Reflection for:

Dec. 4 - Dec. 18, 2006 - Dr. Dan McGuire

"Bringing Theology Back to Life:  Theology as Mission"

When religions are in their early vigor, they are exciting moral revolutions, stoking the embers of somnambulant consciences, to set those consciences ablaze with a passion for justice.  When Ignatius Loyola sent St. Francis Xavier out on a mission, his charge to him was “i, omnia accende et inflamma,” go and set this world on fire with the blazing passion that drove Jesus in his mission.

 

As religions age and grow cold, they tend to stress dogmatic statements and forget their moral mission.  Their creeds tend to become less and less moral creeds, and more a list of facts to be asserted, not beliefs to be lived.

 

My vocation as a theologian is to revive the moral challenges of Christianity and blend those challenges with the moral visions of all other world religions and thus become a moral force to save a world in terminal peril, a world addicted to war and hell-bent on self-destructive ecological devastation.

 

My main mission is summed up in my most recent book, A MORAL CREED FOR ALL CHRISTIANS, Fortress Press, 2005.   That book opens with a short new creed that calls us back to moral vocation we were called to at baptism.  Here is that creed:

 

                                    A CHRISTIAN MORAL CREED

 

We believe in the Reign of God, a God who loves us “with an everlasting love.” (Jer.31:3) We believe that we are called to join God in creating a world in which oppression gives way to justice, a world where “justice and mercy kiss,”(Ps. 85:10) a world that will be like a “new heaven and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17)  a world where “they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, (Isa. 65:25) and we believe it can be done.

 

We believe that wholehearted biblical justice (Tsedaqah) is the hallmark of the reign of God, a justice that sees the ending of poverty and its evils as the prime moral challenge and mission for Christian peoples.  We believe that we are called to be “good news to the poor.” (Luke 4:18), that making the interests of the poor our interests is the only holiness. 

We believe in prophecy and that we are to be prophets, the social conscience of our society, specialists in the art of cherishing the earth and its peoples, joining with the prophetic movements of all the world’s religions.

 

We believe that peace can be achieved by justice (Isa. 32:17) not by the horrors of war, a peace in which the hostile barriers between “Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female” are dissolved for we “are all one person” in the sight of God (Gal. 3:28).

We believe that our God is a “God of Truth” (Ps. 31: 5), that we are missionaries of truth in a world awash with self-serving lies where “truth stumbles in the market-place and honesty is kept out of court, so truth is lost to sight.” (Isa. 59:14)

We believe that we are “called to freedom” (Rom. 5:13) and that freedom is a virtue only when it is married to justice and compassion.

 

We believe in hope, that “what we shall be has not yet been disclosed (1 John 3:2), that the plan of the “God of hope” (Rom. 15:13) for us has not yet been realized.  Hope drives us to dream and work for a better world where the cries of the oppressed are no longer heard and where tears are wiped from sorrowing eyes.

 

We believe that “the whole law is summed up in love.” (Rom.13:10) that “God is love” (1 John 4:16) and that loving like God whose “goodness knows no bound,” (Matt. 5:48) is our mandate and model.  That commits us to loving our enemies and persecutors for “only so can you be children of your heavenly Father, who makes his sun rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the honest and the dishonest.” (Matt. 5:45) We believe that love is the solvent that can end all enmity.

We believe that joy is our destiny, that the appropriate response to the promises of the Reign of God is “sheer joy,” (Matt. 13:44) and where joy is not present because of poverty or prejudice, our work is not done.

All of this we believe and to all of this we commit ourselves.  Amen.

“We believe that joy is our destiny, that the appropriate response to the promises of the Reign of God is “sheer joy,” (Matt. 13:44) and where joy is not present because of poverty or prejudice, our work is not done.

"Bringing Theology Back to Life: Theology as Mission:" Dr. Dan Maguire

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