1. Prologue
1.1. What is the meaning of life?
The most ancient and ubiquitous question—“what is the meaning of life?”—is the one which the Catholic Catechism answers in ¶1. The answer: to share in the divine life; to seek, know, and love God. We come to experience the life intended for us in the place which God has chosen to be the location where men and women seek, know, and love him: the Church. In other words, the meaning of life, here and now, is to be part of God’s family on earth—the Church. The meaning of life is found in the fact that God has graciously called us to share in the blessedness of God’s own abundant life. To put it simply, the meaning of life is grace, which means that life’s meaning is not something that we can discover on our own or bring about through our own human powers. Rather, life’s true meaning is something which we discover when we discover the God of love and grace. The rest of the Catechism is an attempt to explore and explain the depths of this grace as revealed by God.
1.2. What is a catechism?
According to the Catechism (¶4-5), catechesis is “an education in the faith,” which means that the Catechism itself is the comprehensive teaching of the Church which facilitates this education. The Catechism is “an organic presentation of the Catholic faith in its entirety” (¶18). The Catechism has four parts or “pillars”: the profession of faith (the Creed), the sacraments of faith, the life of faith (the Commandments), and prayer in the life of faith (the Lord’s Prayer).
1.3. What is the goal of catechesis?
“The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope or for action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love” (Roman Catechism).
Catechesis is not about brute facts or building up knowledge. Instead, we study the Catechism in order that we might “arrive at love.” As the Apostle Paul puts it, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). Knowledge puffs up the one who claims to have knowledge, while love builds up others. Love is a virtue which supports and strengthens the community. When we gather together to study the Catechism, we gather not simply to gain knowledge but to grow in love. The goal of catechesis is to become a person of love by entering into a community of love in order to worship and serve a God of love.
2. Man’s Capacity for God (I.1.1.)
2.1. What is faith or belief?
Faith, according to the Catechism, is a “response to God.” In this first part of the Catechism, the emphasis is on our knowledge of God. The focus is thus on belief, which is an aspect of faith—viz. the aspect related to knowledge. Faith is not limited to belief, but rather includes it. We will discuss faith in more detail when we arrive at Chap. 3: “Man’s Response to God” (¶142-84).
2.2. What is the basis for belief in God?
The Catechism lists a number of things as the ground for religious belief, in particular: innate desire for God and proofs from the world and from humanity for the existence of God. We might call these cosmological and anthropological proofs. In theology, these belong to the category of thought known as metaphysics, which is just a fancy word meaning that which concerns things beyond the physical world. (To be more precise, the word itself comes from a Greek phrase meaning, “after the Physics,” referring to Aristotle’s treatise. After physics, Aristotle treated abstract topics such as being, substance, knowing, and time. These were later classified under the heading of “metaphysics,” and with the rise of Christianity, this field of knowledge became centrally concerned with the knowledge of God.) The cosmological and anthropological proofs for the existence of God have fancy Latin names in metaphysics. A cosmological proof is knowledge via causalitatis, while an anthropological proof is knowledge via eminentiae. There is one other way of knowing—viz. via negativa, or the “way of negation”—that is briefly referenced in ¶43.
2.3. What enables our knowledge of God?
The Catechism does not always make this clear, but we might list the following: (1) the existence of God as a given; (2) the acts of God in creating and in communicating with creation; (3) the created capacity of human reason (the “image of God”); (4) the faithful witness of others; and (5) the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. The Catechism also states that “this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, ‘an upright heart,’ as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God” (¶30).
2.4. What gets in the way of our knowledge of God?
According to the Catechism, our knowledge of God is hampered first and foremost by original sin, which disorders our human desires (including our desire for God) and causes confusion regarding truth and falsity. In addition, we are hampered by “the impact of the senses and the imagination” (¶37). This is another way of saying that our senses can distract or deceive us: they can distract both because our senses are exciting and because God is not sensible like the rest of the world, and they can deceive because our mind can be confused by them. In addition to sin, a major obstacle regarding the knowledge of God is the fact that “God transcends all creatures” (¶42). This means that God is not an object alongside other objects in this world. God is a mystery. God is transcendent and mysterious, and thus not something we can control or manipulate or define willy-nilly.
As a result of the fact that God is transcendent and we are sinful, the only way we can truly come to have knowledge of God is if God graciously makes himself known to us. This brings us to the heart of this week’s study: The Revelation of God.
