24 August 2011
Eric Hodgens
In 1974 I was appointed the founding Parish Priest of a new parish. The parishioners were almost exclusively Baby Boomers with very young families. I expected a large number of them to give up churchgoing. But they didn’t. It was their Gen X children, well catechised in post Vatican II catechesis, who dropped out.
At a meeting of these young adults to discuss what was going on one said: “You can’t believe half of it so why believe any of it?”
Meanwhile school staff were finding that their students, especially at secondary level, simply were not engaged by anything to do with the Church. Faced with this indifference, the teachers had to revisit their own position. Most of them wanted to be able to believe it; some for tribal reasons, some because they sensed that there was something deeply meaningful here but had trouble articulating it, some because they were distressed that what meant so much to them meant little to their students.
At secondary level these teachers were at home when on justice and social action issues. They tried to make liturgy appropriate for their students and to create some sense of a community worth belonging to. They largely avoided Christian doctrine because it was a bit confusing to them and they were not able to teach it convincingly. Moral rules became a big issue. Some teachers accepted what they had been taught was the teaching of the Church. Others were not so convinced but taught the official line. Others had a conscience challenge because they no longer accepted the traditional moral line.
One suggestion to explain why this younger generation could not “believe half of it” is that they no longer experience the assumptions and images of the Catholic sub-cultural universe. They live comfortably in the contemporary secular, pluralist, liberal democratic culture. They do not feel the obligation to believe the scripture, tradition, doctrine and moral rules of Catholicism in the way preceding generations did. What has changed?
The Classical Mindset.
For most of its history Christianity has been the established religion of a confessional state. The 700 year period from Charlemagne to the Reformation we call Christendom. Christianity, the sole religion, was central to the body politic. All religious and educational matters were under the control of the Church; political power rested with the king. God was assumed to be the creator and provider of the universe exercising His authority through the king and the bishops. The universe, created by God, consisted of the earth with its moon and sun and the stars in the heavens. Everything that happened in this universe and in the lives of individuals was due to the will of God. The universe was very stable. Every creature had its given nature and acted according to that nature or, in the case of mankind, possessing free will, sin disrupted things.
Jesus was the human face of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, who took a human nature to bring the knowledge of God’s saving plan to mankind.
The social order was pre-ordained by God. It was feudal with the king in charge and his subjects bound to him. The king exercised God’s authority.
Order was a fundamental value and both Church and King strove to maintain it. Heresy and treason disrupted the order and were capital offenses.
The underlying philosophy was that of ancient Greece and Rome. The system was fundamentally classic, unchanging and harmonious. History was the story of the interplay of characters in this stable structure. It recorded interplay within a closed system. It was cyclical and there was nothing new under the sun which rose and set according to God’s harmonious plan.
All enquiry started with the given and applied it to changing circumstances. New phenomena can be understood by returning to the classics. The methodology was top-down - deductive.
The Evolutionary Mindset.
The renaissance started an upheaval of this mind set. Humanity, not God, was the starting point of experience and knowledge. Humanism dominated art and literature. The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Isaac Newton revolutionized knowledge of the universe. Together with the philosophers of the enlightenment such as Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire they overturned the old method of enquiry. Observation of the facts led to testable theories and the newly invented scientific method produced an amazing wealth of new knowledge. This method was bottom-up – inductive. And it worked. Later came Charles Darwin and the Big Bang theory and we found that our universe is anything but harmonious and predictable. It is a seething, evolving mass. The classical nature of all beings was replaced by a constant evolution to something else more adaptive to the changing environment.
The relatively stable unchanging political structures of Christendom also came under attack. The Reformation awoke thinkers to the rights of the individual. Luther’s private interpretation of the scriptures held a powerful seed of individualism which had the potential to undermine the God-given authority both of Church and State. As Christendom fractured into Catholic and Protestant the universal authority of Rome was lost. However, religion was slower to lose its dominance. In Western Europe established religions continued even after the reformation. The religion of the king was the official religion of his state. The French Revolution saw the overthrow of both king and religion and started a movement in Europe which ended up in the 20th century with secular, pluralist, liberal democratic states and freedom of religion. Meanwhile, in the US colonies the establishment of any religion was ruled out by their constitutions. Freedom of religion has been part of USA culture from the beginning. Likewise in Australia.
