Introduction
We have been asking ourselves a single question: What does it mean to be a Christian? This is the all-important question for everyone who styles themselves "a believer" in the Gospel, but as we have seen, the rise of specialization within academic disciplines has led to a presentation of the Gospel reduced to just a basic kerygmatic set of propositions that one believes. "Faith" becomes separate from "morality" and views the moral content of the Gospel as secondary to the kerygmatic content. This academic specialization trickles down, as it were, to the whole body of believers, causing an essential separation of "what I do" from "what I believe."
The result? Pastors are tempted to shy away from controversial moral issues in order to keep the people in the pews. This also creates the situation where people are living and supporting immoral behaviors yet still considering themselves committed Christians. This series of blog posts seeks to address this problem and suggest an answer or two.
Return to the Sources
Back in the day it was fashionable for wise men to found schools of thought in order to keep their teachings in perpetuity, but Jesus did not do this. Jesus Christ started the Church. To understand the Church is to understand the answer to what it means to be a Christian, what it means to join faith to morals in an all-embracing form that distorts neither. We need to return to the sources of the Church in order to answer this question.
In the previous article I spoke about the Apostolic Church's self-understanding. They were not members of a club, an organization, or a political party. They were communally a part of The Way of the Lord Jesus. They were Christians, followers of Christ Jesus, who understood their call to be precisely that: little christs in the world. The word for church, ekklesia, is a Greek word that translates the Hebrew qahal- the assembly, or literally 'the called-out ones'. They saw in Christ a New Moses who was calling out a people from the bondage of slavery to sin to journey to the promised land of eternal life. Christ is the new and final mediator between God and Man, and so the People of God would not be defined by ancestral bloodlines, but by His blood shed "for you and for all".
The Church, then, did not gather its essential identity from the world as a geo-political, ethnic, or social organization of men, but rather the Church was born through the encounter of man with God in Jesus Christ. The Church was fashioned from His Body and remains forever His Bride. The New Israel of God, the Church, is not a man-made institution, but a Christ-fashioned organism. She is living, vital, not on her own, but only through the life that Jesus breathes upon it through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is in the Church, first and foremost, that we know who we are, our identity, and from this flows “what I believe” and “what I do.” They are bound to one another.
New Creation is New Life
Jesus Christ does not want believers! He is sick and tired of believers! (see Matthew 7:21-23) Jesus wants followers. Those who seek to hide the Church’s moral teaching behind a more vaguely stated and less controversial kerygma loose sight of very thing that conjoins faith with morality: becoming a Christian means precisely a new way of life as a new creation. Christianity is the answer to the question How should I live?
Both the truths of faith as well as the truths of morality interpenetrate one another in order to form the good news of Christianity, for they are both located, grounded, rooted in a living person, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the object of our Faith, for He is the final Word spoken from the Father by the breath of the Holy Spirit to humanity. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” who entered into the human condition to communicate the life of God to man. He is the fullness of God’s self-revelation to mankind, and in becoming “like us in all things except sin,” Jesus simultaneously reveals man to himself, as Vatican II insightfully taught.
Christians do not follow the teachings of Jesus, in themselves, but rather we follow Jesus. Everything that Jesus thought, spoke, or did, all of His actions are caught up in the self-revelation of God to man. The decision to follow Christ is not a decision to believe a list of facts, but is to convert oneself to a truth to be lived, moving to a whole new state-of-being. The path of the Way of the Lord Jesus is a “recognizable form of life,” according to Livio Melina, “It is Christ who reveals in truth the heart of man, who reveals to man his highest vocation.”
That is why Jesus does not want mere believers or “hearers of the word”, because one cannot really know Jesus Christ without following Him along the way, without being “doers of the word.” It is all or nothing in the Christian life- Incarnation, life, suffering, death, resurrection- everything in the life of the Man discloses the heart of the Trinity, demonstrates that in God’s innermost mystery “is love.”
The gospel of Jesus is total, integral to the person who would have faith in God. To be a Christian is to be a new creation, the adopted son or daughter of God the Father in the Son Jesus by the Spirit of Jesus through grace.
The Incarnation
Concluding these brief and non-exhaustive thoughts on living the Christian life, one must turn again to our Savior to see the union of faith and morals in the life, in the very being of Jesus, that is relevant to answering our question.
Some Christians hold that morality is separated from faith because it has to do with human duties and works, that to believe morality truly bears upon eternal life is to substitute a false gospel of works-based righteous for the real gospel of faith alone. To such Christians, with great love and affection, I have a few concluding words to say that might help frame the discussion.
Primacy is given to faith over works because it is from our knowledge of who Jesus is and what He did that we base our lives (works) upon. I grant that outright. However, before both faith and works is grace, God’s free gift, that is poured into our very being by His righteousness.
Faith, in the sense of man’s response to God, is thus clearly a work of man, an action that man freely performs in conformity to the life of grace given to him by God. A man responding generously to God is doing an act that can be verily be described as moral. Any morally good actions done by man that is pleasing to God is done only through the power of His divine grace.
