Religious Education: Good News for Living

Learning area

Concepts for developing religious understanding

The F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum (Good News for Living) identifies the concepts of God, Jesus, Church, Scripture, Sacraments, Prayer, Christian Life and Religion and Society, as integral to the development of theological and spiritual understanding. These are high-level ideas or ways of thinking that can be applied across the subject to identify a question, guide an investigation, organise information, suggest an explanation or assist decision making. They are the key ideas involved in teaching students to think theologically and spiritually.

God

It is easier to say what God is not, than it is to say what God is. And whatever else we might say about God, God is certainly not “a god” – especially if by “god” we mean what the world’s religions mean by it: “a superhuman being or spirit worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes” (Oxford English Dictionary). Even the OED’s definition of what Christianity means by “God” is seriously inadequate: “the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.” It is inadequate because it suggests that God is one being along side other beings, albeit the “supreme” being. And that is simply not the case from a Catholic point of view.

God is that mystery at the heart of all being that loves all beings into being. And because it loves us, this mystery has a “name”, an identity by which it relates to us and reveals itself to us, and can therefore be, in some measure, known by us: “I am who I am”.

All “theology” is very seriously limited when it comes to saying anything definitive about God. In fact, there are those who would say that nothing definitive can be said about God in Godself.The most that we can do, when speaking of God, is to speak by analogy and in metaphor ; and then only ever by saying something true about our experience of God, as distinct from saying something definitive about God in Godself. As Saint Thomas Aquinas put it: “We can never know what God is; we can only ever know what God is not.” Or as Saint Augustine said in one of his sermons, “If you understand [it], it isn’t God.”

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of God is developed with these theological emphases:

The Catholic way to spreak of God is by analogy and in metaphor. Almost all of the books in the Bible speak of God in metaphor ; and almost all Catholic theology (at least the academic kind) speaks of God by analogy. This way of speaking of God is not in our terms but on God’s terms.
Christians use the word ‘God’ because we have no better one with which to point to the ineffable mystery we are trying to talk about. Using this poor word – and others like it, such as “Father” or “Lord” or “Spirit/Breath” – saves us from falling prey to a delusion that we’ve actually “got” God, that we now “grasp” who and what God really is, which is far more likely if we were to use words that seem to us like more accurate definitions of God: e.g.The Supreme Being,The Absolute Reality,The Ground of all being/reality,The One, Pure Essence, etc.When it comes to actually defining God, all these abstractions are just as lame as “fortress and rock” (2 Samuel 22:2), “mother hen” (Matthew 23:37), “gate for the sheep” (John 10:7) .
No definition of God’s essence or nature, of “God-in-Godself ”, is possible – except perhaps the paradoxical one that deconstructs itself, and is therefore no definition at all: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).
The “Christian God” is not just another god among other gods (because there are no gods, and God is not “a god”).The “Christian God” is rather the Christian way of speaking about this Mystery, which we experience as loving us and which is revealed in Jesus – that’s what makes it specifically Christian. In other words, the central Christian statement of faith is to stretch a metaphor so far into an analogy that no meaningful distinction between them is possible and say:“God is love”.

Jesus

What Jesus reveals about God is that God is love: the total and absolute self-giving Lover who rejoices in the Beloved and desires nothing other than that the Beloved should live with the power of the same Love that moves, and indeed constitutes, the Lover. Jesus reveals that God is a relationship of Love that unites Lover (i.e. source of love) with the Beloved (i.e. end of love): God is “tri-une”, God is “Trinity”: Lover-Beloved-Love. And we, made in the image and likeness of the Beloved (which Jesus “embodies”, “incarnates”, in our flesh, as one of us), are being “saved from” our false piety (which fears its gods, even as it tries to manipulate them) and narrow rationalism (which dismisses what it cannot reduce to its own size and grasp).

The Christian claim is simply this: if God is, then God is love; and if God is love, then God is what Jesus is: total self-giving. Or, to put it even more trenchantly: if God isn’t what Jesus is, there is no God. (Little wonder that fundamentalist religion, philosophy, and secularism all condemn us!)

