MODULE I

Becoming a Prophet in Dialogue

Preface

A. Significance of Human Communications

1.Language as Verbal and Non-Verbal

2.Significance of words.
- For communications: written and spoken
- Language as formative force:
a. Inform: truth about ourselves, about other people, about the
world
o They reveal who we are by the kind of language we usually
us
b. Formative: means to shape us
c. Transformative: changes us to become better persons
- Words are powerful, kind of possessing a psychic energy, they can
either destroy or build up persons or relationships

Transition: We’re witnesses to the Word. But we can’t witness to

something if we don’t understand that something. First what does the
“word” mean in the context of our Christian biblical tradition?

B. Functions of the Written Words of God

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1. Informative
- through His Word, God interprets man/woman, his existence and
history by giving meaning and direction to him/her
- by listening to God’s Word, he/she comes to a knowledge of himself,
his being, and destiny
o 2 Tim 3:17 “All Scripture is inspired by God and useful for
refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them
to be upright. This is how someone who is dedicated to God
becomes fully equipped and ready for any good work.”
2. Expressive
- Through His Word God teaches us about Himself. He reveals Himself to
us because He considers us as His friends.
o Jn 15:15 ‘I call you friends, because I have made known to
you everything that I have learned from my Father.”
- By many names, images, metaphors and examples, God reveals
Himself and His love to all that we may have eternal life.
o Jn 17:3 “Eternal life is this: to know you, and only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
3. Appellative
- God teaches and reveals Himself because He summons us to a
response.
- The truth of God’s Word is not to be known (conceptually) but to be
done.
o Lk 11:28 “More blessed are those who hear the Word of God
and keep it.”
o Mt 7:21 “It is not anyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord, will
enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but the person who does the
will of my Father in Heaven.”
- In the early Church, the faithful who belonged to the community were
called the kletoi (Rom. 1:6-7; 1 Cor. 1:2, 24), or the “called” because
they had listened to the call.
- Community of the “called:” ekklesia, that is, the assembly of those
who responded and gathered by the Word of the herald.
o Jesus assured them of his presence (Mt. 18:20 “Where two or
three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst”).

C. God’s Word as Dabar

• Word in Hebrew scriptures is “DABAR”; in Greek: “LOGOS”

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• For the Jews “dabar” is more than the spoken word. It is a thing, an
affair, an event, an action.

o Dabar is a relational concept.

a. God’s dabar is God talking to us in words.
b. God wants to relate Himself to us with love and in love!

o How is “dabar” used in the Old Testament?: It is life-giving; it

has power to heal; it is creative; it makes things happen; it is
fruitful
1) It is LIFE-GIVING: Dt. 32:46-47
o “Take to heart all the words that I am giving you in witness
against you today; give them as a command to your children,
so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law.
This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life;
through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing
over the Jordan to possess” (addressed to Moses)
2) It has POWER TO HEAL: Ps. 107:19-20
o “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved
them from their distress; he sent out his word and healed
them, and delivered them from destruction.” (Ps 107:1 “O
give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love
endures forever.”
3) It is CREATIVE: Wis 9:1
o “O God of my ancestors and Lord of mercy, who have made
all things by your word…”
4) It MAKES THING HAPPEN: Ps. 33:9
o “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it
stood firm.”
5) It is FRUITFUL: Is. 55:10-11
o For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and
do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower
and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out
from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall
accomplish that which I produce, and succeed in the thing for
which I sent it.

• Other fundamental meanings of “dabar” in the OT?

(1) refers to God’s revelation through the Prophets (prophetic)

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 (2) to God’s laws which He gave to His people through the
prophets (propositional)

D. From Dabar to Logos

> Transition: Other meanings of “dabar” in the OT?

(1) refers to God’s revelation through the Prophets;
(2) to God’s laws which He gave to His people through the
prophets
o God’s word spoken through the prophets was God’s
way of guiding His chosen people
Heb 1:1 “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and
various ways by the prophets….”

