I. The Challenge of Adult Education in the Local Church

John O'Malley has noted that Vatican II brought what he calls “the long nineteenth century” to a close.Footnote ³ An incident from that century will illustrate this change. During a conversation in which his bishop, W. B. Ullathorne, tried to convince John Henry Newman to give up editorship of The Rambler, a lay journal that irritated the English bishops, “[Bishop Ullathorne] said something like, ‘Who are the laity?’ [Newman] answered that the church would look foolish without them.”Footnote ⁴ Newman's response to his bishop was clever and revealing: the church wouldn't look foolish; it wouldn't even exist without the laity. The elite contributors to The Rambler were a very small percentage of the Catholics in mid-nineteenth-century England. Today in the United States, although the situation is greatly changed, there is still much work left to be done if the laity are to function in the apostolate proper to them.Footnote ⁵ When Newman joined the Catholic Church he recognized that the church's urgent need (and his potential contribution) was education.

Theological education is an ongoing need in every generation, and the theology that mediates the gospel to the future includes doctrines, an interpretation of their meaning, and multiple ways of communicating that meaning to various contexts and communities. Theological education for both laity and clergy must include clearly articulated doctrines, but doctrines are affirmations that generate questions for understanding what those doctrines express. The effective communication of the gospel must be grounded in a critical systematic theology because “to communicate one must understand what one has to communicate. No repetition of formulas can take the place of understanding. For it is understanding alone that can say what it grasps in any of the manners demanded by the almost endless series of different audiences.”Footnote ⁶ Given the increasingly diverse cultural situations of the United States, multiple styles, genres, and techniques must be employed when communicating the commonly held meaning of the one gospel.

The bishops at Vatican II noted that laypeople “earnestly cooperate [with their pastors] in presenting the word of God especially by means of catechetical instruction.” The participation of the laity “is so necessary within the Church communities that without it the apostolate of the pastors is often unable to achieve its full effectiveness” (AA §10). And with the decline in the percentage of priests and religious serving the church, this is even truer today than it was in the 1960s. While the special area of competence for the laity is the temporal order and the transformation of the world by the announcement of the gospel through their activity in the world, they are also able to assist in the catechetical instruction of their local churches. The conclusion must be that authentic Christian instruction is directed toward a presentation of the gospel that seeks the transformation of the world. That task requires a deeper understanding of doctrine, one that goes beyond the repetition of formulas or concepts that fail to communicate, a catechetical task that integrates insights into local culture as well as the demands made by the gospel to shape human history in its many and diverse contexts.Footnote ⁷

One of the obstacles to be overcome in the education of lay pastoral ministers is what we might call geographic discrimination. The number of motivated and capable people who want to be educated theologically in order to serve in one of many diverse ministries in the church is much greater than the number who can afford to spend a year or two at a university with a graduate program in theology. Our colleges and universities are experiencing some degree of identity crisis today, and one dimension of that crisis has to do with the distorted economy, which has expanded the gap between the rich and the poor. As Fred Lawrence has recently remarked,

The “ever steeper tuitions” combined with restrictions due to personal situations often exclude many potential catechists from making their contribution to handing on the faith, while at the same time exacerbating the customer mentality among parents and their children applying to colleges.

Such a mentality on the part of parents doesn't exactly encourage maturity in the eighteen-year-olds who sit in our classrooms. Yet colleges and universities that are struggling to make financial ends meet will be tempted to cater to this mentality in order to avoid losing the tuition dollars of those who can afford to pay them. Meanwhile, many potential students who are older, more mature, and more motivated are excluded from such institutions because of financial, geographical, or other constraints. Given this inequality in educational opportunities, what will be the means of training adequate numbers of future religious educators for our local churches? The colleges and universities must continue to be involved via the new digital forms.