In order to re-examine the faith/works dichotomy, we must look to Christ in just what He reveals about man’s highest vocation. Jesus’ life is our life. Jesus was fully God and fully man. The Incarnation reveals not only the humility of God, but also reprinstinates human dignity. When Jesus healed, He healed as one who is fully God and fully man. When He spoke, He spoke as divine and human, perfectly united without any separation of the two natures. When He died, God died.
The Incarnation of Jesus demonstrates our highest vocation, which is to be so fully united to God by His Holy Spirit that we act like Christ: fully God’s divine grace and fully our work. The moment we begin in the authentic Christian life to separate “my work” from “God’s grace” is the moment we moved away from being followers and entered into the realm of mere believers. Yes, we are fallen creatures, prone to sin and lovers of temptation, but that is precisely where the work of the merits of Christ’s redemption is so radical: He makes it possible to live the Christian life by giving us the Spirit of the One who perfectly lived the Christian life.
Thus, to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ by hiding the controversial moral teachings is to not preach the full gospel. It is to preach, ultimately, a false gospel. Depriving people of the Church morality deprives them of the saving freedom that Christ died to give us, which is a real freedom from slavery to sinfulness. Christianity is the simple call to follow Jesus Christ in a new way of life.
AMDG
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Ortho-doxy/praxis. think about it.
Introduction
What does it mean to live the Christian life, to be a follower of Jesus Christ? That question is what we are seeking an answer to, but there is the principle obstacle that we must overcome (besides the trifecta: world, flesh and the devil), which is the tendency of our culture towards super specialization. This specialization, this division of a whole down to its parts, has created in the realm of praxis a dividing wall between faith and morals.
Kerygma
One of the greatest of modern problems with pastoral work, especially evangelization, is the desire to preach and teach the whole saving message of the Good News without denying anything essential. It is indeed Good News when God not only teaches us about how to live, but that the Divine Author wrote Himself into the story, became an actor, and communicated the fullness of life. If Love itself were to take on flesh, bone and blood, what would this human life look like from this perspective?
How incredible a proposition! How unbelievable a statement! "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
This is the Gospel: that God so loved us that He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave- teaching, living, loving, crying, and dying so that we might be freed from slavery to death. And in His glorious resurrection there is the promise of eternal life for us by sharing in His life through the Holy Spirit! This is the gospel, the Good News of Christianity, the "true Philosophy", the perennial wisdom.
And yet, this is not all. It is to the person of Jesus Christ that we turn to in our object of Christian faith. We seek Him, to know Him and love Him, in order to understand what it means to be a follow of Christ. But we know from the earliest of times, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, that being a Christian was more than a series of propositions to be believed, but a life to be lived. In contrast to the Buddha who said, "Look not to me; look rather to my dharma [doctrine]" and Mohammed who claimed only one miracle, the writing of the Koran, in Jesus we find statement after statement that He (or the Trinity) is the content of the Faith. In the center of orthodox and traditional Christianity we find not a series of doctrines or sacred writings, but the Word Himself, the person of Jesus Christ who reveals to man the inner life of the Blessed Trinity and who, in the words of Vatican II, "reveals man to himself." And it is in Jesus that our lives, not just our beliefs, need to be true and good.
What does all this have to do with our question, well and good as it may seem? The reality is that in modern Christianity, especially Catholicism, when it comes to understanding the faith, we look to either Sacred Scripture and its academic field of exegesis or we look to the Systematic Theology and its doctrinal statements and dogmatic formulations. To learn how to live we do not turn to either of the above, but instead to Moral Theology, especially focused on the Natural Law and Casuistry, or to Spiritual Theology as lived in the various orders throughout church history. We get lost in the divisions, the separations, the subcategorization of the specialization.
I said above "especially in Catholicism" because, since the rise of the Medieval Scholasticism, we have been extremely scientific in our approach to the various theological disciplines. Protestants can avoid some of these tendencies due to their exclusive attention to Sacred Scripture and the emphasis in evangelical Christianity on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. These can offer as a balance, but that is realized only on a popular level. Once one enters the realm of academia, largely, this balance is lost because of the modernist approach to specialization in all American places of higher education.
Praxis
All of the early followers of Jesus Christ, from the Gospels to the Early Church, encounter the Christian message as metanoia, as a call to repentance, conversion, and a life of holiness. This life of holiness was understood and the heart and soul of Christianity, which is why the earliest followers of Christ were not called "christians" but rather "followers of The Way". The Way or The Way of the Lord Jesus, was a sect within Judaism, to be sure, but its name reveals more than that. It reveals the interpenetration of faith and morals, of life and belief, in a way that cannot be so easily separated. Jesus Christ did not come to give us a series of beliefs, but to make us a new creation, one with His eternal life. New life certainly, and do not get me wrong here, involves right teaching (ortho-doxy) but it is not limited to it. The content of our faith, then, is transformational and not mere information. The encounter with Jesus leaves the individual asking, "How do I now live" and "Lord, teach us to pray."
