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 Since they have no concept of how the moral conclusions were reached, those moral teachings seem outdated or absurd.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.

 

January 31, 2013

Msgr. William J. King