Religious life still stayed more or less strong in Western society even without being established. Religions were recognized by the secular state but not endorsed. Religious leaders were no longer players in the top echelon of political life. Their political weight depended on the size and power and unity of their cohort of subjects. It was at this stage that the various religions missed the bus. The political order had changed irreversibly. Political leaders had to respond to their constituents. Political policies had to change and adapt to new social conditions. Monarchy had given way to democracy. But religions, especially Catholicism, retained and strengthened their monarchical structure. The pope lost the Papal States to the new Italian Republic but countered with Vatican I’s definition of Papal Infallibility and the mantra “the Church is not a democracy.” Pius IX’s intransigence in the face of the new order had already been spelt out in the infamous Syllabus of Errors of 1864 which contains a marvellous summary. The proposal: “That the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” is condemned as the final statement of the list He may have saved the Church a lot of later pain if he had just opened himself a little to the signs of the times. We had to wait a full century till Vatican II suggested just that.
The theology which underpinned the catechesis that the older ones amongst us received was the neo-scholasticism which was revived at the end of the 19th century and imposed by Leo XIII as the only theology to be taught in seminaries. It, in turn, drew on the scholastic theologians of the 12th and 13th centuries – predominantly St. Thomas Aquinas. Central to that movement was the return to the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. This theology set the climate in which other classical theologians such as St. Augustine were interpreted. One difficulty in our contemporary age which assumes the universe is in evolutionary mode is that these theologies assume the static, classic universe. Pope Benedict XVI constantly attacks relativism in today’s culture. But relativity is the cousin of evolution. There is no static nature of beings in an evolutionary universe. The pope’s problem with the concept is understandable. He is a leading theologian of the Augustinian, and therefore classic, static tradition. John Paul II was thoroughly trained in neo-scholasticism. Both have called for a new evangelization in the light of the collapse of the last few decades. Bur the theological background of both of these men explains how their vision of a new evangelization is to repeat the old catechesis – to try to reconfessionalise rather than recontextualize. This is simply not going to happen. Accommodation is necessary. We need a new language and a new articulation of the central Christian belief.
Different Modes of Discourse.
We are not very skilled at recognising the different modes of discourse in our language. Factual report is not the same as story telling. Truth can be found in the correct reportage of facts; but it can also be found in the affective and imaginative impact of a good drama or story. The language of fact – logos in Greek - is distinct from the language of meaningful experience – mythos in Greek. Theology, especially when it is told through story, as in the gospels, is mythical discourse. It yields truth via the meaning of the story rather than its factuality. The scriptures can be very badly misunderstood unless we make this distinction.
Karen Armstrong is one of today’s clearest writers on this subject. Read her Short History of Myth and, more recently, The Case for God.
Christian Theology can be problematical because nearly all its original written sources are in mythological language – the gospels, Acts of the Apostles, Revelation. Quite a lot of later theology is in logos language. The Trinitarian definitions use logos terms such as nature and person, Father and Son – but they are always anthropomorphic and metaphoric. Furthermore they are always analogous attempts - i.e. partly accurate and partly not – at expressing the infinite mystery of God. God is bigger than any definition. Definitions can only be good as far as they go. Otherwise we end up with an idol – not a God that transcends all human knowledge and experience.
Misunderstanding the literary form of the scripture text leads to fundamentalism and loses the richness of the story’s meaning. The result is bad theology. The creation stories of the Book of Genesis are a central example of this misunderstanding. God’s first intervention is to bring order into the chaos. The six days of creation, if taken literally, are at odds with our known science. Seek the meaning in the story and you find that God is a bringer of order. The universe is good through and through. Humankind is ennobled by being made in the image of God – the main likeness being in knowing good and evil. It is also helpful to know that this story is very late in its authorship. Scholars now date it to after the Babylonian Exile – late 6th century BCE. It is a post factum interpretation of Israel’s universe and story.
One result of the scientific and industrial development of the 17th and 18th centuries is the prominence given to the image of God as creator. Even if you did not believe in the God of Judeo Christianity, the harmony of the universe appeared to demand a creator. The god of enlightenment deism was primarily the creator. But both God and the deist god got a big shock with Darwin’s evolution. Many Christian apologists, including John Henry Newman, just took one step back and attributed the evolutionary design to God; the laws of nature were the secondary cause. The Big Bang theory upset that stance. The intellectual presumptions and imaginative universe have changed so massively that the concept of God as creator has to be totally recontextualized.
