Robert Barron - Seeds of the Word: Finding God in the Culture

Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, Skokie 60077
2015 by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries
Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved.

Published 2015.

19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 978-0-988-52459-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933319

Barron, Robert E., 1959

www.wordonfire.org

CONTENTS

IMAGO DEI:
GOD IN FILM

TAKE AND READ:
GOD IN BOOKS

CITY ON A HILL:
GOD IN POLITICS

RAYS OF TRUTH:
GOD IN THE CULTURE

How should a Christian respond to popular forms of arts and entertainment found in our culture? Should a young woman striving for holiness avoid at all costs the latest movie or television show that may depict characters who act in ways contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ, or who promote ideas contrary to the teachings of the Church? There are certainly some people who advise detachment and even rejection of the popular culture when it is at odds with the Church and would encourage that young woman to spend her time with explicitly Christian material. But while there may be times when certain things ought to be avoided, we can also look at this situation and see an opportunitynot to idly waste time, but to engage with the culture in a way that allows us to evangelize!

At times this can be a difficult question, but the good news is that Christians have been wrestling with it since the beginning of the Church and we can learn from their wisdom. In the second century we find Justin Martyr, a great defender of the Christian faith, explaining to the Roman Senate the similarities between the story of Socrates and the plight of Christians in Rome. We also find Clement of Alexandria, one of the great catechetical leaders of the early Church, explaining how philosophers, playwrights and poets who lived before Christ in pagan cultures nevertheless grasped some portion of the Christian message. Clement writes that the elements of truth in these works reflect the reality that the force of truth is not hidden. Both of these men, evangelizers par excellence, were not afraid to use examples from the culture that surrounded them to explain and promote the teachings of Jesus Christ, whom we know is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Sometimes this task requires serious consideration and a little creativity, as the presence of Christian truths can be hard to detect in secular work. But the Christian message can be illuminated by turning to the fullness of the teachings of Christ found in the Church, the Light of the Nations. At the Second Vatican Council, the document Lumen Gentium acknowledged the good that exists in other religions as well as in those who have never heard of God, saying whatever good or truth is found among them is looked upon by the Church as preparation for the Gospel (Lumen Gentium, 16). So to bring this teaching together with the wisdom of Justin and Clement, we realize that not only are elements of truth found in popular works in our culture, but they even help to prepare the way for the full acceptance of the Gospel!

And that brings me to Fr. Robert Barron. His magnificent Catholicism DVD series showed how the beauty of the Catholic faith can deepen our understanding and draw us even closer to Christ. In addition to being a great teacher of the Catholic faith, Fr. Barron is also one of the best at finding the connection between twenty-first century culture and the timeless teachings of Catholicism. Whether it is the many movie reviews he offers on his YouTube channel or the essays that follow in this book, Fr. Barron has a wonderful ability to identify the ways that the message of Christ is present in places we might not always expect. This powerful witness makes him an exceptional evangelizer, and I am grateful for all his efforts! Father Barron reaches many people outside the Church through his ability to connect what they know about the culture around them with what he knows about the saving message of Jesus Christ.

Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan
Archbishop of New York
December 4,

Just below the Parthenon and the Acropolis in Athens is a rocky outcropping called the Areopagus, which, in ancient times, functioned as a forum for the adjudication of legal disputes and the airing of philosophical opinions. To that place, some time around 55 AD, came a man who had been trained in both the Greek and the Jewish traditions and who had a novel message to share. The Apostle Paul commenced, not with the news itself, but rather with an observation about the religiosity on display in the city: You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious. For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed To an Unknown God (Acts 17:23). Christians have long taken Pauls strategy on the Areopagus as a model for the evangelization of culture. Before sowing the Word, one looks for semina verbi (seeds of the word) already present among the people one seeks to evangelize. The wager is that, once these are uncovered, the Word of Christ will not seem so strange or alien. In the best case, a nonbeliever might come to see that he had, in fact, been worshipping Christ all along, though under the guise of an Unknown God.

I have been actively involved in the work of evangelizing the culture for over ten years. Sometimes, I think it is necessary to challenge deep moral dysfunction in the culture directly. For example, in the face of an abortion-on-demand philosophy, which permits a mother to eliminate a baby in her womb simply because she doesnt care for another child of that gender, one can and should only shout, No! However, especially in our relativistic postmodern framework, commencing with moral prohibitions is often an evangelical nonstarter. Therefore, I have tended to begin my work by presenting features of the high or low culture that, sometimes faintly and sometimes powerfully, echo the Gospel message. Monsignor. Robert Sokolowski, who taught me many years ago at Catholic University, shared an image that has long stayed in my mind. The integrated icon of Christian doctrine, he said, exploded at the time of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and its charred and distorted fragments have landed here and there, littering the contemporary cultural environment. Accordingly, we are not going to find, at least very often, the whole Catholic thing on beautiful display, but we are indeed going to find bits and pieces of it practically everywhere, provided we have the eyes to see.

If the evangelist exercises his analogical imagination, he can see images of Jesus in Superman, Spider-Man, and Andy Dufresne; he can sense the play between divine love and divine mercy in the strong arms of Rooster Cogburn; he can hear an echo of Augustines anthropology in the protagonist of Eat, Pray, Love; he can discern a powerful teaching on the danger of concupiscent desire in The Great Gatsby; he can sense a longing for the supernatural in The Exorcist and the Twilight series; he can pick up overtones of Jeremiah and Isaiah in Bob Dylan; he can hear the voice that spoke to Job out of the whirlwind in the Coen Brothers A Serious Man; and he can appreciate one of the most textured presentations of Christian soteriology in Clint Eastwoods