Introduction: From the Middle of Our Life's Journey

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) begins The Divine Comedy, his great work of poetic theology, "midway along the journey of our life," awakening in a dark wood and realizing that he has lost his way. In writing this introduction to Catholic theology we have found ourselves returning again and again to the idea that we are always beginning our theological endeavors in the middle. Theology, taken in its broadest sense of talking about and reflecting on God and all things in relation to God, is something that we find ourselves doing long before most of us are ever aware that there is an academic discipline called Theology. Our talking and our reflecting occur spontaneously from the middle of our life's journey, and that middle is as particular as each life story. The Second Vatican Council speaks of the Church sharing in "the joys and hopes and the sorrows and anxieties of people today" (Gaudium et Spes n. 1), and we presume this means that the Church's theology can begin from any of the joys and hopes, sorrows and anxieties that people experience. We feel ourselves lost, or found, and find ourselves praying in moments of crisis or of great joy; we wonder why it is that a loved one suffers or why we should be so lucky; we tell and are told stories about Noah and Moses and Mary and Jesus; we are taught and teach others to ask St Anthony for help when we've lost something and to talk to St Jude when things seems really hopeless; we hear politicians say, "God bless the United States of America" or "God save the Queen"; priests say, "The Lord be with you" and the rest of us respond, "And with your spirit"; we find a sudden peace, a sudden clarity, descend upon us without any preceding cause, while engaged in activities as diverse as washing the dishes or embracing our child and we wonder what its source is. In these and countless other ways, people are always already engaged in God-talk and God-thought, so we do not presume that there is an obvious place to start in theology.

We also begin in the middle because that is where God is at work, and God is at work not only in our talking and reflecting, but also in our actions. We have sought to be attentive to the ways in which Catholic theology is rooted in Catholic practices in all their diversity. Our thinking about Jesus, for example, is related to the practice of offering a prayer in his name, but it is also, he tells us, related to what we are doing when we offer a drink to the thirsty or food to the hungry, when we care for the sick or visit the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46). Claims about what Catholics believe about the Eucharist are inseparable from practices such as Eucharistic adoration, the care shown for the sacramental elements after communion, discernment concerning who can and cannot receive communion, the offering of "stipends" to have Masses said on behalf of the dead or for other intentions, and so forth. The meaning of our talk and reflection is only made clear in relation to the practices that accompany them, and vice versa. It is not simply that the practices display the beliefs that underlie them, but the beliefs are shaped by the practices. Christians were praying to Jesus and in the name of Jesus for centuries before the Council of Chalcedon defined what it means for him to be both divine and human; Catholics were concerned with reverently disposing of the Eucharistic bread and wine centuries before they formulated the doctrine of transubstantiation. Catholic theology grows from the desire not only to have our practices conform to our beliefs, but also to have our beliefs conform to our practices.

This book reflects the various practices in which its authors have engaged over the years: participating in the Eucharist, being parents, preaching homilies and hearing homilies, baptizing and being baptized, feeding the hungry, and so forth. One practice that we have both engaged in for many years (over 50 years between the two of us) with great frequency has been teaching an introductory course in theology at Loyola University Maryland. It is really only in retrospect that we have realized how much this introduction to Catholic theology has been shaped by our experience of teaching this course, which is required of all students at Loyola. It has shaped this introduction in a number of different ways.

First, because this course is required, we teach students from a wide variety of backgrounds and levels of interest. Some have twelve years of Catholic education and some have no religious education whatsoever. Some are practitioners of Catholicism or some other tradition of Christianity, a smaller number are practitioners of a non-Christian religious tradition, and a growing number identify with no religious tradition at all (although they too are diverse and do not fit under a single label such as "secular" or "atheist"). Some, regardless of their own beliefs or practices, are extremely interested in thinking about religious questions, and others have to be coaxed into seeing how these might be interesting.

We hope that this book will be useful to a similarly wide range of readers. We believe that it can properly be called an "introduction" because we have tried to presume as little knowledge of theology or Catholicism as possible. We attempt to explain terms and identify people and events as we introduce them, and to avoid some of the more abstruse theological argot. At the same time, this book undoubtedly contains more information than could be covered in a typical introductory course and at times goes into significantly more depth than a beginner might need. Still, by seeking to keep our discussions only as technical as they need to be, we have sought to make it something that is accessible to any reader with a solid general education.

Second, our Introduction to Theology courses, while taught differently by different members of our department, are all guided by certain agreements we have with each other as to the types of material we will use. Specifically, we all agree to make use of the Bible-drawing from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels, and the Letters-along with some texts from the theological tradition, and some texts that raise contemporary questions. Teaching this sort of course, which everyone in our department does, regardless of theological sub-specialty, engenders many theological conversations, because no one is expert in all of these areas and so we must depend on each other to teach our courses well.

Likewise in this book we have tried to write a book that ranges across the standard sub-specialties of theology, drawing in Scripture, historical theology, philosophical theology, systematic theology, liturgical theology, and moral theology. In doing so, we have sought to be in conversation with thinkers whose expertise in these areas is greater than our own. We hope that the result is not dilettantish. We have tried to take Scripture seriously on every topic, without pretending to offer an introduction to everything Scripture says about any topic. We have tried to take seriously Catholic life and thought as an historical movement with abiding as well as transient traditions, but we have not provided a comprehensive overview of the tradition. We have also tried to take account of our contemporaries-whether they are Catholic or not-and their questions, though we obviously have been unable to address, much less answer, all those questions.

Third, because the audience for our classes is so varied, and because the material we attempt to teach is no less varied, there is no obvious starting point at which to begin. As we have already said and will have occasion to mention repeatedly, this book is an exercise in beginning in the middle. We might begin our classes with what seems to us an interesting contemporary question, or with the book of Genesis, or with the question of the existence and attributes of God, or perhaps with Job's protest against God. Over the years, we have begun our classes in all these ways. We do it differently at different times because our interests and circumstances, and our perception of our students' interests and circumstances, shift over time. At any given point and on any given topic, we find ourselves needing to say everything, while recognizing that this is impossible. So we resign ourselves to having to begin somewhere.

This book follows a fairly classical order that reflects both the order of the creeds and the order of the Biblical narrative. After a brief preliminary chapter on the nature of Catholic theology (Chapter 1), which might be seen as corresponding to the "I believe" with which the creeds begin, we then move on to the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit (Chapter 2) and who is "the creator of heaven and earth": a world that reflects the goodness of its creator, yet is fallen away from the fullness of divine goodness (Chapter 3). We then turn to Jesus, who is the saving presence of God in the midst of God's creation, one who is both truly "God from God and light from light," and at the same time truly a human creature (Chapter 4). God is present not only visibly in the person of Jesus, but also invisibly in the person of the Holy Spirit, who is "lord and giver of life," so we then turn to the Spirit who dwells in us by grace and is manifested in the lives of those holy ones we call saints (Chapter 5). This Spirit gives life to the Church that is...