We invited Joseph Thompson, a retired high school teacher of religious studies and a father of eleven, living in Sarnia, Ontario to examine Fully Alive at its deepest level – namely the principles of theology which under gird it.
Mr. Thompson has both educational and theological credentials.
In this perceptive article, the author pinpoints the exclusive emphasis on the Holy Spirit as a source of difficulties.
Fully Alive is an (other) example of the separation of love from truth, a characteristic prominent in current thinking. In society, compassion and love are emphasized while the need to adhere to objective moral standards is ignored or played down, if not denied.
In Fully Alive, God is emphasized as the source of love, but little is said about God as Creator, (the Father), or God as Redeemer, (the Son). The Creator presents the reality of nature; the Redeemer the need to overcome sin, something which can only be done through Jesus.
The absence of reference to sin and its implications is a weakness in Fully Alive addressed by Fr. John McGoey in previous articles in The Interim.
Blessed Trinity
The program stresses, or attempts to stress, God’s love for His creation. And it is true, God loves us, so much so that that expression of that truth is a vast understatement. But even in God Himself, in so far as we can speak about one thing, depending on another in One Who is indivisible except for the Three Divine Persons, God know before He loves.
The Father sees Himself and knows Himself and expresses His infinite knowledge of His own infinite Being in a Word, that Word being the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son. Then the Father and the Son see each other and love each other, and express their mutual love in a sigh, the Holy Spirit, Who is the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. This action of knowing and loving is, it must be remembered, timeless and implies no dependency, no first and last, no superior and inferior, for the Three Persons are all equal, all fully God, there being only one God, but Three Divine Persons in Him.
Such is a thumbnail sketch of the doctrine of the Most Blessed Trinity. Add to that the fact that the Second of those Three Persons, the Word, the Son, became man 2,000 years ago, being born of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a place called Bethlehem in ancient Israel, and you have a skeleton outline of Christianity.
No separation possible
The point here is that since the Son is the expression of God’s knowledge of Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the expression of the mutual love of Father and Son, love and knowledge cannot be separated even in God, and, if man is made in God’s image, a point Fully Alive insists on, then they cannot be separated in man either.
Talking about love (more properly called the theological virtue of Charity), without relating it to the theological virtue of Faith, is like describing an unlit lamp. Until the cord from that lamp is plugged into a receptacle called Faith, the current of Charity cannot flow through it. And it is its shining which produces Hope, a virtue the text merely takes for granted, or, worse, replaces with excitement.
Love, or Charity, is indeed the point, but Charity does not stand alone. The Holy Spirit is not the only Person in God.
Chinese Catholics, who are few and far between (and have to fight for their Faith like martyrs) have a saying: “The word (Scripture) is the ground beneath my feet; the Lord is the light above.” I forget where I read that, but it expresses rootedness as well as glory. Fully Alive attempts to express glory without attention to what glory is grounded in, with the result that the glory suffers along with the grounding.
Love and truth
The Scriptures talk untiringly about “Your love and Your truth.”
St. John the Evangelist, the Apostle of Love, who speaks untiringly of love, does not do so at the expense of truth.
Far from it.
And in society which does just that ad nauseam, which goes on and on about love and compassion, all the while being unable, in practice, to tell the difference between an unborn child and a diseased appendix, it ill behooves us to go on and on to children about love without referring love to truth at every step of the way.
I cite one example (from Grade 1, Topic 2) as typical: “The teacher and children make up riddles about the gifts of creation. For example, ‘I see someone God has made; she is in this class; she has blue eyes, brown hair, and a friendly smile; she is wearing a red sweater. Can you guess who she is?”
I looked for the backing for this, and found, in Topic 1, “God loves us so much he gave us the whole world.”
Notice that this is not the same as saying, “God loved the world so much that He gave His only-begotten Son.” Nor is it the same as saying, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Methodology
The fact that God loves us is a truth of such exquisite significance that the student should be led to discover it for himself, and, if that does not seem possible, he should be, as it were, escorted into the very depths of the forest where the secret is whispered in his ear as the ultimate in priceless insight. The logician would say, do not beg the question.
The student should be asked (with the finesse grade school teachers have which to my mind marks them as geniuses) where he or she came from. If he says, “from God,” he should be asked how he knows that. If he says, “from my parents,” he should be asked whether it was his parents who designed his ear, his eye, etc. Thus he can be introduced to the idea that design implies designer, and that 100 per cent of the evidence points to a Designer beyond our parents.
As a bonus, he will begin to sense the difference between secondary causes and primary cause. There you have Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Start with the thing, and work back to the causes. So also Socrates, a pagan with more respect for truth than one can find in all modern secularism. Socrates method was to work from the known to the unknown, something which cannot fail to engage reason.
Text bypasses discovery
The text – seemingly unconsciously – is Platonic, by-passing the thing and proceeding at once to the conclusion (love) as if the thing about which the conclusion was to be drawn did not matter very much.
The Christian starts with the thing and works his way, ignoring neither reason nor Faith, to the conclusion. The universe is here; the universe has a King; the King loved me and delivered Himself for me. He loved us first promising a Redeemer to Adam and Eve even before they had even acknowledged, or perhaps even realized that they had need of One.
The Christian embraces everything true in both Plato and Aristotle. He recognizes the primacy of form without subtracting anything from the real importance of matter. He recognizes the primacy of soul without in any wise shortchanging the body.
He marries Charity to Faith and begets Hope.
What he will not do is condone disunity between these elements, for he knows that their separation is death. Charity cannot be divorced from Faith.
Psychology of Fully Alive
I have a huge question about the psychology of the program, the answer to which may depend far more on the teacher than on the text, for a good teacher can turn a text of dross to gold (something which provides zero justification for the production of texts of dross).
My question is whether the program contains sufficient recognition of the existence of this thing called latency.
Example
I have a story from home which says something about the character of this phenomenon. The subject of where babies came from had come up among the gathered family members, all young. One of the boys, in Grade IV, perhaps, pressed for details, which his mother provided, speaking of the baby’s emerging from his mother’s body through a passage which ended at an opening between her legs.
This explanation produced a somewhat disconcerted look on the face of a boy whose habitual bearing was one of full confidence. It was as if he sensed that he had bitten off more than he could chew, so he resorted to a question which shifted the focus without inviting the charge of being off topic, and asked: “Well if you get one with a moustache, can you put it back and get another?”
He himself realized, by the look in his eye, that this question might be flawed even in its premises, and the gales of laughter that greeted his question assured him, I think, that this subject was, indeed, fraught with mystery.
Latency
I am persuaded that latency, mutates mutandis, lasts throughout life.
I was in church one time, making a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, when a young man approached me visibly, intensely moved. His wife had just given birth to their first child, and he was looking for some adequate way to deal with what he felt. He was not a Catholic. He did not go to church. But he sought out this holy place intuiting that there was a relationship between the birth of a child and a sanctuary. Secular ‘sex education’ destroys that intuition.
Catholicism, if it is Catholicism, enshrines it.
I fear that Fully Alive has espoused some middle ground between Catholicism and secularism, inviting the penalty reserved for the lukewarm in Revelation. (Chap. 3: 15-16).
‘Sex education’ is nothing without the realization that human sexuality is a mystery, and the overwhelmingly major element in our understanding of this mystery – this huge truth – is our awareness, as St. Paul say, of the connection between married love and the love of Christ for His Bride, the Church.
I found that connection missing in Fully Alive, and, if one tries to deal with a topic without relating it to its ultimate significance, one cannot fail to shortchange the student, something doubly true of a topic as volatile as human sexuality.
