No
matter how far one goes in life, the fundamentals remain the same. 2+2
always equals four, whether one is in First Grade or is completing a
post-doctoral program in physics. Layers of learning and experience are
added to the basics, but the advanced
content consists in applying the basics in new ways. No First Grade
teacher starts out teaching Newton’s second law of motion: “The
relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the
applied force F is F = ma.” To one who has never grasped the basics,
formulas such as this make no sense. Start with the fundamentals and add
layer upon layer, and then the final applications of these basics
finally make sense.
It is no different in theology. The New
Testament authors understood this. To persons who were hearing the
Gospel of Jesus Christ for the first time, it was senseless to begin by
outlining the moral applications of theological principles. In other
words, the first preachers of the Christian faith did not start with
preaching morality. The fundamentals must be preached first: sin and
mercy, redemption and the person of Jesus of Nazareth, Divine grace and
the Church. Add layer upon layer of fundamentals, and even the most
challenging of theological teachings make sense.
We live in a world
where many generations have heard about Jesus and think that they know
the Gospel. Few do. Analogously, most of us have heard of Einstein’s
theory of general relativity, but when asked about it, most people get
it wrong.
The preaching of the Gospel needs to begin anew in our
secularized society. We need to start with the basics. Public opinion
polls are very revealing: we can’t expect people to understand or accept
moral applications of the Gospel if they don’t know the basic Gospel
truths. Too often people hear only the moral conclusions – the
applications of theological truths to practical issues – without first
having heard the basics of faith. Since they have no concept of how the
moral conclusions were reached, those moral teachings seem outdated or
absurd.
Without our preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a
generation who really doesn’t know it, and without our teaching of the
fundamentals of faith and theology, we can expect that emotion and
sentimentality will continue to dominate public opinion. Of course
people will call for “equality” and “fairness” and “rights” and
“toleration” – those words all stir the emotions. In the face of that
sentimentality, it seems ludicrous to speak of applying moral theology
to modern life by speaking of natural law and how the innate meaning of
human experience reveals the plan of God, or by speaking of how human
behavior should spring from a graced relationship with God. Without the
context of faith and basics of theological reflection, these practical
applications of theology seem to be out of touch with human experience,
and seem to be oppressive and limiting to human freedom.
Because
we teach the basics of science from an early age, most of us accept
physical truths like the law of gravity, even though gravity is itself
oppressive and limiting to human freedom! We can’t take for granted that
a culture which has heard the name of Jesus for generations actually
believes with deep conviction or understands with deep comprehension
what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. As the Catholic Church is
currently in the midst of a “Year of Faith” we are invited to revisit
the fundamentals. The moral applications come at the end, not at the
beginning, of our formation in faith. We can’t start preaching the
Gospel by first providing a thesis on moral theology. No First Grader
has a textbook on particle physics, but unless they first learn basic
arithmetic they have no hope of ever understanding physics at all.
