Gospel Values
Gospel living involves living our lives in line with our values-- Gospel values. Scripture and Catholic Tradition offer not only belief statements that commit us to certain ways of living, intentions, and attitudes, but also broader Christian worldviews or perspectives that affect how we see the world. We need to understand these values and how they can be applied to our daily lives. This site identifies some of these core values, explains them, and provides resources to go deeper.
Catholicism embraces the Bible and Tradition as sources of our religious beliefs, including the gospel values that evangelization seeks to spread. These sources offer not only belief statements that commit us to certain ways of living, intentions, and attitudes, but also broader Christian worldviews or perspectives that affect how we see the world.
One of the greatest challenges in identifying gospel values is the overwhelming nature of the source materials. Scripture must seem like a jumbled grab bag of seemingly contradictory stories and sayings to lay Catholics who hear it in the lectionary cycle (and associated preaching). Church teaching can also appear arbitrary to the average Catholic, who generally is exposed to it in even more limited sound bites than Scripture. The mainstream media's coverage of the Church focuses on hot-button issues, such as the pedophilia scandals, sexual ethics (homosexuality, birth control, abortion), and limitations placed on candidates for the priesthood.
However, when we look at the Bible and Church teaching as a whole, major themes emerge that inform how to live our lives. Stepping back and taking account of major themes also helps us understand emphasis placed on certain topics by the regularity in which they are addressed, which may not be obvious from the lectionary cycle or modern media. Many are shocked, for example, to learn that nearly half of Jesus' parables involve money; the Kingdom of God is the only topic he addressed more frequently.
Catholicism embraces the Bible and Tradition as sources of our religious beliefs, including the gospel values that evangelization seeks to spread. These sources offer not only belief statements that commit us to certain ways of living, intentions, and attitudes, but also broader Christian worldviews or perspectives that affect how we see the world.
One of the greatest challenges in identifying gospel values is the overwhelming nature of the source materials. Scripture must seem like a jumbled grab bag of seemingly contradictory stories and sayings to lay Catholics who hear it in the lectionary cycle (and associated preaching). Church teaching can also appear arbitrary to the average Catholic, who generally is exposed to it in even more limited sound bites than Scripture. The mainstream media's coverage of the Church focuses on hot-button issues, such as the pedophilia scandals, sexual ethics (homosexuality, birth control, abortion), and limitations placed on candidates for the priesthood.
However, when we look at the Bible and Church teaching as a whole, major themes emerge that inform how to live our lives. Stepping back and taking account of major themes also helps us understand emphasis placed on certain topics by the regularity in which they are addressed, which may not be obvious from the lectionary cycle or modern media. Many are shocked, for example, to learn that nearly half of Jesus' parables involve money; the Kingdom of God is the only topic he addressed more frequently.
Competing Cultural Values
We also should be aware of tendencies to water down the challenge of certain gospel values. The call to evangelization is particularly challenging in the United States, since the values of the dominant secular culture are often in conflict with the Gospel. The stewardship pastoral letter states:
This is a culture in which destructive 'isms'—materialism, relativism, hedonism, individualism, consumerism—exercise seductive, powerful influences. There is a strong tendency to privatize faith, to push it to the margins of society, confining it to people's hearts or, at best, their homes, while excluding it from the marketplace of ideas where social policy is formed and men and women acquire their view of life and its meaning. [Stewardship: A Disciple's Response, 2.]
These "destructive" influences are not only felt by the wealthy, but have a growing effect on Americans across the socio-economic spectrum. For example, middle- and low-income consumers are increasingly making "premium" and "luxury" purchases—everything from vehicles to fur coats—for their social status, even when they can't afford them. To the surprise of many Christians, the Gospel message challenges these kinds of values. Biblical directives are often spiritualized to only refer to our personal relationship to God or our family and friends. "We read the Gospel as if we had no money, and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the Gospel," says Jesuit theologian John Haughey.
Prioritization
However, it is not enough to identify, communicate, and promote particular gospel values as morally good, as Timothy E. O'Connell explains:
[V]alue inculcation, the making of disciples, misunderstands its mission if it views itself as the process of convincing people that what seems good is bad, and vice versa. Rather its mission is convincing people that what seems more important is less important, and that something else is more important. [Making Disciples, 63]
In making decisions, people will wrestle with a number of conflicting positive values and ultimately have to prioritize them in making a decision. For example, a person on the way home from work approaching a panhandler may want to help the person but also worry that offering money may contribute to a substance abuse problem. Taking the time to buy the poor person food could make the decision-maker late for an appointment. All of the values being raised are good ones, but how they are prioritized will determine what decision is made.
Selecting Values
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them (a scholar of the law) tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." [Matt. 22:34-40]
Since gospel values are the basis for living an authentic life of Christian witness and the core of the faith we wish to share, identifying major themes in Scripture and Church Tradition is an essential step. Most Catholics do not read the Bible, Church documents, or theological materials on their own, so they are generally only aware of what their local parish presents to them. Isolated passages or insights can take on much greater meaning when put into a larger context, so understanding key themes as they are developed throughout our faith sources is important. For example, we cannot fully understand the significance of Luke's portrayal of Jesus initiating his public ministry (Luke 4:16-30) unless we understand the Sabbath and Jubilee implications of that reading based in the Hebrew Scriptures.
But which themes are most important? For the purposes of informing the laity in their role, themes should have clear applicability to daily life issues in the United States today as well as being dominant and central to our faith. When asked to identify the most central directive in scripture, Jesus replied with the Great Commandment: love of God, love of neighbor, and (implicitly) love of self. This command is key to living a moral life of discipleship based around relationship. As Russell B. Connors, Jr. and Patrick T. McCormick express, the concept of sin is not following these directives:
But which themes are most important? For the purposes of informing the laity in their role, themes should have clear applicability to daily life issues in the United States today as well as being dominant and central to our faith. When asked to identify the most central directive in scripture, Jesus replied with the Great Commandment: love of God, love of neighbor, and (implicitly) love of self. This command is key to living a moral life of discipleship based around relationship. As Russell B. Connors, Jr. and Patrick T. McCormick express, the concept of sin is not following these directives:
Scripture tends to portray sin as a threefold alienation: alienation from the God who creates and loves us; alienation from our neighbors and from the rest of creation that we are called to love and care for; and alienation even from ourselves. Sin is a rift tearing at every fabric of our lives. [Character, Choices, and Community, 205]
Since Jesus, many Christian authors have attempted to compile lists of central biblical themes. For example, Connors and McCormick identify eight: creation, sin, covenant, incarnation, death and resurrection, discipleship, love of neighbor, and reign of God.
I have selected primary themes for gospel living which incorporate aspects of Connors and McCormick's themes and which speak to daily life very clearly.
I have selected primary themes for gospel living which incorporate aspects of Connors and McCormick's themes and which speak to daily life very clearly.