets, liturgists, etc.

• The Scriptures were composed over a long period of time and among a specific people in a specific place—all of which has to be taken into account when interpreting the Scriptures.

• The Bible is not what modern people mean by “history” or “science”.

• The Bible is best described as a kind of “narrative theological anthropology”—that is, the story of humanity in relation to God.

• It tries to say something true, and at a profound level, about the perennial truth about the world and humanity as it is, especially in its relationship to God.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF). 

[RELIGION, CULTURE & SOCIETY]

This element of GNFL looks at the phenomenon of religion and society, as well as specific religions and societies, from a Christian theological perspective. This is not a secular sociological study of religion: it is an attempt to understand religion and society from the point of view of faith in God revealed in Jesus—it is part of religious education, which means it is done from a religious point of view. It therefore asks questions like: What does Jesus reveal about the nature of religion and society? What does faith in God as love mean in and for a world divided by social, religious, ideological and philosophical differences?

Part of the Christian, and more specifically Catholic, view of humanity (its “anthropology”) is that human beings are profoundly social beings. We need each other in order to exist and we need a shared method of holding together (which is what makes us religious, since that is what religion is there to do for us).

The word “religion” comes from the Latin re ligare, to bind up again, or to re-unify. Given that not all religions believe in God (as understood in classical theism), this “binding back” or “re-unifying” is not necessarily about connecting us with God, but with each other. It is about society.

Christianity both is and isn’t a religion; and this is true in different ways. According to some influential Christian thinkers, Christianity is more a revelation than a “religion”. In fact, it did not refer to itself as a religion for at least the first three hundred years of its existence. But it also is and is not a religion in the sense that it is not one homogenous phenomenon, “a” religion, since it is many, often incompatible religions (churches, communions and sects): Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Orthodox, Protestant, Quaker … and the list goes on.

The social role of religion in human violence is a hotly contested issue. Does religion cause violence, or does it overcome it? Is religion about peace and justice, or about power and privilege (or neither set of alternatives)? Would the world be better off if there were no religion? Is/was society better off where religion is/was banned? Can society function without religion?—for how long?

And how does Christianity respond to the growing cultural relativism of secular (post)modernity? Are all religions equally true/false, good/bad and/or admirable/deplorable?

In GNFL this understanding of the role that religion plays in society is developed in the following ways:

• The Christian Revelation, building on the Hebrew Revelation (principally the Old Testament), uncovers the deep structures of human social and religious ways of being.

• Social cohesion is one of humanity’s deepest needs; and social disintegration, one of our worst fears. The universal role of archaic/traditional religion was to manage social cohesion by managing social disintegration and its causes.

• The unveiling of the violent foundations of society, and the role of religion in its maintenance, began with the Hebrew Revelation and came to a head in Christ, namely that society is built on violence, using violence to contain violence; and religion is the mechanism by which it achieves this end.

• All religions have three things in common: ritual, myth and law. Each of these is to some extent a violent way of dealing with violence: ritual sacrifice of victims to angry gods; mythological stories that cover up human violence by projecting it onto the gods; using the threat of legal violence (law) against those who do things that cause violence (crime).

• Religion is the ancient, indeed primal, means by which violence was managed, contained, channelled and “sacralised”.

• The real cause of violence was and remains wanting what others have—envy, or what the Bible calls “coveting”.

• At the heart of Christianity is the image of a crucified outlaw revealing the truth about God and about humanity: that there is no violence in God; that the human condition is riddled with violence; and that its roots are in distorted desire.

• This creates a complex and often fraught relationship between Christianity and the world religions.

• Christianity has a unique relationship with Judaism, ancient and modern. Ancient Judaism is absolutely vital to a proper understanding of Christianity, since both Jesus and the early Church were Jewish, and belonged to the now extinct form of Judaism known as “Temple Judaism” or “Second Temple Judaism”. Christianity is, in some ways, as much a descendant of Second Temple Judaism as is modern Judaism, or “Rabbinic Judaism”. Christianity’s relationship with modern Judaism is the most important interreligious relationship for Christianity.

• Christianity also has an important relationship with Islam, or the various forms of Islam (many of which have complex and fraught relationships with each other). Historically the relationship was at least as strained and difficult as that with Judaism; and though the relationship is somewhat better, there is still much work to do (especially between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East).

• Christianity has been undergoing a massive change in its attitude to and relationship with the other world religions, especially Hinduism and the other religions of Asia, as well as the indigenous religions of Africa, Australia and elsewhere.

• There is a growing and widespread rise in anti-religious sentiment and policy throughout the (post)modern world; and Christianity is by far the most oppressed religious group in the world: it is oppressed by both other religions and the increasingly secularist ideologies, including in Australia, where religion is increasingly marginalised and excluded from the public forum, whether social, political, cultural, philosophical, or even spiritual or moral.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF).