The question of God needs to be examined seriously in mid-adolescence, but in an
introductory way. Therefore, in the first chapter of the Year 9 text the
question is presented in a series of carefully planned stages that help us to
know and name God.
The ground is broken in 1.1 when students are invited to face what many adults fail to grasp: we all need to grow in our understanding of God across the phases of life. It is no use having a five-year old’s understanding of God in a fifteen year old’s mind, or worse, in a thirty five year old’s mind! A paperback published on this theme some years ago was entitled Your God is Too Small. On the cover was a drawing of some children’s toys. A childish notion of God can lead to “I don’t believe in God any more”, but that may mean no longer believing in a childish god. The late medieval image of God as an old man on the title page of this chapter should help discussion.
Proofs for God?
The Catholic tradition strongly favours making a rational case for God. The First Vatican Council affirmed that we can work out that there is a God by using our reason. This is called natural revelation. Of course, it only takes us so far in knowing and naming God. By itself, natural revelation does not usually produce a deep faith. It only establishes belief in God, Theism, as opposed to Atheism or an agnostic view.
The most well-known “proofs” for God are the five ways of St Thomas Aquinas, which are presented in a rudimentary form in 1.2 of the Year 9 student text. These “proofs” may be better understood as good demonstrations that belief in God is reasonable and plausible. The five ways are based on a common sense “world view”. Such a view maintains that this world is real and the objects in it are real. We can know the objects we encounter in life because. Life is not illusory, perception is not deceptive, hence the world around us is largely intelligible and measurable. This also happens to be the basis for Western scientific research and continuing progress in scientific knowledge and technology.
St Thomas’ five ways rest on: (a) looking out at the world around us, (b) drawing on our experience of this world, (c) perceived that the greater cannot proceed from the lesser, hence reasoning that there a Creator-God beyond, behind and within the whole universe. There are observed or experienced phenomena behind these five ways:
1. motion hence the need for a “prime Mover”;
2. cause and effect hence, ultimately, a first Cause:
3. necessity and the need for the necessary Being:
4. perfection and the quest for the ultimate Perfection:
5. order and design and the imprint of the supreme Designer.
What the five ways are saying is not simply that God makes sense of the world/universe, but that the world/universe carries within it a strong sense of God at work. Therefore, the most easily grasped arguments are cause and effect and the order and design that we find in the universe. These help most people to see that faith has a rational basis and is not simply a guess or a “leap into the dark” (fideism). We need to remind young people that the Catholic tradition respects a rational basis for faith and does not favour “blind faith” of a fundamentalist or pseudo-mystical type.
Other ways of showing that there is a God look within the human conscience and consciousness, as in Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent. For a more technical introduction to the five ways and other philosophical proofs, see the Catholic Encylopedia (1966), volume 6, God, 7, pp 551-552. The problem of evil, often raised as an objection to belief in God, or a personal God, is not dealt with at this stage but will be raised in the final years of secondary education.
Naming God
In the student’s text, 1.2, the question of God was raised as: “Does God exist?” Technically this is not a precise way of speaking about God because God does not “exist” in the strict sense of that word. Only contingent beings “exist”, that is, beings like ourselves, and other material realities. To exist means depending on other kinds of being and continuing to be or grow in a chain of cause and effect or in a network of inter-related realities, like an ecosystem. With God there is no need for dependence on others realities at all. God is. All that exists ultimately depends on God. This is what makes the divine name so interesting in the direct Revelation granted to Moses: “I am who I am” (Yahweh) – pure uncaused Being.
However, we can say intelligible and sensible things about God (“God is infinite”), just as we can say foolish things (“God is blue”). This is what is behind 1.3 in the student’s text. Refining God language may be introduced at this stage of religious education, again to counteract immature ideas.
One essential word in the list in 1.3 is “transcendent” – God above and beyond all created things, the absolute freedom of God (pure Theism). It may need to be balanced by the opposite truth about God, that God is also “immanent”. This means that God is within all things, at a depth beyond the most minute atomic particle. This inner dynamism holding all reality in existence is present within the human mind and soul. But God is not a prisoner of the universe, nor can God be identified with the universe (Pantheism).
God Revealed in Christ
In 1.4 we move to a higher source for knowing and naming God, to Divine Revelation in the Scriptures and Tradition. At this stage, we concentrate on helping students to grasp some of the biblical imagery for God in the experience of Israel as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. In turn this leads to students exercising their own imagination about God, in terms of “God is like…”. But it must be made clear that, while categories and images may be useful, they only offer limited understandings of God. They are always incomplete, partial, fragmentary. Each description on its own can also lead to misunderstandings about God.
In Jesus Christ the complete and accurate Revelation of God occurred through a divine self-revelation (1.5). The Second Vatican Council’s decree on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, is our key source, reflected in the short essay Revelation and Religious Education at the beginning of this Teaching Companion. Once we enter the realm of Revelation we introduce students to the divine Love revealed when God took our human nature and became one of us on earth - the Incarnation (1.6). The emphasis moves from the purely rational to include the affective, to the loving personal God revealed by Jesus in his deeds and words. This is not the abstract or remote God of philosophy, but the God who is concerned, involved, compassionate etc. Further information on the Incarnation can be found on this website ****** Link here*****
The Trinity in the Scriptures and Tradition
This One God is revealed as a Trinity of Persons. It is only through God-incarnate in Christ that we know the Father and the Holy Spirit.
The Christian Scriptures attest to the Trinity in various traditions transmitted in the Church derived from the historical Christ and developed in the first Christian communities. The first level of this material seems to have been derived from the earliest Christian traditions of worship and prayer. This indicates that members of the earliest Church were aware of the Triune God, even if metaphysical theological formulas had not yet developed. Christians knew well that Jesus, the Son, prayed to his Father with the intimate Hebrew word “Abba”, that Jesus had promised the Holy Spirit, and that this Spirit, poured out in the Pentecost event, was always making the risen Lord Jesus present in the Church.
Therefore, in St Paul’s letters, we find that God is described as the "Father of our Lord Jesus Christ". Praise to God should be offered and prayer made “through Jesus Christ”, the mediator Son, the “way to the Father”. There are Pauline references to both the Father and Son, or God and Christ (Romans 4:24; 8:1 1; 2 Corinthians 4:14; Col 2:12; 1 Timothy 2:5-6; 6:13; 2 Timothy 4:1). At times, the Father, Son, and Spirit are linked in a verse or a group of verses. Galatians 4:6 and Roman 8:15 (the Spirit praying in us calls God Abba) reflect trinitarian prayer. Indications of the Trinity may also be found in 1 Corinthians 6:1 1; 12:4-6; 2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 1 Thessalonians 5:18-19; Galations 3:11-14 and Ephesians 1:3-14.
We are familiar with one of the opening greetings in the modern Roman Rite of the Mass: "May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you." This is St Paul’s concluding greeting in 2 Corinthians 13:14. This illustrates how the first Christians knew God the Trinity less in terms of the inner-Life of the Trinity (the relations between Father, Son and Spirit) but more in the way the Trinity works in this world, in history, in our lives. This approach is what theologians describe as the “economic” understanding of the Trinity. This is reflected in Pauline tradition, especially in Ephesians 1:3-14. But it forms the basis for the later theological definitions by the Councils of the Church, which focus more on the inner-Life of the Trinity and a deeper understanding of the relations between the divine Persons in the One God.
In the synoptic Gospels, a specific revelation of the Trinity at work in this world is found in the description of Jesus' baptism especially in Matthew 3:16-17. The Father calls all to recognize the beloved Son and the Spirit rests on Jesus. Baptism again is the key to trinitarian revelation at the end of Matthew’s gospel, when the Trinity is named in the baptismal formula (Matthew 28:19). The risen Christ sends out the twelve with the commission to baptise ‘’in the name of the Father the Son and of the Holy Spirit". The trinitarian nuances in John’s Gospel are numerous, but are best seen when John presents Jesus at the Last Supper as the Son-High Priest who prays to his Father and promises the Spirit as parakletos, Comforter, in chapters 14 to 17.
The Greatest Miracle
At a later stage in religious education, an interesting rational “case for God” can be developed through a study of the key event of the Resurrection, whereby Jesus is revealed as Lord. Obviously, this “greatest miracle” is a Christian “short cut” to belief in God. At this stage in Year 9, however, we do not concentrate on apologetics or issues education, hence the transition in this chapter to the Holy Spirit (1.7) and the Trinity (1.8), which can be seen as revising and enriching work already covered in primary and junior secondary years.
