The New Evangelisation: how are we to do it?

Some of the things our Holy Father, Pope Francis, has been saying since he became Pope about the way the faith should be presented and taught as a preamble to the new evangeliation have unquestionably ruffled a few feathers. However, I have increasingly come to think that there would be less misunderstanding if more people were aware of a development that has been taking place in the Church’s thinking and teaching on this subject over the last fifty years. This development seems to have begun at the time of Vatican Two, and, in a modified form, has been accepted by subsequent popes and episcopal synods. But only, I would say, in the last few years have a significant section of the theologically-minded faithful become aware of it.

 

It involves making a distinction, when considering or talking about the Church’s beliefs, teachings and practices, between what are now called the kerygma and the didache, both Greek words.

 

Kerygma, which carries with it the idea of a herald blowing a trumpet to announce or proclaim some important news, is used to describe what are held to be the most characteristic features of the initial apostolic teaching or ‘proclamation’. The apostles and first generation of Christians were not propagating a religious philosophy, based purely on human reason and human wisdom like that, say, of Confucius. They were announcing a message of salvation achieved by a divine-human person, whose witnesses and representatives they claimed to be . The point is made with particular force by St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. With characteristic irony, the apostle to the Gentiles there describes what he is preaching or proclaiming as ‘the foolishness of God’ in contrast to the ‘wisdom’ or philosophy admired by the Greeks.

 

Explaining or justifying the facts is the role of didache or the detailed religious instruction we now call catechetics. This is given after the proclamation of the message has, with the help of grace, and in some cases miracles, been accepted. Didache has its origin in the fact that the kerygma or initial apostolic proclamation is not all self-explanatory or systematically organised. Almost as soon as it has been heard and accepted, the new Christian starts to ask questions: why, how, or ‘when you say such and such what does it mean’? And it is the attempts to answer these questions as they have been put to the Church down the ages by succeeding generations which have given rise to those great storehouses of the Church’s dogmatic, doctrinal and theological teaching --- the works of the Church Fathers, the Acts of her Councils, the Summae of the medieval scholastics and so on, or that most recent addition, the Catechism of the Catholic Church --- which are one of the glories of her existence.

 

 

The kerygma or initial apostolic proclamation, its range and style, are best seen and appreciated in the Acts of the Apostles, better indeed than in the Gospels which go way beyond it. And important to remember too is that for its first audiences the kerygma was not something totally unheard of. The apostles were addressing Jews and telling them about their long awaited messiah. For the Jews the proclamation was mainly about the fulfilment of prophecies. It was only after St Peter’s visit to the Cornelius and the turning to the Gentiles that the kerygma became a complete novelty for the majority of its hearers.

 

In the hands of thinkers hostile to Catholic belief and practice, distinguishing between the kerygma and the didache can be and has been used as a way of devaluing or dismissing much or all of the latter. The message is that the kerygma alone is important, and the rest of what passes for Christian belief and teaching is mostly just “man-made stuff”.

 

Included in this category of doctrinal iconoclasts one regretfully has to place Catholic= theologians who have been anxious to get the Church to drop, change or adapt this or that of her teachings. However, other theologians, those with a genuinely Catholic cast of mind, have seen in the kerygma-didache distinction a means of overcoming what they consider had become a too rationalistic presentation of the faith.

 

 

From the Catholic standpoint, as we shall see in a moment, kerygma and didache are not in opposition. They are to be seen as complementary, fulfilling different roles or needing more or less emphasis in varying circumstances. Put at its simplest one could say that emphasis on the apostolic kerygma is considered best for the evangelisation of new peoples who have never heard of Christianity , or the de-Christianised populations of the west, many of whom are now equally ignorant. Didache comes in once they are established in the faith in degrees and forms suited to their level of education and culture.