Living in a world where intellectual discussion is heavily weighted to logos discourse we all have a bias towards interpreting statements as logos. This shows in the common tendency to take the gospel stories literally. The youth who said: “You can’t believe half of it so why believe any of it” is probably bringing a literal interpretation to the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood and the so called “nature miracles” of Jesus. His question: “Are the stories true?” would mean: “Did they actually happen?” rather than: “What do the stories mean?” The stories are not factual (logos) but what they mean is very true (mythos) to the believer.
Different Christian Sub-groups.
Christianity, including Catholicism, is now very varied in the forms it takes. The Catholic Church in the first half of the 20th century was fairly monolithic. It is worth noting that Catholicism has a fundamentalist wing, a Pentecostal wing and an ideological wing. All of these groups are small but very energised. Most Catholics, however, have been influenced by Vatican II, and are not in these groups and, often enough, find them off-putting. If they see any of these as representative of normative Catholicism they quickly lose interest and drift away. However, this is the only group that is open to mature Christian belief in this post-modern culture in which we live. It is this mainstream group (probably including many of us) that needs catechesis recontextualized in today’s cultural landscape.
Classical Christology – Top Down.
The study of Christology which has prevailed for most of the Church’s history has been based on the definitions of the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon which took place between 325 to 451 CE. At the end of this process the Church had a fully developed theology of the Trinity. In God there are three persons. Jesus is the second person of the Trinity and he has two natures, divine and human. The second person of the trinity took a human nature via the conception and birth of Jesus. The reason God the Son became man was to save mankind from being abandoned to sin after the fall. The Baltimore Catechism says:
60. Q. Did God abandon man after he fell into sin?
A. God did not abandon man after he fell into sin, but promised him a Redeemer, who was to satisfy for man's sin and reopen to him the gates of heaven.
It is worth noting that this discourse is logos style – yet it uses metaphors and images drawn from scripture texts that are thoroughly mythos in style.
This then became the starting point for Christology. Its argumentation is top-down. Top-down Christology starts with the presumption that Jesus is God. The theologian then has to explain how this divine person could function in human form. Problematic questions arise. Since God, by definition, has infinite knowledge what did Jesus know? Did he learn as any normal human learns? He suffered. Does that mean that God suffered? When he asked the disciples who they thought he was, did he know the answer already? Was there any development in his awareness of his divine status? How do you explain the passion and death in the light of his infinite power and authority as God? Could not God the Father have developed a less torturous method of atonement for sin?
The top-down Christology influenced the way the scriptures were interpreted. The gospel stories, told in mythos language, tended to be interpreted literally once the mediaeval Church had arrived. If Jesus is God, miracles tend to be interpreted literally. The virginal conception of Mary is taken as factual and the significance interpreted differently as a result. Stories of the magi, the slaughter of the innocents, the flight into Egypt, the annunciation and the rest of the infancy narratives are all interpreted differently to the way they would be interpreted in a bottom up approach.
Historico Critical Analysis.
The study of history was influenced by the classical to evolutionary change of mind set. The historian came under pressure to verify facts and sources. Interpretation of facts had to be by rational argument. The enlightenment figure Nicolas de Condorcet argued that history was a story of progress – ever upward - as opposed to the cyclical model of the classics.
At the end of the 19th century an historico critical approach to the scriptural texts began to gain strength. This “higher criticism” sought to find who wrote the text and when. What were the historical, sociological and economic conditions in which it was written? It became clear that the Jewish and Christian scriptures were not historical accounts but writings aimed as bolstering the faith of the group for which there were written. When applied to the New Testament scriptures the reader could see much more clearly what was going on. What did we really know of the historical Jesus from these stories written by authors who viewed him with faith? What in the texts is literal and what is mythical? These questions seemed to endanger the divine status of Jesus. In 1907 the Catholic authorities condemned the movement as Modernism. Pope Pius X cracked down with a heavy hand on all and any unconventional ideas. The same ideas were disturbing some Protestants, too, especially in the USA. The Protestant reaction took the form of the Fundamentalist Movement with essays published 1910 – 1915. Fundamentalism is still alive and well today. This set Catholic theological and scriptural scholarship back 50 years. Vatican II permitted a more open approach to scriptural and theological study.
Bottom Up Christology.
Bottom-up Christology starts with the experience of the believers and follows the development of their thinking as the movement grows.
We can see the development of the thinking of the early Jesus movement by observing the time line of the various texts.
In chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles Luke, the author, has Peter give a speech to the Pentecost crowd. It goes:
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders in your midst, as you yourselves know – this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. . . . Let all the House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Although Acts is dated to the 80s the scholars identify this text as much earlier. Luke puts it into Peter’s mouth as he writes his account. The understanding of this text seems to be that by God’s plan Jesus has been raised to the status of Lord and Christ when he was raised from the dead.
Mark’s gospel is dated to the early 70s. His understanding seems to be that Jesus becomes the Son of God at the baptism by John.
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." Mk 1:9-11.
Matthew and Luke are dated to the 80s. Their understanding is that Jesus had the status of Son of God and Saviour from his conception and birth. See the infancy narratives. One device they use to underscore Jesus’ divinity from his conception is to declare that Mary was a virgin mother. In this context Mary’s virginity is a Christological statement.
The fourth gospel, written around 100 CE, understands Jesus’ divine status to have been from the beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God . . . The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. And we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.”
Jesus somehow pre-existed his conception and birth.
We see from the texts that the early believers developed an ever higher Christology as the decades of the first century passed. It is a development from the bottom up. What the disciples had seen happen to Jesus and what he said and did lead to this development. This growth in understanding is presented as the very centre point of Mark’s gospel in the chapter 8 scene at Caesarea Philippi where Jesus asks the disciples: “Who do you say I am? Since Mark positions this story right in the centre of the gospel we can see how central this question is to him.
The fourth gospel brings a very different approach. It takes as its starting point the final conclusion that Jesus is the Word which existed from the beginning with God. Jesus’ first encounter with disciples in the 4th gospel has them come to believe that he is the Christ. This becomes the presumption through the rest of the text. Jesus knows exactly who he is and what is his relationship with God. This is the beginning of top down Christology. It starts a theological trend which ends with the definitions of the four early councils ending in 451 CE.
This bottom-up Christology is based on the historical facts of Jesus’ life and ministry insofar as we are able to discover them from the source texts available to us. The disciple group comes to ever deeper insight into Jesus’ relationship to the God of Israel. That insight is an interpretation they superimpose on their experience of Jesus – an insight we call faith. Spotting how that faith developed helps us to make sense of it and clears the way for us to come to the same faith.
New Cultural Contexts Call for Recontextualization.
By the end of the 1st century disciples of the Jesus movement were called Christians. They were no longer a movement within Judaism. They jealously claimed their Jewish origins but were now a universal and evangelistic movement made up largely of non-Jews. As Rome became a more important Christian centre than Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria Christianity began to leave behind its Semitic culture and adapt to the surrounding Greco Roman culture. This process of recontextualization influenced the theology that resulted in the definitions of the four early councils that were thoroughly Greco Roman. The Jesus Movement which began in the semitic culture of Israel had become Christianity – inculturated into the Greco Roman world.
Some theologians such as Roger Haight, Elizabeth Johnson and Roger Lenears, have returned to a bottom up approach to Christology. This approach has developed as a result of the historico critical method of studying the scriptures. However, it is not well received by devotees of top down theologians such as St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic and neo-scholastic schools. Roger Haight, a Jesuit, has been banned by the Vatican from any teaching. Sr. Elizabeth has been criticised by the USA Bishops Conference. This confrontation is significant in that it shows how narrow the Roman position has become.
The Process of Recontextualizing.
Recontextualizing one’s own theological understanding calls for a keen awareness of our contemporary cultural context. Our surrounding culture is secular, pluralistic and liberal democratic. Our prizing of individual rights means that we need to persuade, not force, acceptance of what we teach. Note the points where you are uncomfortable about aspects of creed, practice and organization. Teachers have the added advantage of observing the attitudes, beliefs and priorities of the students. Areas where they disagree with the traditional should come under reconsideration. Genuine dialogue is essential for effective recontextualization. It is no good just reasserting the past – even in new terminology. The language which worked in a bygone cultural context may very well have to be revisited to speak effectively to the new. We do need a new evangelization as John Paul II and Benedict have called for. The call is right. Their vision of the response – reassert the past – reconfessionalise – is self-defeating.
Historical knowledge of Christianity through the ages is an advantage. Theology has been defined as “faith seeking understanding”. Culture limits the understanding of any seeker. We are all pre-programmed by the language and conceptual repertoire in which we are educated. All definitions are conditioned on the time, language and prevailing cultural presumptions of their period. So, for example, the Trinitarian definitions proclaimed in the language of Greco Roman culture can be fully accepted in their original setting but not make the same sense to someone from another time or culture. It is not only the perception but the intellectual method that changed as Christianity moved from being a Jewish faction to being a universal religion in the Roman Empire. This was recontextualization. There is a bigger gap between the classical intellectual world of mediaeval Europe and the evolutionary mind set of today’s Western world.