• Significance of Heb 1:1: It links us to the NT understanding of

the Word of God > Heb. 1:2: …but in these last days he has
spoken to us through his Son” (Heb 1:2).

• In the New Testament: Greek word of “dabar” – “LOGOS”

(Word-made-flesh)

E. Jesus as Logos

• Jesus Christ: dabar as logos (Gk) made flesh

▪ Jn 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with
God and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God”
▪ Dabar saves > Jesus as Logos, to him is offered the definitive
word of salvation (See Mt 21:33-39 Parable of the Wicked
Servants)
▪ Dabar accompanies and guides > in the person of Jesus made
human like us, Yahweh accompanies and guides his chosen
people

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 • Dual role of Jesus: human expression of God and God’s idea of
what the human being is supposed to be

• Dabar/Logos and Its Prophetic Character

▪ Prophetic from the noun “prophet”… who is a prophet?:

spokesperson of God
▪ What is his main function? – to communicate God’s dabar (truth)
▪ Primary consideration: not to please people, but to faithfully and
truthfully proclaim God’s word
▪ Prophets’ experience of rejection, ridicule, refusal on the part of
the people > Jesus the greatest of all prophets was rejected – by
those in power, the conservative Jewish authorities in collusion
with the Roman authorities (Jesus not a goody-goody person)
▪ Prophetic has two sides: to proclaim and to denounce/judge

A. THE REIGN OF GOD AS THE REIGN OF LOVE

(to be presented during the synchronous)

B. TO LOVE IS A CALL TO DIALOGUE

(to be presented during the synchronous)

C. TO DIALOGUE IS TO A CALL TO UNIVERSALITY

AND CATHOLICITY

(to be presented during the synchronous)

Addendum

Church Proclaiming the Good News of God’s Reign of Love

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 • Catholic Nature and Orientation of the Church

In EDM 1 you were taught that Jesus embodied the fullness of the
Father’s love and this was precisely the mission of Jesus: to proclaim by word
and example what that Father’s love is all about. Before Jesus ascended to
heaven he made it sure that his disciples (the church’s apostolic foundation)
would carry out that mission (review Matt 28:18-20). Indeed the disciples did
just that but after Jesus sent his Spirit upon them who were gathered inside
a house (Acts 2:1-36), because the Spirit it was who removed their fears and
timidity and replaced it with boldness and courage. What was striking during
the Pentecost was that the disciples preached in different languages so that
the crowd who came from different regions were able to understand what
they were preaching (Acts 2:1-11). That early, the young Christian
movement had already exhibited its catholic character and orientation.
Catholicity is derived from the Greek katholikos, which means “pertaining to
or oriented to the whole). This catholic character means that Christian unity
would welcome diversity inside the movement. This is called differentiated
unity, or unity in diversity: one Gospel, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, yet
its expressions would take in a plurality of forms. Cultural difference was not
destroyed but became the very instrument for a realization of a more
profound spiritual unity.
What are the three religious bases of the Church’s belief on the
goodness of difference?
There are three, namely: the doctrine of creation, of incarnation, and of the
Trinity.
(1) doctrine of creation, that is, since creation is good, then differences
in creation must be celebrated;
(2) doctrine of incarnation, that is, God, other than God’s self has truly
become the other in Jesus of Nazareth;
(3) doctrine of Trinity, that is, differences grounded in the God who is a
tri-unity of distinct subsistent relations.
In the Old Testament, there were actually two contrasting traditions
which emerged. The first believed that God’s saving love was exclusivist,
which was linked to ethnic purity. The second viewed God’s salvation as
inclusive (Is 49:60 “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation
may reach to the ends of the earth.” See also the books of Ruth and Jonah).
The inclusive view was affirmed in Acts whose central theme was the
emergence of the church as a missionary community confident that the
gospel is hospitable to all people and cultures (Acts 1:8 “But you will receive