The need for better education for lay leaders in our local churches is urgent. My own anecdotal experience on the local level reflects the good news and bad news articulated by Peter Steinfels. It is very encouraging that there are many religiously mature adults, scattered in various locations and situations, who want to serve the church and who seek education to do so. There are also, of course, many valuable efforts to educate local congregations in the traditions of the church.Footnote ⁹ The bad news, however, is that quality theological training and resources are often inaccessible to those who are willing and able to make their contribution to the maintenance and enhancement of the faith. Where are catechists going to receive adequate education so that they might serve the local church? Occasional enrichment efforts, as important as they are, do not suffice. My online graduate students are often women and men in their middle years, training to be religious educators in parishes, grade schools, and high schools, youth ministers, spiritual directors, or chaplains in hospitals and other medical facilities. There are deacons seeking more theological education, as well as professional people such as physicians and nurses working in low-income areas who recognize frequent opportunities to minister to the spiritual needs of their patients but want some training to be able to serve adequately in this way.Footnote ¹⁰ Sometimes even priests enter the program for updating and theological growth. Some want to explore the Catholic tradition because they are discerning a vocation in a religious order. And of course there are those who simply desire to live their faith more intelligently and responsibly. It is especially important to meet these desires today, in a world of growing pluralism in which questions about the cultural practices and formulas of Catholic faith are being raised from many quarters. There is a need to support and encourage the widespread desire to make some contribution to the church by helping to pass on the faith in ways beyond informal practice and example. In sum, local churches need more opportunities for affordable and accessible theological education.

If the desire for theological education is strong among significant numbers in our local congregations, the opportunities for satisfying it, even if one is near a Catholic college or university, are limited. All dioceses and most parishes provide some continuing religious education, but the extent and quality vary. I doubt that I am speaking solely for myself if I suggest that theologians, whose job it is to search for and communicate the intelligibility of the faith within particular cultural contexts, find the lack of intelligibility in many local church resources and other modes of communication quite distressing. Allow me to cite an anecdote that I fear is emblematic of the educational problems at the local level.Footnote ¹¹

It is safe to suppose that the number of Catholics who read Commonweal or America is much smaller than the number who read their diocesan newspapers. Because of their wide circulation and funding, diocesan papers have the potential to serve as important vehicles for education. However, the quality of the local paper, in spite of the fact that it is the bishop's organ of communication and a prime opportunity for education, can be distressingly low. For example, a theological blog by Fr. Dwight Longenecker that some diocesan newspapers reproduce published an essay on the meaning of “real presence” in eucharistic theology. The author, a former Episcopalian, claimed that the phrase “real presence” is not a Catholic but an Anglican term that is too vague to do justice to the doctrine; he goes on to insist that the Catholic term—transubstantiation—indicates not a “vague spiritual presence” but a “corporeal” presence.Footnote ¹² Fr. Longenecker's interpretation of transubstantiation amounts to an insistence that orthodox sacramental theology must be naïvely realistic, imagining that the real is limited to bodies. Such a position creates needless confusion not only for Catholics who ask theological questions but also for ecumenical dialogue. People deserve more intellectually and spiritually nourishing fare from the local bishop's newspaper. (I will return to this example in the next section.)

Theologians must deal constructively with the digital revolution, and Fr. Longenecker's blog is an instance of the perennial theological task of distinguishing faith from ideology, of which the World Wide Web overflows. Pope Francis commented in an interview conducted by Antonio Spadaro that

As I will argue below, only a carefully considered theological method can begin to address the problem that the pope identifies.

II. The Need for Widespread Collaboration

Before I make practical suggestions for the teacher of online courses, I need to emphasize the most practical need of all: collaboration. The religious educator with a historically conscious theological education can do little without the cooperation of the local church, which in turn depends on the intelligent leadership of the bishop, the pastor, and others. The scope of significant positive educational change on the local level requires the willingness of bishops, pastors, and communities. That willingness in turn must be based on the needs of the local churches for communicating the gospel. The collaboration must be massive: seminary curricula must take seriously the need to shift from a classicist mentality to a historically conscious one, so that pastors will acknowledge the need to communicate the gospel with the particularity of their churches in mind, recognizing that the form of the required communication will vary according to the cultures and needs of the congregation.