To utilize the language, the Church is the guardian of the Deposit of Faith handed down to us from Jesus and His Apostles to the Catholic Church. Faith and morals forms the singular Deposit of Faith, the one saving message of the Good News of Jesus. They are not two messages. In fact, the earliest non-biblical writing of the Church, the Didache, uses the traditional pedagogical method of "The Two Ways" in order to layout the life of the Christian. It is here in the interpenetration of the two- faith and morals- that we see the importance of ortho-praxis (right acting) is just as important as ortho-doxy (right belief).
Union of the Two
And so we realize now, hopefully, that the content of the Good News is a message that involves things like the Trinity and the Resurrection, but also about moral questions, situations, laws and virtues. The question "What must I believe?" cannot be separated from the question, "What must I do?" It is in the union of belief and practice, in faith and morals, that the fullest possible understanding of "living the Christian life" can possibly offer.
If we persist in maintaining a separation of faith and morals, of saying that being a Christian means only believing these sets of truths about God and Jesus and keep questions about moral thoughts, words, and deeds bracketed, one will always have a half-faith, also known as a false religion. The implications of the Gospel challenge our social, political, and moral perspectives. They have to because they are God's and not man's.
peace,
gomer.
AMDG
What does it mean to live the Christian life, to be a follower of Jesus Christ? That question is what we are seeking an answer to, but there is the principle obstacle that we must overcome (besides the trifecta: world, flesh and the devil), which is the tendency of our culture towards super specialization. This specialization, this division of a whole down to its parts, has created in the realm of praxis a dividing wall between faith and morals.
Kerygma
One of the greatest of modern problems with pastoral work, especially evangelization, is the desire to preach and teach the whole saving message of the Good News without denying anything essential. It is indeed Good News when God not only teaches us about how to live, but that the Divine Author wrote Himself into the story, became an actor, and communicated the fullness of life. If Love itself were to take on flesh, bone and blood, what would this human life look like from this perspective?
How incredible a proposition! How unbelievable a statement! "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
This is the Gospel: that God so loved us that He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave- teaching, living, loving, crying, and dying so that we might be freed from slavery to death. And in His glorious resurrection there is the promise of eternal life for us by sharing in His life through the Holy Spirit! This is the gospel, the Good News of Christianity, the "true Philosophy", the perennial wisdom.
And yet, this is not all. It is to the person of Jesus Christ that we turn to in our object of Christian faith. We seek Him, to know Him and love Him, in order to understand what it means to be a follow of Christ. But we know from the earliest of times, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, that being a Christian was more than a series of propositions to be believed, but a life to be lived. In contrast to the Buddha who said, "Look not to me; look rather to my dharma [doctrine]" and Mohammed who claimed only one miracle, the writing of the Koran, in Jesus we find statement after statement that He (or the Trinity) is the content of the Faith. In the center of orthodox and traditional Christianity we find not a series of doctrines or sacred writings, but the Word Himself, the person of Jesus Christ who reveals to man the inner life of the Blessed Trinity and who, in the words of Vatican II, "reveals man to himself." And it is in Jesus that our lives, not just our beliefs, need to be true and good.
What does all this have to do with our question, well and good as it may seem? The reality is that in modern Christianity, especially Catholicism, when it comes to understanding the faith, we look to either Sacred Scripture and its academic field of exegesis or we look to the Systematic Theology and its doctrinal statements and dogmatic formulations. To learn how to live we do not turn to either of the above, but instead to Moral Theology, especially focused on the Natural Law and Casuistry, or to Spiritual Theology as lived in the various orders throughout church history. We get lost in the divisions, the separations, the subcategorization of the specialization.
I said above "especially in Catholicism" because, since the rise of the Medieval Scholasticism, we have been extremely scientific in our approach to the various theological disciplines. Protestants can avoid some of these tendencies due to their exclusive attention to Sacred Scripture and the emphasis in evangelical Christianity on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. These can offer as a balance, but that is realized only on a popular level. Once one enters the realm of academia, largely, this balance is lost because of the modernist approach to specialization in all American places of higher education.
Praxis
All of the early followers of Jesus Christ, from the Gospels to the Early Church, encounter the Christian message as metanoia, as a call to repentance, conversion, and a life of holiness. This life of holiness was understood and the heart and soul of Christianity, which is why the earliest followers of Christ were not called "christians" but rather "followers of The Way". The Way or The Way of the Lord Jesus, was a sect within Judaism, to be sure, but its name reveals more than that. It reveals the interpenetration of faith and morals, of life and belief, in a way that cannot be so easily separated. Jesus Christ did not come to give us a series of beliefs, but to make us a new creation, one with His eternal life. New life certainly, and do not get me wrong here, involves right teaching (ortho-doxy) but it is not limited to it. The content of our faith, then, is transformational and not mere information. The encounter with Jesus leaves the individual asking, "How do I now live" and "Lord, teach us to pray."