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power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my
witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the
earth.” So the catholicity of the Church is revealed in and through its
missionary mandate.
Ecclesiological principle of the biblical origin of the church: the Holy Spirit
does not erase difference but renders difference nondivisive.
- Significance of the Council of Jerusalem: the good news of Christ was
to be offered to all peoples as approved by the council

• Catholic Church as Missionary in History: Lights and Shadows

Historically throughout much of the past thousand years, Christianity

flourished in Europe. Moreover, it was largely from Europe that the religion
eventually spread, first to the Americas and later to Africa and Asia. What
has given a bad image to the expansion of Christianity in the earlier centuries
was its association with the global empire being established by European
nations. Despite the not-so-good developments it was a fact that Christianity
was from the beginning global in its impulse, embracing a catholicity open to
cultural difference and, later, geographically spread to diverse global
contexts. Unfortunately by the end of the first millennium many of the
Eastern Christian communities outside of Byzantium eventually dissolved
into minority Christian enclaves in the face of the spread of the Islamic
cultural revolution, while the Western church, in turn, increasingly aligned
itself with Western political powers and lost contact with other Christian
forms of different cultural contexts.
Hand in hand with the Europeanization of the Church, the Church
achieved a more hierarchical form which provided little space for a genuine
diversity of local churches, became more a church of laws, and its
relationship to the world was determined by the emergence of Christendom
in which a symbiotic relationship between church and empire was forged.
From the 16th to 19th centuries (Age of Discovery) the catholicity of the
Church got reduced as evidenced by the following:
a. Missionary work rode the wave of European colonialism.
b. Missionary work in the Americas were shaped by the patronatus
system, which led to the church’s complicity in many abuses and
enslavements of indigenous peoples
c. Asia: church’s missionary endeavors were not so directly tied to
military conquest, but nevertheless depended on the colonial
impulse.

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 d. Missionary work was primarily concerned with the quantitative
expansion of the church by way of the plantatio ecclesiae.
e. Operative conquest paradigm which disparaged local cultures and
sought to purge indigenous peoples of their cultural heritage as a
precondition to receiving the gospel.
Nonetheless there were voices that challenged the dominant
Conquest paradigm like Bartolome de Las Cases in Mexico, Matteo Ricci in
China, Roberto de Nobili in India, and Alexandre de Rhodes in Vietnam. A
document from Vatican in 1659 also challenged the prevailing paradigm of
conquest. Written by the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, it was
addressed to two bishops in Vietnam and gave directives on dealing with
indigenous customs. What did the document basically say?
Still those who advocated greater cultural sensitivity in mission practice had
a narrow view of the relationship between cultures and the Christian
message:
a. They presumed an artificial distinction between the cultural and
religious practices of the indigenous peoples, affirming the former
while condemning the latter.
b. There was little sense that these cultures were themselves
mediations of God’s grace.

Christendom did not last as it got battered by the forces of Reformation,

Enlightenment, Modern Science, Nationalism, and Reason. Instead of
entering into a dialogue with these forces, the Catholic Church adopted a
defensive siege mentality approach which later would be strengthened by
the French revolution. Following the Age of Reason and the Age of
Revolution which both threatened the institutional church’s interests,
ecclesial paternalism predominated in Catholicism’s engagement with the
larger society. For taking on a defensive stance the Church lost the following:
a. Capacity to learn from the world
b. Sense of the Church’ catholicity as an embrace of peoples’ and
cultural diversity
c. Capacity for a respectful dialogue within and outside of the church
The Holy Spirit blows where it wills, when it wills.