Collaboration requires education. Teachers know that they must understand two basic things: the content they wish to communicate, and the audience to whom it is to be delivered. So too, the local church must be understood by those tasked with its ongoing education. It would be a great mistake to imagine the local churches as simply a branch of an abstract ideal community, much less as a branch of a multinational concern whose sole interest is to reflect the idealized model on which it is based.Footnote ¹⁴ The classicist assumption that controlled ecclesiology for centuries is giving way to the sociologically informed view that the church must constitute itself in concrete local communities in order to be catholic, a mark of the church that should not be thought of as in conflict with its unity as a communion of particular communities.Footnote ¹⁵ A historically conscious theology will recognize that the local church, a concrete and not an abstract reality, needs to be understood with the aid of the human sciences if it is to be grasped in its concreteness. The recognition that the church is a human, and therefore social, reality takes nothing away from its status as a divine mystery or as the Body of Christ. In fact, without that recognition, the existential meaning of the gospel within the local church can lead to misunderstandings and a diminished sense of the church's role in God's redemptive process. Where classicist assumptions imagine the structures of the church as always the same, a historically conscious ecclesiology will understand the church as the communion of local churches, each of which is a concrete, socially constructed body of believers with the proper freedom to be the church at that time and in that location.Footnote ¹⁶

Unless religious educators acknowledge that the permanent gospel meanings to be communicated have been given diverse expressions as that meaning has been mediated historically, they will be unable to avoid the temptation to fall back on classicist assumptions that maintain clear definitions but lack the capacity to deliver the meaning. Meaning and its expression are not identical, as Pope John XXIII insisted in his opening address of the Second Vatican Council.Footnote ¹⁷ This distinction is not simply a matter of communicating more clearly; it is also a matter of not misunderstanding the doctrine itself. It is one thing, for example, to insist that Jesus was a divine “person,” and another to explain how this affirmation and the ancient meaning of “person” that operates in the definition do not in any way compromise his humanity. If we do not teach Christology from a historically conscious perspective, we will be faced with two unacceptable choices: either to deny the claim that Jesus was a divine “person” in order to defend Jesus' humanity or to affirm the orthodox definition at the cost of encouraging what Karl Rahner called crypto-monophysitism, a view that compromises his full humanity.Footnote ¹⁸ Learning to differentiate understanding from concept and expression is more important in today's pluralist cultures than ever before.

Collaboration, therefore, is essential, but not easy or quick. Institutions such as the church “constitute the commonly understood and already accepted basis and mode of cooperation. [Because of this they] tend to change only slowly for change, as distinct from breakdown, involves a new common understanding and a new common consent.”Footnote ¹⁹ The widespread expansion of horizons among members of local churches is a very large and long-range project, but individuals working together for the common good will be the basis of any progress in cooperation that might occur.

III. Practical Suggestions

Online teaching has developed its own professional societies and standards. These organizations can be of value in helping the theologian assemble the elements of an online course. For example, students need to feel comfortable with the course package; they need to be able to maneuver through the digital platform without puzzling over the next step. They also need to have clear instructions regarding the assignments and the instructor's expectations. Essay questions need to be coordinated with course objectives, and access to online materials outside the platform should be easy. Finally, students must have easy access to the instructor via e-mail, telephone, or videoconferencing. I have found that it is important to be generous with one's time communicating individually with students, not only in order to reassure students when uncertainties or difficulties arise, but more importantly to encourage the kind of theological questioning that is required in any serious theological education.