In Jesus we encounter the “impossible” in the flesh: we encounter the victim of our hatred returning to us not as our punishment, or even as our conditional pardon, but as our peace-bestowing mercy and reconciliation, our “salvation” (which actually means “healing”, from the Latin salve).

Jesus is what God looks like “in person”, in “human flesh”. This is what absolute love looks like in a world marked by hatred, violence, resentment, fear and vengeance – in a word, sin, and its consequence: death. If this is not so then there is no God.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of Jesus is developed with these theological emphases:

The fact that Jesus was utterly human is of the very greatest importance.The fact that he was a Jew is crucial: steeped in the Hebrew revelation, its liturgy and poetry and ethics, its bonds of community and covenant love. The fact that he suffered, worked, prayed, cared, healed, and ate with “sinners” and “righteous” alike; the fact that he befriended men and women, and called them into discipleship; the fact that he was a teacher, healer, worker – a “simple peasant” (as opposed to a priest, noble, imperial citizen, etc.) – all this is vital to who Jesus was, and therefore to the revelation of who God is among us. For it is in and through his humanity – in all its particularity and “scandalous contingency” – that Jesus reveals what God is really like: self-emptying love.
The doctrine of the incarnation is not about a godling pretending to be human, it is about us “becoming God”: “for he was made man that we might become God” (St Athanasius, ‘On the Incarnation’).
As one of the earliest, and strongest defenders of the doctrine of the incarnation, Saint Athanasius, put it: “God became human so that humanity might become God.” This is the point of the incarnation: human transformation, human divinisation.
So, to say that “Jesus is Lord” is to say that if God is not what Jesus is, there is no God; and if God is what Jesus is, then God is love, and we are becoming what Jesus is by the power of that love, who IS the Holy Spirit.

Church

A theological understanding of the church must begin with God who is love. As St Paul explained it:The church is the “Body of Christ”, the “Temple of the Holy Spirit”, the “Bride of Christ”, the “People of God”. The church has had this to say about itself in its more authoritative statements: the church is the “Sacrament of Christ”, the “Community of faith”, the “Communion of saints ”, a “Priestly People”, etc. These are not sociological, political, psychological, philosophical, historical or “scientific” descriptors.They are theological “images” whose meaning is discovered in love – not our love but in God’s love, which is revealed in Jesus.

The Church does not exist for itself. It is, by definition, called and sent down into the depths of the Mystery that loves us, and out on mission to the margins of our world. Mission is not just something the Church does, then. Mission is what she is sent to be and do because that is what Christ does and is:“good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, a time of the Lord’s favour”.

The church’s identity is God’s gift to us in Christ because we are first and foremost God’s gift to Christ:“They were yours; you gave them to me.” And through us, as Christ’s Body, unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity continue to be God’s gift to the world:“so that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them even as you have loved me”. Our unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity is, then, the heart of our mission and thus of our identity: at once a call to be (one with God in Christ) and a sending out of ourselves into the whole world to live (in faith, with hope, and, above all, as love).

This call and this sending are the same act in Christ: we are called and sent through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of his Spirit. Apart from a constant focus on Christ, whom we “know” because we share his Spirit – indeed, live in his Spirit – being one, holy, catholic and apostolic would lose its vital meaning, which is its real meaning. Therefore, in Christ, as his Body, we profess, as part of our faith in the Holy Spirit, that the Church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic”.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic is developed with these theological emphases:

It is Christ who is one: completely and authentically himself, “fully integrated”, single-minded, whole-hearted, and utterly alive. And as such, he is the unifying power of God at work in us through our sharing in his Spirit as his Body.
It is Christ who is holy: divine, other, transcendent, marginal, and liminal (these are all part of the meaning of the word “holy” in scripture). And as such, he is the sanctifying power who gives us his Holy Spirit, the only real source and meaning of the church’s holiness.
It is Christ who is catholic: one-with-God and one-with-us, whole-and-inclusive, open to all, and made up of all- nto-one. And as such, he is the all-embracing opening up of the Triune God drawing us into the divine communion of love.
It is Christ who is apostolic: coming from God, sent by God, and forever moving ahead of us leading us into God; and as such, the simultaneous act of grounding us in a living tradition and sending us out into the whole world to live and proclaim the gospel. Being one, holy, catholic and apostolic is the church’s “radical tradition”. As we are called to integrity (“one”), wholeness (“holy”), and communion (“catholic”), so have we been sent in living continuity (“apostolic”) with all those who have gone before us (“tradition”), beginning with Christ himself (which is why this tradition is “radical”, from the Latin radice meaning “roots”).