The question of God is thus being presented according to the vision of “To Know, Worship and Love”, that is, as a balance between religious education in a cognitive sense and a catechesis that leads to faith.
The ground is broken in 1.1 when students are invited to face what many adults fail to grasp: we all need to grow in our understanding of God across the phases of life. It is no use having a five-year old’s understanding of God in a fifteen year old’s mind, or worse, in a thirty five year old’s mind! A paperback published on this theme some years ago was entitled Your God is Too Small. On the cover was a drawing of some children’s toys. A childish notion of God can lead to “I don’t believe in God any more”, but that may mean no longer believing in a childish god. The late medieval image of God as an old man on the title page of this chapter should help discussion.
Proofs for God?
The Catholic tradition strongly favours making a rational case for God. The First Vatican Council affirmed that we can work out that there is a God by using our reason. This is called natural revelation. Of course, it only takes us so far in knowing and naming God. By itself, natural revelation does not usually produce a deep faith. It only establishes belief in God, Theism, as opposed to Atheism or an agnostic view.
The most well-known “proofs” for God are the five ways of St Thomas Aquinas, which are presented in a rudimentary form in 1.2 of the Year 9 student text. These “proofs” may be better understood as good demonstrations that belief in God is reasonable and plausible. The five ways are based on a common sense “world view”. Such a view maintains that this world is real and the objects in it are real. We can know the objects we encounter in life because. Life is not illusory, perception is not deceptive, hence the world around us is largely intelligible and measurable. This also happens to be the basis for Western scientific research and continuing progress in scientific knowledge and technology.
St Thomas’ five ways rest on: (a) looking out at the world around us, (b) drawing on our experience of this world, (c) perceived that the greater cannot proceed from the lesser, hence reasoning that there a Creator-God beyond, behind and within the whole universe. There are observed or experienced phenomena behind these five ways:
1. motion hence the need for a “prime Mover”;
2. cause and effect hence, ultimately, a first Cause:
3. necessity and the need for the necessary Being:
4. perfection and the quest for the ultimate Perfection:
5. order and design and the imprint of the supreme Designer.
What the five ways are saying is not simply that God makes sense of the world/universe, but that the world/universe carries within it a strong sense of God at work. Therefore, the most easily grasped arguments are cause and effect and the order and design that we find in the universe. These help most people to see that faith has a rational basis and is not simply a guess or a “leap into the dark” (fideism). We need to remind young people that the Catholic tradition respects a rational basis for faith and does not favour “blind faith” of a fundamentalist or pseudo-mystical type.
Other ways of showing that there is a God look within the human conscience and consciousness, as in Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent. For a more technical introduction to the five ways and other philosophical proofs, see the Catholic Encylopedia (1966), volume 6, God, 7, pp 551-552. The problem of evil, often raised as an objection to belief in God, or a personal God, is not dealt with at this stage but will be raised in the final years of secondary education.
Naming God
In the student’s text, 1.2, the question of God was raised as: “Does God exist?” Technically this is not a precise way of speaking about God because God does not “exist” in the strict sense of that word. Only contingent beings “exist”, that is, beings like ourselves, and other material realities. To exist means depending on other kinds of being and continuing to be or grow in a chain of cause and effect or in a network of inter-related realities, like an ecosystem. With God there is no need for dependence on others realities at all. God is. All that exists ultimately depends on God. This is what makes the divine name so interesting in the direct Revelation granted to Moses: “I am who I am” (Yahweh) – pure uncaused Being.
However, we can say intelligible and sensible things about God (“God is infinite”), just as we can say foolish things (“God is blue”). This is what is behind 1.3 in the student’s text. Refining God language may be introduced at this stage of religious education, again to counteract immature ideas.
One essential word in the list in 1.3 is “transcendent” – God above and beyond all created things, the absolute freedom of God (pure Theism). It may need to be balanced by the opposite truth about God, that God is also “immanent”. This means that God is within all things, at a depth beyond the most minute atomic particle. This inner dynamism holding all reality in existence is present within the human mind and soul. But God is not a prisoner of the universe, nor can God be identified with the universe (Pantheism).
God Revealed in Christ
In 1.4 we move to a higher source for knowing and naming God, to Divine Revelation in the Scriptures and Tradition. At this stage, we concentrate on helping students to grasp some of the biblical imagery for God in the experience of Israel as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. In turn this leads to students exercising their own imagination about God, in terms of “God is like…”. But it must be made clear that, while categories and images may be useful, they only offer limited understandings of God. They are always incomplete, partial, fragmentary. Each description on its own can also lead to misunderstandings about God.