In the professional literature that discusses online teaching there is much talk of the value of student interaction with the instructor and with other students. Quality Matters is a professional organization that sets standards for online education.Footnote ²⁰ No doubt there is much practical advice to be gathered from such organizations as Quality Matters, but it is important to keep an eye on the more basic principles of learning, such as the fundamental fact that understanding is not an automatic product of techniques. Fortunately, theologians are usually alert to fault lines in cognitional and epistemological assumptions. One of the recent webinars sponsored by Quality Matters promoted “interaction” at the service of “active learning.”Footnote ²¹ But is it true that “interaction” promotes “active learning”? If engineered engagements and interactions with instructors and fellow students are not the most efficient strategies for learning, what is? Moreover, it is unclear what differentiates “active learning” from “learning.” The psychological fact seems to be that insight often occurs when one is not attempting, actively or interactively, to achieve it.Footnote ²²

Researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have argued that the oft-recommended “social experiences” such as student “interactions”

In summarizing the results of his research, Alexander Astin comes to a similar conclusion:

In an online course, the usual campus distractions as well as the financial investment to maintain them are happily absent, so that the student can be focused on reading and writing, the very activities that have the most positive impact on cognitive gain.

There are additional reasons to place more value on reading and writing than on student-to-student interactions. Brent Hege notes his online students' negative response to required interactions with other students:

In spite of this negative reaction, Hege thinks that “one key to a successful online course is the creation of a safe and vibrant virtual community and sustained, lively engagement with that community of learners.”Footnote ²⁶ There are two issues here. If student objections are emerging from a desire to avoid work, then Hege is certainly right to ignore them. On the other hand, if some students fear this sort of course requirement in which their opinions must be exposed to other students in the course, especially when English is a second language or when a student senses that she or he is not as well prepared as others, then reading, writing, and private dialogue with and direction from the instructor are more efficient ways of engaging the intelligence of students.

Seven years of online teaching have convinced me that reading and writing are the most efficient tools for learning, as in traditional classrooms. My first practical suggestion, therefore, is for the online course to provide a heavy dose of reading and writing. Students in an online course can, of course, learn from one another, but most students in an asynchronous course are not temporally together (they are not taking the course at the same time) and are often located in very diverse communities and bring differing educational backgrounds. Thus, my second practical suggestion for online teachers of theology is, in the spirit of collaboration, to encourage students who intend to serve as pastoral ministers to set up blogs or chat rooms in which those ministers with similar communities and experiences can share techniques, bibliographies, and other suggestions. The university and its theology instructors can perhaps even facilitate this structure for the benefit of its students and graduates, but this would be optional and independent of any course or degree requirement. Students' time in courses should be used mostly for reading and writing; their continuing education after the degree will require dialogue with peers.

Students who are expecting to work with their local churches need to be committed to listening to their local communities. Dialogue with those whom the pastoral minister or religious educator serves is an essential element of the continuing education of that minister, and dialogue should continue after the course and the degree have been completed. Again, this is not something that should be part of the instructor's evaluation in the course. Collaboration entails a division of labor, and the instructor's role is best served when she or he provides students with materials for a rigorous intellectual experience. My third practical suggestion is thus to encourage students who are intending to serve in local churches to become involved with base communities where they exist. Such encouragement should emerge naturally in the historically conscious horizon built into the course. The redemptive process that is the church is the ultimate goal of religious education. Communities who live the gospel have the power to heal the wounds of sin and to create new structures of cooperation that will decrease the chances of repeated error. Education itself is a very basic structural element in this regard; healing and creating require converted intelligence and not simply piety and goodwill.Footnote ²⁷ The theological method that structures the courses should also open the student to cooperation with other professionals and organizers in the community: psychologists, economists, labor leaders, and others.

Finally, I would suggest that the instructor assemble a course package that has as its most important component clearly written notes to guide students in their reading and writing. In a traditional classroom, we can to some degree rely on nonverbal indicators of meaning. And so lectures can be very effective in person when the instructor is relying on notes that only he or she can interpret. The “incarnate meaning” that is delivered through gesture, pace, tone of voice, and other nonverbal clues is missing in an online course. This limitation can to some degree be ameliorated by audio or video recordings of the lecture notes. Still, the teacher's written lectures must be very clear and include plenty of examples. For that reason online teaching is more akin to writing a short book than to lecturing in a classroom.