One good place to begin is the Christian scriptures which are the primary documentation of how it all began. Read Karen Armstrong’s small, readable book: The Bible – A Biography and Ray Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament. Then browse through the New Testament texts with an eye on the dating of the various texts.
Theology Evolves.
The earliest Christology developed during the 1st century CE. This has been documented above. The method is inductive – starting from experience moving to identifying underlying reality. It develops within a community of believers. At the same time an Ecclesiology – an understanding of the structure and purpose of the believing community – develops. This can be discerned by reading between the lines of the epistles of St Paul, the four Gospels, the Book of Revelations and the other New Testament documents. The historico critical method is fundamental to this study because it discerns the date and sociological background of the documents. Greater insight can result from contemporary documentation which is not Christian. A couple of examples.
Take the story of Jesus walking on the water and calming the storm.
Then he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but the boat by this time was many furlongs distant from the land, beaten by the waves; for the wind was against them. And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out for fear. But immediately he spoke to them, saying, "Take heart, it is I; have no fear." And Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus; but when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, "Lord, save me." Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "O man of little faith, why did you doubt?" And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God." Mt. 14:22-33.
A literal understanding of the story of Jesus walking on the sea and calming the storm results in missing the whole point of the story. Matthew believes that Jesus really is the Christ and the Son of God. And his resurrection is our guarantee. So, in the story of the calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee he intimates Jesus’ power by having him walk on the sea – the place that harbours evil. He has Jesus calm the storm so that the disciples in the troubled boat end up saying “Truly you are the Son of God”. Peter is presented as missing the point and asking to be called to walk on the water – not the sea. He should have moved to greater faith in who Jesus is rather than make his act of faith depend on his ability to walk on the water – Lord, if it is you.
The point of the story is that for the believer Jesus is a uniquely different human because of his relationship with that overarching mystery we call God. So he can mediate hope to those in trouble and safety (salvation) to those in peril if the disciples have faith. The faith experience of Jesus bringing them to safety is beautifully proclaimed to them in the story. On the other hand if the story is taken literally the text becomes a proof story that Jesus is God because of his power to walk on water – a highly incredible scene. Then, if you deny its literal factuality you are seen by the literalist as questioning Jesus’ divinity.
Another example is the development of the virginity of Mary in the Gospel texts. Mary is almost a negative character in Mark’s Gospel. In Mark 3:30-34 Mary and Jesus brothers come looking for him. They stand outside the house where Jesus is teaching a gathering. Jesus asks “Who are my mother and brothers?” Then concludes: “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” But Mark’s gospel assigns Son of God status to Jesus at the baptism by John at the start of Jesus public life.
With Matthew and Luke Jesus is Son of God from his conception and birth. In both of these traditions God is the source of Jesus’ status from conception. Mary’s virginity is an adjunct to this. It is a statement primarily about Jesus.
Adapting to New Cultural Contexts.
Trace the development of theology following a time line. Recontextualization has been constantly happening. Compare St Augustine’s images of God with those attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Augustine’s God is a law maker and judge. Compassion is must more conditional than in the New Testament; cf. the prodigal son. The political authority embraced by Augustine would brand him as a violator of rights in today’s world. But Augustine, as a bishop, is a big political figure living in a world of Roman culture. The theology fitted the new context. It held pride of place during the long period of Christendom.
The Modern Period.
The major revolution in thinking between the classical and the modern world has been explained above. Many theological opinions were attacked during the reformation. Some of the confrontations during that period were confusion of types of discourse on both sides. Some were genuine theological differences which still need to be resolved. Some of the burning issues include:
- Soteriology - the theology of what salvation means and how it is achieved.
- Theology of the Eucharist including the Real Presence controversy;
- The theology of revelation;
- Indulgences and the underlying theology;
- Papal primacy;
- Mariology.
Reform v. Restoration.
Addressing these issues is complicated by the contemporary factions in the Church. One faction wants to remain faithful to Vatican II and to go further along the road to reform while the other wants restoration of the pre-council mind set, theology and devotional life. This second group while much smaller than the first occupies a majority of the positions of power within the Church organization.
The response to many of the theological issues above leads to differences in liturgical and devotional practice. Confession has almost vanished from the routine life of the Church. Devotion to the Real Presence in the Eucharist in the form of Exposition and Benediction has a weak following. In both of these cases the Restorationist faction is trying to revive the practice but with very little success.