3. God Comes to Meet Man (I.1.2.1.)
3.1. What is revelation?
When we speak about revelation on an everyday level, we say things like, “I had a startling revelation today…” Revelation means that we now know something which we did not know before. It is something new and surprising, and it affects how we go about living in the future. All of this is true in relation to God’s revelation. When we speak about revelation in relation to the Christian faith, we are referring to something new and surprising that has huge implications for our life. We aren’t speaking about something that was there all along which we simply have to discover for ourselves. Revelation does not refer to some general religious principle or something resident within the world; it refers rather to a new event. Revelation is not simply a novel interpretation of the world; it is rather a reality which forces to see the world in a whole new way. Revelation is thus a divine reality, a divine event, a divine appearance which shatters the old and ushers in the new. In short, revelation means that we aren’t making this up. God has really arrived on the scene. God has appeared on the stage.
The drama portrayed by the Bible is God’s initiative, and so between man’s blueprints of existence and God there is not a continuous transition but a leap. (H. U. von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II, 53).God is the actor, the world is the stage, and revelation is the dramatic event. Scripture is the written testimony of this drama. And humanity is the other actor which God’s revelation brings on to the stage. Revelation is therefore not a piece of knowledge or a text; it is first and foremost an acting person, Jesus Christ. God appears on the world-stage in the person of Jesus. God is not some abstract or distant deity who has no concern for the world. On the contrary, the Church confesses that God loves the world, interacts with the world, forms relationships with people and communities in the world, and will one day dwell together with all the redeemed of the world. And at the heart of this divine action is the person of Jesus, who is God in the flesh.
According to the Catechism, “Christ, the Son of God made man, is the Father’s one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word. In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one.” The Catechism discusses revelation using linguistic metaphors, and this is also very helpful. Revelation is a dialogue, and Jesus Christ is the Word of God that communicates to us who God is and what God has done. But it is also helpful to use a dramatic metaphor, because revelation is not just information or speech; it is also and perhaps primarily a divine action. God really does something. Or, to be more precise, God has done something, God is doing something, and God will do something. The drama is ongoing and eternal. Revelation is drama, and like any good drama, God’s revelation includes dialogue. Action and speech are both involved in the revelation of God. As Balthasar puts it,
In the Christian drama God does not speak in monologues. He engages in conversation, shared speech. This shows once again that Christianity is not (like the Koran, for example) a ‘teaching’ that has fallen from heaven but an interaction, a kind of negotiation between two parties. . . . In contrast to the world, which is closed in on itself, does not want to listen to him and distorts all his words even as he utters them, God is the One who allows himself to be most profoundly affected by this partner so unfit for speech. . . . And only on the basis of the Cross is faith given to the disciples and all subsequent believers, rendering them capable of dialogue with God. (TD II, 71-72)As we noted before, the Christian life is not primarily about knowledge but about love, and love is an action. This is why we can speak about revelation properly as a drama. God demonstrates his love toward humanity by redeeming us and adopting us his children. The Catechism says that in revelation, God seeks to “communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son” (¶52). Revelation is thus the drama of our reconciliation and adoption. This drama of revelation is both ontic and noetic in nature—that is, it concerns our being (ontic) and our knowledge (noetic). Our redemption and adoption are ontic realities, but the communication and explication of this redemption are noetic realities. The dramatic metaphor emphasizes the ontic dimension, while the dialogical metaphor emphasizes the noetic. When we bring these two dimensions together, we can say that through the testimony of Scripture and the Church (noetic), we come to understand both who God is, as the one who redeems and adopts, and who we are, as those who are redeemed and adopted into God’s family (ontic).
In this section we are dealing with God’s part in the drama. Later on, when we discuss the Church and the life of faith, we will discuss humanity’s role in the drama. But it’s important to remember that God’s action is always primary, and human action secondary. God makes us into actors; in the event of revelation, God welcomes us onto the stage. According to Balthasar, “human activity is embraced, directed and accompanied by divine activity” (TD II, 68). We will talk about this human activity at a later point. For now, we are concerned with the divine activity in which God makes himself known to humanity.
3.2. What is the “divine pedagogy”?
The “divine pedagogy” simply means that revelation is a relationship between God and humanity that occurs over time. Revelation is not instantaneous, because we could not possibly handle the knowledge of God all at once. We are finite, temporal creatures. The Bible calls us children who are easily blown about by different teachings and doctrines. What we need is a loving, caring teacher, and this is precisely what we find in the God of the Scriptures. The Catechism calls it “divine pedagogy” because God is our teacher, and he instructs us in a way that is suitable for our understanding.
3.3. What about other revelations of God?
We have to make an important distinction between sources and norms in relation to knowledge of God. There are many different sources of knowledge of God that God can and has used: trees, animals, books, friends, movies, politicians, etc. But there is only one norm, and that norm is Jesus Christ. According to the Catechism, “Christian faith cannot accept ‘revelations’ that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfillment…” (¶67). And later, “The Son is his Father’s definitive Word; so there will be no further Revelation after him” (¶73).