IV. Theological Method and the Virtual Classroom

We live in rapidly changing situations, with culture wars and competing visions of what theology should be doing. Sensitive to the speed of the changing intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman cautioned that “to unsettle the minds of a generation, when you give them no landmarks and no causeway across the morass, is to undertake a great responsibility.”Footnote ²⁸ In any course, traditional or online, a securely grounded method needs to do two things: confidently supply what Newman calls the “causeway” in the empirically verifiable “turn to the subject,” and at the same time identify the doctrinal and theological “landmarks” of the great tradition.

Everyone in the church has a contribution to make; as Vatican II's Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church (Ad Gentes) puts it, the church “is not yet fully alive…unless there is a laity worthy of the name working along with the hierarchy” (AG §21).Footnote ²⁹ There will always be members of local churches whose talents and motivation are recognized by the local community as capable of mediating the gospel in the community's particular condition and context. Given the plural cultures in which the Christian faith is embodied, the academy trains ministers who need an understanding of the local situation if they are to mediate the gospel without reducing it to forms of expression that do not communicate its meaning. The two populations—academic theologians with methodological training, and local ministers with significant firsthand experience of the cultures beyond that of academia— can always benefit from coordinating their efforts.

As an example of the changing local reality of the church we might mention the way that the members of Hispanic background are rapidly transforming American Catholicism. Many work as religious educators and as pastoral leaders in Latino communities. Timothy Matovina has noted Avery Dulles' “frank assessment [that] identifies the single most important issue that undergirds the contours of Hispanic impact within the US context: Latinos' critical engagement as Catholics of the wider societal and cultural milieu.” Dulles predicted either a Latino enrichment of American Catholicism through the injection of Latino spirituality and practice into middle-class American Catholicism, or a forgetfulness of their spiritual roots and the adoption of what Dulles calls “the prevailing American values of individualism, professionalism, and worldly success.” Dulles' evaluation presents, in Matovina's view, “starkly dichotomous alternatives.”Footnote ³⁰ While maintenance of the cultural heritage of Latino Catholicism is important, Matovina correctly points out that “in the extreme a countercultural stance is naïve.” Necessity demands “faith formation that enables Catholics to engage the surrounding culture with critical discernment.”Footnote ³¹ Students who come to attain a graduate-level theological education, especially those with minimal theological background, bring with them a symbolic narrative of their faith. The methodological approach to theology can inculcate an ability to distinguish between the images of that narrative and the permanent meanings that those images and symbols carry. Students need to locate the permanent meanings in the tradition and the diverse ways in which those meanings are carried. The goal is not to disabuse ordinary people of their lived religion but rather to help them to understand their own beliefs and practices. Such critical engagement is never a simple matter of embracing or resisting a culture; the task is always, in St. Paul's words, to test everything and keep what is good (1 Thess 5:21).

In other words, local church leaders need a methodologically grounded theological education if that critical discernment is to happen; that is the academic contribution. During a period of confusion and controversy, it is not surprising that lay ministers may be tempted to retreat to the mere repetition of symbolic narratives or abstract formulas thought to be orthodox. If that happens, they will likely be settling for a version of the faith that is in fact not adequate to the needs of the local church, especially if it does not meet the questions of the day or provide a future-oriented and creative way of extending the redemptive process. Fred Crowe has succinctly identified the problem:

When the “heavy tariff” of historical work is not paid, there is the potential for producing what the pope has called “doctrinal ‘security’” at the expense of a contemporary understanding that opens us to God in the present, in our particular time and place. Of course, the rejection of doctrinal security is not the same as the rejection of orthodox doctrine; the permanent meaning expressed in the older formulations must be transposed so that the meaning can be grasped and lived in ever-new situations.Footnote ³³ If either task is eschewed—determining the meaning or transposing it—the community of faith begins to lose its hold on constitutive meanings and values. Ideology then presents itself as a tempting substitute for authentic doctrine.