Scripture

The Bible is an adult book. It is ambiguous, easily abused, and even scandalous at times. It touches our humanity at some of its most vulnerable nerves. And it has a great deal to do with life, death, violence, justice, beauty, suffering, meaning, and (of course) love. At least nominally some three quarters of the world’s population consider it to be “word of God” – and not just Jews and Christians. Muslims, Bahais, and some Hindus and Sikhs also accept its status as sacred.

The scriptures are ancient texts, which means that historical-critical methods designed for the study of ancient texts is an invaluable tool in studying the scriptures. Many biblical books are great literature (though not all!), and therefore deserve to be studied with the same critical rigour with which we would study comparable poetry, drama and prose. There are among them legal texts of more than antiquarian interest, and therefore we do well to apply our best tools of jurisprudence in exploring them (especially since they are the basis of so much in Western law).

Biblical books contain profound psychological, cultural and social insights, which have implications for us personally and collectively, and require serious engagement at philosophical, psychological, anthropological, sociological, political, cultural and even aesthetic and artistic levels.

Theology takes all of these (and any other) into consideration when it asks ‘ what does it say about God and us in God?

The word “Bible” comes from the Greek word ‘biblia’, which is the plural form of the word for a scroll.The Bible is, in fact, not a single unified book but a collection of various and disparate texts.The Christian Bible is composed of two major parts, traditionally called the OldTestament and the New Testament.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of the scriptures is developed with these theological emphases:

The Bible was not written in one go nor by one person. Indeed, there is reason to believe that many of the individual “books” themselves were written, re-written, edited and achieved their final canonical form over a protracted period of time and by an unknown number of people.
The Bible is the church’s book. Over the course of many centuries the church came to recognise that some of the sacred texts of our Jewish ancestors in the faith (the so- called Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) and some of the early Christian texts (especially the Gospels and epistles) were “inspired” and “revealed”.
God’s Spirit (“inspired” = “in-spirited”) breathes life in and through these texts in a unique and lasting way; and they were simply not something we could have come up with on our own: they are “revealed” because they lead us into a truth that is simply beyond our capacity to imagine or come up with on our own.
Catholics hold the Bible in very high reverence; but do not believe that God either wrote or dictated these texts to people who were no more than scribes.The human writers of the biblical books were fully involved in the work of producing these texts. God inspired them and gifted them with the talents of great writers, legislators, poets, liturgists, etc. And not just as individuals but as a community, a living tradition of wisdom, scholarship and imagination. And this took place over a long period of time and among a specific people in a specific place.
the Bible is not history. Nor is it science. It is perhaps best described as a kind of “narrative theological anthropology” – or, the story of humanity in relation to God. It does not deal with “factual accounts of the past”. Rather it tries to say something true, and at a profound level, about the perennial present, about the world and humanity as it is, especially in its relationship to God. It is “historical”, then, in the most radical sense of that word only: it has to do with the unfolding story of humankind.

Sacrament

“Sacrament” is traditionally defined as a sign that is itself what it signifies. A sacrament is not a mere representation, therefore, but is, in some sense, itself the very thing it represents, just as, for example, a hug not only signifies affection, it is affection. Sacraments not only show God’s love, they are that love.

Every sacrament has four inseparable parts to it:

it is an ordinary, earthly reality
that points beyond itself
making that to which it points truly and revealingly present in itself
thereby transforming those who receive it.