In Jesus Christ the complete and accurate Revelation of God occurred through a divine self-revelation (1.5). The Second Vatican Council’s decree on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, is our key source, reflected in the short essay Revelation and Religious Education at the beginning of this Teaching Companion. Once we enter the realm of Revelation we introduce students to the divine Love revealed when God took our human nature and became one of us on earth - the Incarnation (1.6). The emphasis moves from the purely rational to include the affective, to the loving personal God revealed by Jesus in his deeds and words. This is not the abstract or remote God of philosophy, but the God who is concerned, involved, compassionate etc. Further information on the Incarnation can be found on this website ****** Link here*****
The Trinity in the Scriptures and Tradition
This One God is revealed as a Trinity of Persons. It is only through God-incarnate in Christ that we know the Father and the Holy Spirit.
The Christian Scriptures attest to the Trinity in various traditions transmitted in the Church derived from the historical Christ and developed in the first Christian communities. The first level of this material seems to have been derived from the earliest Christian traditions of worship and prayer. This indicates that members of the earliest Church were aware of the Triune God, even if metaphysical theological formulas had not yet developed. Christians knew well that Jesus, the Son, prayed to his Father with the intimate Hebrew word “Abba”, that Jesus had promised the Holy Spirit, and that this Spirit, poured out in the Pentecost event, was always making the risen Lord Jesus present in the Church.
Therefore, in St Paul’s letters, we find that God is described as the "Father of our Lord Jesus Christ". Praise to God should be offered and prayer made “through Jesus Christ”, the mediator Son, the “way to the Father”. There are Pauline references to both the Father and Son, or God and Christ (Romans 4:24; 8:1 1; 2 Corinthians 4:14; Col 2:12; 1 Timothy 2:5-6; 6:13; 2 Timothy 4:1). At times, the Father, Son, and Spirit are linked in a verse or a group of verses. Galatians 4:6 and Roman 8:15 (the Spirit praying in us calls God Abba) reflect trinitarian prayer. Indications of the Trinity may also be found in 1 Corinthians 6:1 1; 12:4-6; 2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 1 Thessalonians 5:18-19; Galations 3:11-14 and Ephesians 1:3-14.
We are familiar with one of the opening greetings in the modern Roman Rite of the Mass: "May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you." This is St Paul’s concluding greeting in 2 Corinthians 13:14. This illustrates how the first Christians knew God the Trinity less in terms of the inner-Life of the Trinity (the relations between Father, Son and Spirit) but more in the way the Trinity works in this world, in history, in our lives. This approach is what theologians describe as the “economic” understanding of the Trinity. This is reflected in Pauline tradition, especially in Ephesians 1:3-14. But it forms the basis for the later theological definitions by the Councils of the Church, which focus more on the inner-Life of the Trinity and a deeper understanding of the relations between the divine Persons in the One God.
In the synoptic Gospels, a specific revelation of the Trinity at work in this world is found in the description of Jesus' baptism especially in Matthew 3:16-17. The Father calls all to recognize the beloved Son and the Spirit rests on Jesus. Baptism again is the key to trinitarian revelation at the end of Matthew’s gospel, when the Trinity is named in the baptismal formula (Matthew 28:19). The risen Christ sends out the twelve with the commission to baptise ‘’in the name of the Father the Son and of the Holy Spirit". The trinitarian nuances in John’s Gospel are numerous, but are best seen when John presents Jesus at the Last Supper as the Son-High Priest who prays to his Father and promises the Spirit as parakletos, Comforter, in chapters 14 to 17.
The Greatest Miracle
At a later stage in religious education, an interesting rational “case for God” can be developed through a study of the key event of the Resurrection, whereby Jesus is revealed as Lord. Obviously, this “greatest miracle” is a Christian “short cut” to belief in God. At this stage in Year 9, however, we do not concentrate on apologetics or issues education, hence the transition in this chapter to the Holy Spirit (1.7) and the Trinity (1.8), which can be seen as revising and enriching work already covered in primary and junior secondary years.
The question of God is thus being presented according to the vision of “To Know, Worship and Love”, that is, as a balance between religious education in a cognitive sense and a catechesis that leads to faith.
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