Does the Catechism of the Catholic Church help to educate local ministers? Online and searchable, it contains valuable resources and has aided the education of many Catholics who seek out an authoritative reference tool.Footnote ³⁴ As a reference text the Catechism has no doubt helped many to clarify what the church's basic doctrines are, but it is in one significant methodological way limited. Because of its lack of attention to recent biblical studies and the explicit historical consciousness required of its methods, it does little to aid one's skill in reading Scripture.

Fifty years ago Gerard Sloyan, arguing against a new national catechism to replace the Baltimore Catechism, identified the “great challenge” of catechesis:

In 1966 we hadn't a moment to lose, yet twenty-six years later, Fr. Sloyan found it necessary to point out that the 1992 Catechism shows no evidence that its authors have taken Dei Verbum seriously.Footnote ³⁶ The church since the council has certainly made some progress in meeting the catechetical challenges of the day, but not nearly enough. Has it given up on meeting the challenge in favor of what many will imagine to be safe theological opinions, but which are, in fact, only temporarily safe because they are products of a failure “to see that the solid progress of our biblical and systematic theologians…makes its way…into the area of religious education”? My experience is that the failure of the CCC to integrate and model the insights of Dei Verbum is emblematic of the state of theological formation in many local communities.Footnote ³⁷

The lack that Fr. Sloyan identifies goes beyond biblical exegesis to the general crisis in theological method. For example, the Catechism's positive comments regarding popular piety provide an invitation to explore the anthropological (and thus methodological) foundations of the meanings carried by popular devotional practices. That exploration is required because the Catechism, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, “cannot express the differing types of anthropologies that, especially in various systems of meaning, characterize today's world in various geographical places and socio-cultural contexts.”Footnote ³⁸ The local inculturation of the content of the Catechism requires a theological education that is historically conscious. Without methodologically trained religious educators, the Catechism will sometimes be misunderstood or abused.

The call for attention to method does not, of course, obviate the essential task of the theologian and catechist to recover and pass on the tradition. I agree with Peter Steinfels that

Still, even the ability to pass on the tradition depends on understanding what was going forward in any given epoch or event, and that requires an adequate method. In the Duomo of the Sicilian city of Enna there is a painting that has acquired the name “Christ of the Three Faces” because the face seems to change depending on the perspective of one's gaze. There is only one Christ, but because the gospel message is to be embodied in any and all cultures, there is a necessary pluralism in its expression.Footnote ⁴⁰ Every culture has its common sense, a set of meanings and values that are commonly shared by the members of that culture. Common sense is as diverse as are the many cultures in which the faith is embodied, so communication of the gospel must take cultural difference into account. Yet if the gospel is to remain itself, the underlying concern of every instance of its communication must be meaning. Theologians and pastoral workers need to understand the meaning that they are trying to communicate; they must also understand that there is a distinction to be made between meaning and its expression. The gospel is one, but as catholic, it will be mediated in diverse cultures requiring diverse expressions, just as the Catholic Church comes into being “in and from” the local churches (LG §23). If God's revealed Word is mediated in and through the particulars of concrete life, it is no luxury for religious educators to grasp the fact that cultures are many, and that the Christian faith can be embodied in any culture.Footnote ⁴¹ When a religious educator attempts to impose one culture along with the gospel, as if the gospel is itself a nonnegotiable culture, then the local church is in danger of ideological distortion.