The church has “seven sacraments”; but it is itself a “sacrament” and Christ himself is the sacrament of God: he is the sign (of God) that is itself what it signifies (he is God). Just as Christ points to God and makes God’s presence “real” (as it were), so the church points to Christ and makes his presence real; so the sacraments of the church point to the church’s own real nature as the Body of Christ. These seven sacraments make the church “real” (as it were); they concretely realise the church’s true nature as Christ’s Body. The church has “seven” sacraments; but in the Catechism they are grouped in three categories:

A. Sacraments of Initiation: 1.Baptism 2.Confirmation 3.Eucharist

B. Sacraments of Healing: 4. Anointing of the sick 5. Reconciliation

C. Sacraments of Commitment in the Service of Communion: 6. Holy Matrimony 7. Holy Orders

‘Sacrament’ is the life we live in God concretely, as material, human reality pointing to the invisible reality of our living and being in Christ. ‘Liturgy’ is the actual celebration of the sacrament. ‘Ritual’ is simply the specific way in which we celebrate the sacrament liturgically.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of sacraments is developed with these theological emphases:

Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist are called “Sacraments of Initiation”.They initiate us (lead us into) the mystery of God as the communion of love we call Trinity which is revealed by the life, death and resurrection of Christ. They also lead us into the mystery of the church, the community of all those who believe in Christ and know themselves as loved by God. It is through these sacraments that the church becomes Christ’s earthly presence, his own sacrament.
Eucharist is basically a joyful gift. It is pure grace: Christ giving himself to us in thanksgiving to the Father. In that sense it is a “pure sacrifice” – an act of self-giving love.The word itself is from the Greek, and basically means something like “joyful thanks”.
The sacraments of healing are about enabling us to remain baptised, confirmed, united. The sacraments of healing, which are Reconciliation and Anointing, are about the everyday ongoing mystery of Baptism’s power to set us free and enable us to grow in freedom from evil.
The sacrament of Confirmation confirms the gift of Baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit, by an outpouring of the Spirit’s gifts. As Baptism is about immersion into God, so the sacrament of Confirmation “con-firms”, seals and animates, the communion of Creator and creature.
Matrimony and Orders are the sacraments of commitment in the service of communion focus on the positive, creative reality of human experience, the possibility of relationship in love.They are there to remind us that our freedom is not just from the power of evil, but more importantly for love.

Christian Prayer

Prayer is not just another “topic” to be “covered” in a “syllabus on the Christian religion”. Prayer is to Christianity what water is to the ocean; what breath is to life; what love is to life’s meaning. Without prayer there can be no real faith, no realistic hope and no realising of love for God. Prayer simply is our relationship with God become conscious, deliberate and concrete. It is more a way of being than something we do.

That God wants us to pray is certainly obvious enough, because God desires to draw us into a fuller relationship; and praying is simply how that is done consciously, deliberately and concretely in and for us.

The word “pray” means “to ask”. That is the basic meaning of the word. And it is deeply revealing. Asking is a key to happiness – just as taking (as opposed to receiving) is the key to unhappiness.Asking is the heart of our relationship with God. It points to the deepest truth about human nature itself.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of prayer is developed with emphasis of these theological principles:

Prayer is about desire – ultimate desire.
In prayer we enter into a relationship with the One who intensifies our desire for being, the “primordial metaphysical desire”, in a way that is utterly open, deliberate and concrete. In prayer we find ourselves loved into being in a way that invites us to participate in our own coming-into- being by liberating our desire from all fear, rivalry, selfishness, violence and malice – and therefore, from the power of death itself!
Prayer must always be honest if it is to be true prayer.
Prayer is for union with God.
Prayer is our way of participating in this work, which is always only ever God’s work. The ultimate expression of that work is the “liturgy” – a word that literally means “public work”, and which the Christian monastic tradition calls “the work of God”.This “work of God” is the public act of communal prayer of the church as thanks and praise. It is, therefore, the source and summit of the church’s actions.
The fundamental prayer of the Church is the Eucharist. At the most profound level, the Eucharist has to do with Christ alone. He prays for us; he puts his prayer on our lips, for only he can say: This is my Body—This is my Blood.