To utilize the language, the Church is the guardian of the Deposit of Faith handed down to us from Jesus and His Apostles to the Catholic Church. Faith and morals forms the singular Deposit of Faith, the one saving message of the Good News of Jesus. They are not two messages. In fact, the earliest non-biblical writing of the Church, the Didache, uses the traditional pedagogical method of "The Two Ways" in order to layout the life of the Christian. It is here in the interpenetration of the two- faith and morals- that we see the importance of ortho-praxis (right acting) is just as important as ortho-doxy (right belief).
Union of the Two
And so we realize now, hopefully, that the content of the Good News is a message that involves things like the Trinity and the Resurrection, but also about moral questions, situations, laws and virtues. The question "What must I believe?" cannot be separated from the question, "What must I do?" It is in the union of belief and practice, in faith and morals, that the fullest possible understanding of "living the Christian life" can possibly offer.
If we persist in maintaining a separation of faith and morals, of saying that being a Christian means only believing these sets of truths about God and Jesus and keep questions about moral thoughts, words, and deeds bracketed, one will always have a half-faith, also known as a false religion. The implications of the Gospel challenge our social, political, and moral perspectives. They have to because they are God's and not man's.
peace,
gomer.
AMDG
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The Christian Humpty-Dumpty
do we even know what it means to live a Christian life?
The Problem.
What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to follow after Jesus Christ in my life? What does it mean to be a Christian today, here, now? Is Jesus of Nazareth someone too foreign and too ancient to be able to be grasped, to be held on to in today's climate, like sand slipping out through loose fingers?
I know I have a few presuppositions that I bring with me to the table in answering these questions. First, I know that Jesus of Nazareth is God, is Savior, and is glorified at the right hand of the Father for all eternity. Second, I have encountered and been filled with the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit on more than one occasion so that- even if I wanted to- I could not doubt His action in my story and in others. Also, I know the flawed and broken Catholic Church is the virgin bride of Christ and the fruitful Mother of humanity's gift of salvation. And finally, it is with all pride that I can say I am really bad at this whole "Christian living" thing.
What I want to do in this article is just bounce around a few big problems that we have in trying to understand how we are to live the Christian life. In this article I will introduce one main problem and its significant offspring. This is the problem of specialization. I seek to do this in four articles of which this is the first introduction to the series.
One Wild Divorce Court!
When it comes to being a Christian I think there is this weird double-think that occurs far too often, especially with young people searching for Him in their new lives. This double-think is a really annoying obstacle to intelligent thought, but it so widespread that I don't think this little article is going to contribute much to answering the above questions. The problem is a modern peculiarity, so I am told countless times in various Christian philosophical, theological and historical comments, and it is this: we are so specialized into tiny compartments that we have lost all sense of the whole, of the integrity of life and the universe and God. As Chesterton said it, and said it far better than me, "this world is one wild divorce court!"
What I mean is simple and is seen in every day life. The ordinary man feels impotent and inadequate when contrasted with the technical skill of the specialist. We have given up the right to think for ourselves, practicing a strict fideism to the men and women in white coats or with alphabets of degrees after their last name. We keep specializing so narrowly, we keep dividing up and dividing up subjects into its constituent parts that there is no longer any possibility of synthesis. We have put everything in life on the dissection table and have absolved ourselves of the responsibility to put it all back together again. The real tragedy is that without the whole the parts really do not make any sense. Like tearing upon the rear legs of the frog to scrutinize its muscles and then wondering why it no longer jumps. You've killed the thing!
So goes the world into divorce after divorce, and so goes the Church. Imagine a world where you can study theology without studying Scripture. "No! That is left to the exegetes to banter about." And those in Scripture would never think about making dogmatic, theological statements, for "That's the task of the systematic theologian! We just deal with declensions, grammar, and the politics behind the texts!" I mean, this divorce and specialization and analysis became so silly that Christology - the study of Jesus Christ - was actually separated from Soteriology - the study of the salvation that Jesus won for us. The Savior was separated from salvation! How huge an obstacle to rational thought!
In many ways, however, this scholarly attitude of distinguishing-so-as-to-divorce has seeped into the ordinary person's own mode of thinking, acting, talking and praying. Somewhere along the line between the 13th Century and the 20th Century we divorced the subject of Christian Spirituality from Morality and Christology. We sent each subject to its own corner to be studied, analyzed, picked apart and dissected and then when all was said and done, there was nothing that connected them back together. This was first done in teaching, then in the practices of ordinary persons. We lost the forest for the sake of the pine needle, let alone the trees!
Ethics Without Salvation, Prayer without Morality
Here is the common double-think that impairs our understanding of living the Christian life. On the one hand there is morality and on the other there is spirituality. Faith and morals have been separated and asked not to talk to each other any more. And who Jesus Christ is and does has nothing really to do with either. This happened for at least the period between the Councils of Trent and Vatican II, if not earlier back to the 14th Century.