• Today’s Magisterial Church on Catholicity, Inclusivity, and Dialogue

The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church became the
Spirit’s medium for the recovery of the Church’s biblically based catholicity. It
recognizes the theological significance of diverse human cultures, meaning
to say, that the Spirit of God has been and continues to operate in these

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cultures. On virtually every page of the Vatican II documents is the notion of
dialogue. The dialogical vision of the church is biblically and theologically
founded on the Trinitarian shape of both creation (there’s so much diversity
in it) and divine revelation (God reveals himself to other cultures). The
church is conceived out of the divine dialogue effected at every step by the
missions of Word and Spirit. Again Vatican II expressed the church’s
catholicity in terms of unity-in-diversity. The net of catholicity was extended
to the following groups: all Christian peoples, Jews, Muslims, practitioners of
other great religious traditions, spiritual seekers, and men and women of
goodwill. Part of the church’s task is to transform the world without negating
the positive features of contemporary society. The missiological orientation
of the church toward the world is expressed in the council’s document Ad
Gentes 2: “The church on earth by its very nature missionary since, according
to the plan of the Father, it has its origin in the mission of the Son and the
holy Spirit.” This means that just as God’s being is fundamentally oriented
toward the world that God created, so too the church exists in mission as a
sacramental sign of salvation to the world. The council’s offered new insight
into the church’s catholicity suggests that some of the church’s experience of
ecclesial diversity may come by way of its engagement with the world, and
this engagement, in turn, depended on the church’s capacity for authentic
dialogue. How does Vatican II now see the relationship between the saving
gospel and human culture? Answer: the saving gospel, the foundation of
Christian unity, must find expression in and through human culture.
The enduring legacy of Vatican II is its unswerving commitment to
dialogue among the human family (Gerard Mannion). God must become
Asian or African, black or brown, poor or sophisticated…(Stephen Bevans)

• The Asian Church as a Laboratory for the Becoming of a Dialogical

Church

1. Dialogue is not one event to be placed alongside the work of

evangelization. Both are properly pursued.
2. Three-fold dialogue: with the poor, with the religious traditions of the
region, with local cultures
3. Foundation of FABC’s theology of dialogue: the Spirit is actively at
work beyond the boundaries of the church
4. Dialogue of life, more than formal dialogues with religious leaders >
dialogue of action, a willingness to work together for justice based on
common values but accompanied by theological reflection (praxis) >
dialogue of discourse, formal conversations between religious leaders

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 and theologians > dialogue of spirituality, sharing of religious
experience
5. The mission of the church is not oriented in the first instance to the
salvation of souls but rather to the furthering of God’s reign.
6. Authentic dialogue include a moment when the Christian conversation
partner is free to share his or her most profound convictions regarding
the gracious love of God that has come to our world in Jesus Christ by
the power of the Holy Spirit.

• Plenary Council of the Philippines on Dialogue

- Between clergy and laity (Art 43): “Dialogue – one that is open to the
promptings of the Holy Spirit – should be encouraged between clergy
and laity.”
- Between religious and pastoral program planners (Art 62 #1):
“Mechanism on the national and the diocesan level should be set up to
promote regular dialogue between religious and planners of pastoral
programs in order to promote more fruitful collaboration.”
- To solve conflicts (Art 15): “Catholic moral formation must be
considered as an essential component of Catholic formation with
emphasis given to the values of justice and charity, love of preference
of the poor, and dialogue as a way of resolving conflicts.”
- Inter-religious dialogue (nos. 110-115)
+ Reality of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian elements among the
Chinese and the presence of Muslims > necessity of interreligious
dialogue as an imperative of mission
+ Appreciate inter-religious dialogue as a way of seeing in our brothers
and sisters a “ray of that truth which enlightens all men.”
+ Dialogue task requiring two movements:
1st – deeper knowledge and appreciation of our faith
2nd – openness in understanding the religious convictions of others
+ Model: Muslims and Christians in Mindanao living and working
together (dialogue of life) > building of a just society (common cause)
“We in the Church must be the first to start in undoing past effects
of our mutual grievances” (n. 115)
- Spirit of dialogue and obedience: clergy (n. 544)

D. DIALOGUING ENTAILS BECOMING A PROPHET

(to be presented during the synchronous)

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