Christian Life

The entire Christian ethical and moral “system” is Christian only in so far as it begins with God loving us in and through Christ; and ends in our becoming one with that Love which is nothing less than God’s own self, the Holy Spirit. How we address all the ethical and moral questions in life as Christians is what happens in between. Or as Saint Augustine so famously put it: “love, and then do what you will.” Real love is about moving out of yourself towards another in self-gift, while at the same time opening yourself up to another’s gift of themselves to you. Real love is about vulnerability – which takes an enormous amount of courage and strength and commitment (or what used to be called “fortitude”). Real love begins in a kind of wonder before the awe-inspiring, indeed terrifying mystery of another. It grows and takes possession of one’s whole being with a profound sense of respect, indeed reverence for the Other. And this awe and this reverence are what give rise to the courage, the “fortitude”, to risk everything in committed giving of oneself to that Other.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of Christian Living is developed with emphasis of these theological and anthropological principles:

Real love – God’s love – costs. Real love isn’t cheap. Real love costs; but it is God whom it costs.
Christianity is a revelation rather than a “religion”. For the first three centuries of its existence, the church did not refer to itself as a religion. If it spoke of itself at all, it was as “the Way” (cf. Acts 9:2, 18:25,26, 19:9,23, 22:4, 24:14,22) or even a “philosophy” (e.g. Justin Martyr was one of the first to do so) – but a philosophy in the original sense of a “love of wisdom”, and one that was paradoxical and even subversive.
At its deepest core, its theological heart, the Christian life is about God and the Spirit. And so it must be, for our ethics flow from our spirituality, our encounter with God in Christ; or to be more accurate: it flows from who we are as Christians, from our life in Christ, from who we are as creatures alive through and with and in the Holy Spirit, the very Self and Life of God.
To speak of Christian life in a meaningful way, to do Christian moral theology properly or to work out a genuinely Christian ethics, we must always begin where we mean to end: in God loving us.
To do anything less than that: to start with law, virtue, values, principles, etc.; to focus on ourselves as though we were anything less than loved-by-God, anything less than destined for communion with God, and with one another in God; to do either of these things, is to reduce our ethics to ideology, our morality to legalism, and our theology to idolatry by reducing ourselves to our egos, and our lives to a meaningless existence between the cradle and the grave.

Religion and Society

Human beings are social beings.We are also religious beings. We need each other in order to exist; and we need a shared method of holding together – which is what religion is there to do for us.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin re ligare, to bind up again, or to re-unify. Given that not all religions believe in the supernatural realm or spiritual being(s), this “binding back” or “re-unifying” is not about connecting us with a god or gods, but with each other. It is about society.

In the F–10 Tasmanian Religious Education Curriculum, an understanding of the linked concepts of Religion and Society is developed in the following ways:

Social cohesion is one of our deepest needs; and social disintegration, one of our worst fears;
The unveiling of the foundations of society and the role of religion in its maintenance which began with the Hebrew revelation came to a head in Christ: society is built on violence, using violence to contain violence; and religion was the mechanism by which it achieves this end;
All religions have three things in common: ritual, myth and law. It may come as a surprise to secular “post-modern” people that “god” or “the supernatural” or “spirituality”are not common to all religions. Not only are they not common to all religions, they are hotly debated and contested concepts: what they mean is widely divergent from one religion to another. But all religions have rituals, myths and laws; and it is these that make a religion;
Religion is the primal means by which violence was managed, contained, channelled and “sacralised”.The real cause of violence was and remains wanting what others have – envy, or what the Bible calls “coveting”.
Our early hominid ancestors became human through the agency of ritual, myth and law – i.e. religion.
Since God is love, God did not create an evil being called “the Devil” in order to punish or tempt us into evil. That’s a pagan way of thinking – in other words an idolatrous myth. As St Augustine famously taught: “evil” is the negation of the good. All that God makes is good; and it has “being”, “substance”. Evil is the going-out-of-being of what is. Evil is the good distorted and diminished. That does not mean that “it is not real” in the sense of being imaginary.
At the heart of Christianity is the image of a crucified outlaw revealing the truth about God and about us: deep in our nature we are violent, but in God there is absolutely no violence.