Consequently, it is a crisis today in evangelization when the cautioned and careful proclamation of the Gospel has distilled away any controversial moral principles that could offend. So we have a truncated form of the basic kerygmatic message of the cross and resurrection. We talk a lot about who God is and what Jesus Christ has done, while glossing over the opinion of Jesus who said, "Repent!" and not just "believe." That is, you need to change because God hates your actions.
The encounter with the Gospel meant that we had to accept the moral implications of its message and the theological revelation it unfolded as one and the same Gospel. Cult prostitutes in pagan religions were not allowed to be Christians and carry on their fornication. Some early Christians steeped in pagan society had to become vegetarians in order to escape eating meat that other people sacrificed to idols, then sold in local markets. Why? Because it was a violation of faith to eat meat sacrificed to idols, and thus it became immoral for any Christian to participate in it, even in a more remote way. Homosexuals became chaste. Thieves made restitution. Fornicators married. Adulterers found forgiveness in the cross, but also found their way back to their own marriage beds in renewed faithfulness.
Let me make this point more clear. Just as a person cannot say, "I'm a communist" and also "keep the government out of the free markets;" just as a man cannot declare himself an anarchist and then advocate the divine right of kings; just as a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and say in the next breath, "but there was no such person as Jesus;" so too a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and utilize contraception, support abortion, or advocate euthanasia. The reason why is because these are things that have nothing to do with giving glory to God, and such actions or advocacy of them, like free markets to the communist, demonstrate whose you really are: the world's.
Conclusion
I know a lot of this sounds harsh, but it really should not. It is only because so much of our lives are separated into neat little compartments that never touch each other and have next to no significance with one another that we find what I have stated above as mean-spirited or over the top. The truth is faith and morals are the one Christian Gospel, united as one together in reality, so what our task needs to be is to unite them in practice and in theory. We need to stop allowing the immoral message of this world turn back our voices from preaching the truth, the whole truth, so help us God!
In the next part of this series, I wish to treat how the divorce between faith and morals, seen as possessing two different types of content, limits the way we view "Christian Living" and how we experience the moral life.
God bless,
gomer
AMDG
The Problem.
What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to follow after Jesus Christ in my life? What does it mean to be a Christian today, here, now? Is Jesus of Nazareth someone too foreign and too ancient to be able to be grasped, to be held on to in today's climate, like sand slipping out through loose fingers?
I know I have a few presuppositions that I bring with me to the table in answering these questions. First, I know that Jesus of Nazareth is God, is Savior, and is glorified at the right hand of the Father for all eternity. Second, I have encountered and been filled with the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit on more than one occasion so that- even if I wanted to- I could not doubt His action in my story and in others. Also, I know the flawed and broken Catholic Church is the virgin bride of Christ and the fruitful Mother of humanity's gift of salvation. And finally, it is with all pride that I can say I am really bad at this whole "Christian living" thing.
What I want to do in this article is just bounce around a few big problems that we have in trying to understand how we are to live the Christian life. In this article I will introduce one main problem and its significant offspring. This is the problem of specialization. I seek to do this in four articles of which this is the first introduction to the series.
One Wild Divorce Court!
When it comes to being a Christian I think there is this weird double-think that occurs far too often, especially with young people searching for Him in their new lives. This double-think is a really annoying obstacle to intelligent thought, but it so widespread that I don't think this little article is going to contribute much to answering the above questions. The problem is a modern peculiarity, so I am told countless times in various Christian philosophical, theological and historical comments, and it is this: we are so specialized into tiny compartments that we have lost all sense of the whole, of the integrity of life and the universe and God. As Chesterton said it, and said it far better than me, "this world is one wild divorce court!"
What I mean is simple and is seen in every day life. The ordinary man feels impotent and inadequate when contrasted with the technical skill of the specialist. We have given up the right to think for ourselves, practicing a strict fideism to the men and women in white coats or with alphabets of degrees after their last name. We keep specializing so narrowly, we keep dividing up and dividing up subjects into its constituent parts that there is no longer any possibility of synthesis. We have put everything in life on the dissection table and have absolved ourselves of the responsibility to put it all back together again. The real tragedy is that without the whole the parts really do not make any sense. Like tearing upon the rear legs of the frog to scrutinize its muscles and then wondering why it no longer jumps. You've killed the thing!
So goes the world into divorce after divorce, and so goes the Church. Imagine a world where you can study theology without studying Scripture. "No! That is left to the exegetes to banter about." And those in Scripture would never think about making dogmatic, theological statements, for "That's the task of the systematic theologian! We just deal with declensions, grammar, and the politics behind the texts!" I mean, this divorce and specialization and analysis became so silly that Christology - the study of Jesus Christ - was actually separated from Soteriology - the study of the salvation that Jesus won for us. The Savior was separated from salvation! How huge an obstacle to rational thought!