Morality and Ethics.
Church moral teaching has always been fluid. What is good or bad, lawful or criminal has always been a live issue in most cultures. The reason is that the major determinant of what is morally acceptable has been prevailing cultural attitudes. These vary massively depending on tribal, ethnic and class differences in society. This is the area where the Church has recontextualized its policies most of all. Often enough the Church has had to follow the lead of non-Church opinions.
It took the very secular world of the enlightenment to bring us anything like the human rights we now enjoy in western culture. The abolition of slavery, the recognition of individual human rights in the face of royal or state oppression have been won by secular reformers. The mediaeval condemnation of taking of interest on invested money (usury) gave way to new economic realities. In all such cases a changed cultural context brought a new theology. Church authorities are traditionally very slow to adapt to new contexts. Some contemporary burning issues are:
- Transparency and accountability in the Church;
- The status of women in society and the Church;
- Homosexuality;
- Contraception;
- Sexual mores;
- The status of marriage;
- New medical technology including IVF, stem cell research;
- Euthanasia;
The intervention of Church authorities on any moral matters is complicated because rank and file believers have often done their own readjustment while the authorities shore up the old position. The clearest example of this is contraception which is condemned by the papacy but deemed acceptable by most of the laity and parish clergy.
On top of that the hierarchy have lost enormous moral credibility because of their reluctance to adjust to the stricter standards of secular society in the clerical paedophilia scandal. They have offended by protecting criminals from the law and for a lack of transparency and accountability in their procedures.
Conclusion.
Like it or not cultural change is always in play in life. There are changes in language, in values, in our store of knowledge. The underlying faith of Christians in Jesus of Nazareth and the believing community that grew from his life and teaching remains fundamentally the same. However, if Christians are to remain faithful to Jesus and the Church they must adapt their evangelization and catechesis so that it makes sense in the prevailing cultural context. That is a call for genuine dialogue with the culture leading to a recontextualization of the faith and its organizational vehicle – the Church.
Recontextualizing Catholic Faith: Some Reading.
Armstrong, Karen, 1944- : The Bible : a biography.
Published: New York : Atlantic Monthly Press ; [Berkeley, Calif.] :
Distributed by Group West, 2007.
Armstrong, Karen, 1944- : A short history of myth.
Published: Edinburgh ; New York : Canongate, 2006.
Armstrong, Karen, 1944- : The case for God.
Published: New York : Knopf, 2009.
Brown, Raymond Edward: An introduction to the New Testament
Published: New York : Doubleday, 1997
Haight, Roger: The future of Christology.
Published: New York : Continuum, c2005.
Haight, Roger: Jesus, symbol of God.
Published/Created: Maryknoll, N.Y. : Orbis Books, c1999.
Johnson, Elizabeth A., 1941- : Quest for the living God: mapping frontiers in the
theology of God
Published: New York : Continuum, 2007.
Condemnation of Quest for the Living God by the US Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine:
Covering letter:
http://old.usccb.org/doctrine/statement-quest-for-the-living-god-remarks-2011-03-30.pdf
The Statement:
http://old.usccb.org/doctrine/statement-quest-for-the-living-god-2011-03-24.pdf
The Elizabeth Johnson Response to US Bishops’ Doctrine Committee can be found at:
http://ncronline.org/print/25020
Kennedy, Philip: Twentieth-century theologians : a new introduction to
modern Christian thought.
Published: London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, c2010.
Kennedy, Philip: A modern introduction to theology : new questions for old
beliefs.
Published: London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 2006.
Lenaers, Roger, 1925- :Nebuchadnezzar's dream : or, The end of a medieval Catholic
church / Roger Lenaers.
Published: Piscataway, N.J. : Gorgias Press, 2007.
McWilliams, David: The Pope's children : the Irish economic triumph and the rise of Ireland's new elite.
Published: Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, c2008.
Morwood, Michael: Tomorrow's Catholic : understanding God and Jesus in a new
millennium / Michael Morwood.
Published: Mystic, CT : Twenty-Third Publications, c1997.
Morwood, Michael: Is Jesus God? : finding our faith.
Published: New York : Crossroad Pub. Co., c2001.
Morwood, Michael: From sand to solid ground : questions of faith for modern
Catholics.
Published: New York : Crossroad Pub., c2007.
I always think if I made a right choice..
Posted by: online writing | September 16, 2011 at 11:12 PM