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