In many ways, however, this scholarly attitude of distinguishing-so-as-to-divorce has seeped into the ordinary person's own mode of thinking, acting, talking and praying. Somewhere along the line between the 13th Century and the 20th Century we divorced the subject of Christian Spirituality from Morality and Christology. We sent each subject to its own corner to be studied, analyzed, picked apart and dissected and then when all was said and done, there was nothing that connected them back together. This was first done in teaching, then in the practices of ordinary persons. We lost the forest for the sake of the pine needle, let alone the trees!
Ethics Without Salvation, Prayer without Morality
Here is the common double-think that impairs our understanding of living the Christian life. On the one hand there is morality and on the other there is spirituality. Faith and morals have been separated and asked not to talk to each other any more. And who Jesus Christ is and does has nothing really to do with either. This happened for at least the period between the Councils of Trent and Vatican II, if not earlier back to the 14th Century.
Consequently, it is a crisis today in evangelization when the cautioned and careful proclamation of the Gospel has distilled away any controversial moral principles that could offend. So we have a truncated form of the basic kerygmatic message of the cross and resurrection. We talk a lot about who God is and what Jesus Christ has done, while glossing over the opinion of Jesus who said, "Repent!" and not just "believe." That is, you need to change because God hates your actions.
The encounter with the Gospel meant that we had to accept the moral implications of its message and the theological revelation it unfolded as one and the same Gospel. Cult prostitutes in pagan religions were not allowed to be Christians and carry on their fornication. Some early Christians steeped in pagan society had to become vegetarians in order to escape eating meat that other people sacrificed to idols, then sold in local markets. Why? Because it was a violation of faith to eat meat sacrificed to idols, and thus it became immoral for any Christian to participate in it, even in a more remote way. Homosexuals became chaste. Thieves made restitution. Fornicators married. Adulterers found forgiveness in the cross, but also found their way back to their own marriage beds in renewed faithfulness.
Let me make this point more clear. Just as a person cannot say, "I'm a communist" and also "keep the government out of the free markets;" just as a man cannot declare himself an anarchist and then advocate the divine right of kings; just as a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and say in the next breath, "but there was no such person as Jesus;" so too a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and utilize contraception, support abortion, or advocate euthanasia. The reason why is because these are things that have nothing to do with giving glory to God, and such actions or advocacy of them, like free markets to the communist, demonstrate whose you really are: the world's.
Conclusion
I know a lot of this sounds harsh, but it really should not. It is only because so much of our lives are separated into neat little compartments that never touch each other and have next to no significance with one another that we find what I have stated above as mean-spirited or over the top. The truth is faith and morals are the one Christian Gospel, united as one together in reality, so what our task needs to be is to unite them in practice and in theory. We need to stop allowing the immoral message of this world turn back our voices from preaching the truth, the whole truth, so help us God!
In the next part of this series, I wish to treat how the divorce between faith and morals, seen as possessing two different types of content, limits the way we view "Christian Living" and how we experience the moral life.
God bless,
gomer
AMDG
Trained Up in Love, Part II
Always Faithful
Love is not just the emotional satisfaction that one person can offer to another, for that would be too limited and would just be weak sauce. True love has got to be so much more than these tattered attempts at wholeness that the world presents to us as "real love." We may start with the physical beauty of the other or the way that other person makes us feel, but brothers and sisters, we have to keep love moving onwards and upwards from there.
Love, for it to be real, must be faithful.
Many people, especially men it seems (myself included!), have this irrational fear of commitment to another person for the whole of their lives. We can understand why many people feel this way, after all, I did say earlier that love limits freedom because freedom serves love, not the other way around. Giving up options, choices, Plan B, this scares people! And I think in a lot of ways people should be a little scared. Love is a serious thing and should not be entered into lightly. It carries with it the weight of two whole lives, two hearts, the past of two different people and also their futures, even including their eternal destiny. This is heavy stuff!
That being said, love is liberating in a new way. Love opens up new levels of service and self-disterestedness that never could exist in the bachelor's life, which is almost always self-centered. Faithful commitment is so often resisted because we are not used to saying to another, "You" and "Always;" but "Me" and "Now."
So what does it mean to be faithful in love?
First, it means learning how to break yourself of the most dangerous habit that fights against the heart of love, which is the "me-first" disease. The understanding of love as the gift of self to another means that the opposite is the use of others for oneself, which, let us be honest with one another, is really how most of us just naturally think. But for love to be real, love must think, "How can I serve you today?"
How do we break ourselves of this me-first disease? Slowly, but steadily, we have to choose to love the other person each day. Do not rely on the intensity of emotions or the agreeableness of the other person's personality to our own in order to win over your heart. It lies in the power of each man and woman to choose the other and to choose to serve.
And it is in the service of the other than the me-self disease begins to break. Just like any disease, it may take some distasteful medicine in order to cause the cure, but without it we will fail. So without mincing any words or trying to water it down I will just come out and say it: you cannot love someone without dying to yourself, without killing your own goofy self-love. Appealing? Probably not, but it is good and it is the only way to true and lasting love. Why is dying to yourself so important? You have to create room in your heart for your Beloved to truly take root. You have to stop thinking, "What's in it for me?" and you need to start thinking, "How can I love her?" It is in the day-to-day struggle that your love finds its fullness. It is in self-denial that commitment becomes transformed into faithfulness.
