Bound in Love

In a Christendom age, a deeper conversion to Christ usually means taking more seriously the moral teaching of the church. In such an age, there’s not much argument over dogmatic teachings. Everyone believes that there is a God and there’s a heaven and hell and there are angels and demons and there’s going to be a general judgment and so forth. So taking things to a deeper level involves more rigor as regards our wills and our choices.

In an apostolic age, those who present the gospel through their lives, should assume that the majority of their audience are unconverted or half converted. Most of the people we interact with whether or not they are nominally Christians have embraced to some degree the dominant non-Christian vision.

Preaching in an apostolic age needs to begin with the appeal to a completely different way of seeing things. It needs to aim to put into place the key elements of the integrated Christian vision of the world so that the moral and spiritual disciplines of the church can find their place. We can’t presuppose a shared moral vision when we preach. Even among Catholics, surveys suggest that a core teaching is not really believed by the majority. According to a survey more than half of Catholics in America did not really believe in the doctrine of the real presence. They look at the Eucharist as symbolically meaningful but not a transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. We can teach them the teaching until we’re blue in the face, but that’s not really going to work. What we need to do is to convert their minds to a sacramental vision of the world.