Being faithful is not just don't have sex with other people who aren't your spouse. Faithfulness is a positive virtue that is more than a lack of sin, but is a growth of the mind and heart of one person with his beloved. One can refrain from sex but be an adulterer of the eyes. One can refrain from adultery of the eyes, but still be an emotion whore, seeking intimacy that are reserved only for your Beloved. How many wives regard themselves as "harmless flirts" and how many husbands loose control of their eyes when about town or in the office? This wounds faithfulness and reveals deeper levels of selfishness, conceit, or maybe just plain vanity.
Is it Creative?
In his beautiful mediation on love, The Jeweler's Shop, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) expresses a central point that escapes many today when it comes to real love: "only one question is important, is it creative?"
The root of love is freedom, its shoot is completeness, its flower is its faithfulness, and it is with all of these together that love is fruitful, growing and expanding into the lives of the couple and into the lives of others surrounding them. Here, love becomes not just a power between the two, but an environment that overflows into others.
Essentially, love bears fruit. First, in the lives of the lovers as deeper and newer levels of selflessness are discovered. The sick baby, the elderly parents, the meaningless job that clothes and shelters the family, the drudgery and tediousness of the daily grind- all of these become the jagged rocks upon which love spills and splashes itself against, wave upon wave. The Lover discovers new virtues within himself that previously did not exist, as love is the form of virtue, engendering values, virtues, principles, commitments and perspectives that otherwise would never have existed before. The Beloved finds wellsprings of strength and patience, hope and wisdom that were dormant in her sleeping heart before love's wake up call sounded loud.
And the fruitfulness continues as love conquers all.
In the giving of self and the receiving of the other, love reciprocates into a whole environment, but love demands more. Love seeks to turn its gaze from the couple to others, to enlarge their hearts even more than has been up till now. Love is so fruitful that in our human world it takes on a further dimension of creativity; that is, love wills to overflow so much that it will bring about the creation of new persons to be known and loved.
Love, in the eyes of the world, is not creative. It may be expressive, even a little artistic, but it cannot be fruitful because the grain of wheat refuses to fall to the ground and die. At the heart of real, passionate, true love is dying of the one into the life of the other. It is self-sacrificial. The fullness of the fruit comes in the dying of the seed, in its crushing down and breaking open. It is the only way. It is life's way. But our world, on top of being "One wild divorce court" as Chesterton put it, is also dominated by the contraceptive mentality, wounding love's fruitfulness in order to attempt the harnesses of love's pleasures without its demands.
There is the argument that sex, for it to be a positive and loving act, must uphold simultaneously its two ends, or purposes, which are procreation and unity. The act of making love between spouses ought always to be a unifying act, bringing the two bodies closer and causing their to be one heart in place of the two. Also, sex is clearly, naturally, and obviously ordered towards the generation and education of children. But, many hold, sometimes there are good reasons to separate the procreative end from the unitive end, to divorce babies from bonding.
The great tragedy of the situation is the thought that this child created by your reciprocal self-giving to one another is somehow not the ultimate expression of your unity. I mean this clearly: your children are your unity, writ large in their DNA, their personalities and their hearts. The child is the incarnation of the whole environment of your love. The child is the walking, talking, living, breathing enfleshment of two lovers, a love so real that nine months later you have to give him/her a name!
Concluding Remarks
And it is in the creative fruitfulness of love that we can see why there must also be the faithful commitment to one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. A new life needs the loving stability of two parents bound to one another regardless of the obstacles that life throws at them. Love endures because this created life endures. Love is, then, meant to be a sure and stable thing, a rock or fortress in which the garden of love may grow abundantly.
For love to be real, it must be true. For it to be true, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful. Otherwise, it just cannot satisfy the human heart!
God love you,
Mike
AMDG
Love is not just the emotional satisfaction that one person can offer to another, for that would be too limited and would just be weak sauce. True love has got to be so much more than these tattered attempts at wholeness that the world presents to us as "real love." We may start with the physical beauty of the other or the way that other person makes us feel, but brothers and sisters, we have to keep love moving onwards and upwards from there.
Love, for it to be real, must be faithful.
Many people, especially men it seems (myself included!), have this irrational fear of commitment to another person for the whole of their lives. We can understand why many people feel this way, after all, I did say earlier that love limits freedom because freedom serves love, not the other way around. Giving up options, choices, Plan B, this scares people! And I think in a lot of ways people should be a little scared. Love is a serious thing and should not be entered into lightly. It carries with it the weight of two whole lives, two hearts, the past of two different people and also their futures, even including their eternal destiny. This is heavy stuff!
That being said, love is liberating in a new way. Love opens up new levels of service and self-disterestedness that never could exist in the bachelor's life, which is almost always self-centered. Faithful commitment is so often resisted because we are not used to saying to another, "You" and "Always;" but "Me" and "Now."
So what does it mean to be faithful in love?
First, it means learning how to break yourself of the most dangerous habit that fights against the heart of love, which is the "me-first" disease. The understanding of love as the gift of self to another means that the opposite is the use of others for oneself, which, let us be honest with one another, is really how most of us just naturally think. But for love to be real, love must think, "How can I serve you today?"
How do we break ourselves of this me-first disease? Slowly, but steadily, we have to choose to love the other person each day. Do not rely on the intensity of emotions or the agreeableness of the other person's personality to our own in order to win over your heart. It lies in the power of each man and woman to choose the other and to choose to serve.
And it is in the service of the other than the me-self disease begins to break. Just like any disease, it may take some distasteful medicine in order to cause the cure, but without it we will fail. So without mincing any words or trying to water it down I will just come out and say it: you cannot love someone without dying to yourself, without killing your own goofy self-love. Appealing? Probably not, but it is good and it is the only way to true and lasting love. Why is dying to yourself so important? You have to create room in your heart for your Beloved to truly take root. You have to stop thinking, "What's in it for me?" and you need to start thinking, "How can I love her?" It is in the day-to-day struggle that your love finds its fullness. It is in self-denial that commitment becomes transformed into faithfulness.
Being faithful is not just don't have sex with other people who aren't your spouse. Faithfulness is a positive virtue that is more than a lack of sin, but is a growth of the mind and heart of one person with his beloved. One can refrain from sex but be an adulterer of the eyes. One can refrain from adultery of the eyes, but still be an emotion whore, seeking intimacy that are reserved only for your Beloved. How many wives regard themselves as "harmless flirts" and how many husbands loose control of their eyes when about town or in the office? This wounds faithfulness and reveals deeper levels of selfishness, conceit, or maybe just plain vanity.
Is it Creative?
In his beautiful mediation on love, The Jeweler's Shop, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) expresses a central point that escapes many today when it comes to real love: "only one question is important, is it creative?"
The root of love is freedom, its shoot is completeness, its flower is its faithfulness, and it is with all of these together that love is fruitful, growing and expanding into the lives of the couple and into the lives of others surrounding them. Here, love becomes not just a power between the two, but an environment that overflows into others.
Essentially, love bears fruit. First, in the lives of the lovers as deeper and newer levels of selflessness are discovered. The sick baby, the elderly parents, the meaningless job that clothes and shelters the family, the drudgery and tediousness of the daily grind- all of these become the jagged rocks upon which love spills and splashes itself against, wave upon wave. The Lover discovers new virtues within himself that previously did not exist, as love is the form of virtue, engendering values, virtues, principles, commitments and perspectives that otherwise would never have existed before. The Beloved finds wellsprings of strength and patience, hope and wisdom that were dormant in her sleeping heart before love's wake up call sounded loud.
And the fruitfulness continues as love conquers all.
In the giving of self and the receiving of the other, love reciprocates into a whole environment, but love demands more. Love seeks to turn its gaze from the couple to others, to enlarge their hearts even more than has been up till now. Love is so fruitful that in our human world it takes on a further dimension of creativity; that is, love wills to overflow so much that it will bring about the creation of new persons to be known and loved.
Love, in the eyes of the world, is not creative. It may be expressive, even a little artistic, but it cannot be fruitful because the grain of wheat refuses to fall to the ground and die. At the heart of real, passionate, true love is dying of the one into the life of the other. It is self-sacrificial. The fullness of the fruit comes in the dying of the seed, in its crushing down and breaking open. It is the only way. It is life's way. But our world, on top of being "One wild divorce court" as Chesterton put it, is also dominated by the contraceptive mentality, wounding love's fruitfulness in order to attempt the harnesses of love's pleasures without its demands.
There is the argument that sex, for it to be a positive and loving act, must uphold simultaneously its two ends, or purposes, which are procreation and unity. The act of making love between spouses ought always to be a unifying act, bringing the two bodies closer and causing their to be one heart in place of the two. Also, sex is clearly, naturally, and obviously ordered towards the generation and education of children. But, many hold, sometimes there are good reasons to separate the procreative end from the unitive end, to divorce babies from bonding.
The great tragedy of the situation is the thought that this child created by your reciprocal self-giving to one another is somehow not the ultimate expression of your unity. I mean this clearly: your children are your unity, writ large in their DNA, their personalities and their hearts. The child is the incarnation of the whole environment of your love. The child is the walking, talking, living, breathing enfleshment of two lovers, a love so real that nine months later you have to give him/her a name!
Concluding Remarks
And it is in the creative fruitfulness of love that we can see why there must also be the faithful commitment to one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. A new life needs the loving stability of two parents bound to one another regardless of the obstacles that life throws at them. Love endures because this created life endures. Love is, then, meant to be a sure and stable thing, a rock or fortress in which the garden of love may grow abundantly.
For love to be real, it must be true. For it to be true, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful. Otherwise, it just cannot satisfy the human heart!
God love you,
Mike
AMDG
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