Inculturation (or cultural adaptation) and the historical consciousness that it presupposes have to do with the relativity of context and expression and not with epistemological relativism. Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, has acknowledged that a new age is dawning, one that “is passing from a more static notion of the order of things to a more dynamic and evolutionary notion” (§5). In that context, Pope John Paul II identified the need for a “dialogue of cultures.”Footnote ⁴² Karl Jaspers spoke of the gradual realization over the past two centuries that “the history of scores of centuries is drawing to a close.”Footnote ⁴³ Given the need to acknowledge this momentous shift, this new awareness of historicity and plurality, the practical question is how the Church will realize itself on the local level. The question must be asked and answered in a variety of ways, according to local needs. The new awareness places new demands on pastoral leaders and educators to understand the cultures in which they and the members of their community find themselves. But whatever be the local culture(s), there must also be dialogue with the foundational sources of the faith in order to embody in new ways the permanent meaning of the gospel. Tradition, after all, is not merely a going back; it is also a bringing forward in a new way.

The tools that the new cultural awareness provides can aid in the retrieval of the message. For example, dialogue with the Catholic theological tradition within contemporary American culture requires that the symbolic narratives of the Bible be understood according to the genres in which they have been produced. And here is where, as we have seen, there are deficient resources in the Catechism. As Sloyan summarizes, it “takes for granted, without spelling it out, that all its readers will be aware of the symbolic or figurative nature of much that is written there,” in the Bible.Footnote ⁴⁴ “Spelling it out” is precisely what is needed in religious education today in order to meet the requirement. We do ordinary people a disservice and underestimate their faith as well as their intelligence if we fail to give them an alternative to biblical literalism. The Catechism alone cannot give readers the modern resources for communicating the Bible and the traditions of the Catholic faith within the church's many and diverse contexts. Because the Catechism does not exemplify Dei Verbum's direction in biblical study, the catechetical presentation of its contents must pick up the slack. Without a serious effort to negotiate the biblical genres and how they are to be understood, the reading of Scripture and the interpretation of the Catholic faith in the contemporary Western context will indeed produce confusion.Footnote ⁴⁵

But the needs of the local catechist go deeper than biblical hermeneutics. The historical-literary methods of biblical studies assume a particular differentiation of consciousness within the interpreter, one that distinguishes between substance and expression. The educator must be able to differentiate forms of consciousness and thus the different forms of literature that are produced by them, and this is true not merely for Scripture but for the wide variety of religious expressions that constitutes the tradition. By way of illustration here, recall the theology blog republished by the diocesan newspaper. The author's insistence on the “corporeal presence” of Christ in the Eucharist assumes that the Body of Christ must mean that the substance is a physical or material body; it is an example of what results when one's theological education lacks any “differentiation of consciousness.” The different patterns of human experience produce different kinds of cultural expressions. A differentiated consciousness does not assume that concepts always mean the same thing no matter the context, nor does it conflate everyday forms of communication with the technical categories of theoretical discourses such as the natural sciences employ.

In sacramental theology, the signs are “corporeal” or “physical,” and these signs make the noncorporeal reality present. The signs represent—make present again—the reality of Christ's sacrifice, God's love, which is a spiritual reality, made manifest first on the cross and then, in a sacramental way, by way of the signs of bread and wine. If the real is not necessarily corporeal or physical, neither is it the case that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation requires a belief in the “corporeal” presence of Christ in the Eucharist if corporeal means physical or material sense data.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is obvious that what our senses encounter are the appearances of bread and wine. That “corporeal” presence (pace Fr. Longenecker) is the sense data and not the substance or reality of the sacrament. The key is that Christ's sacrifice is spiritual and so is represented—really presented again—under sacramental signs. For undifferentiated common sense, the notion that seems most orthodox is sometimes, in fact, merely naïve.

If it is to reach those for whom naïveté is an intellectual impediment, the church of the future needs to provide a more methodologically sophisticated theology through its local educators and organs of communication. One factor that causes difficulty is the modern distrust of religious symbolism. Teachers of theology and religious studies know that when our students, religious or not, hear that something is “a symbol,” they spontaneously tend to add an adjective such as “only” or “merely” or “just.” In the early and medieval church, there was no such distrust. For the early Christians it was taken for granted that what is interior (the spiritual) can find expression in what is exterior (the symbolic). They knew no false separation between symbol and reality, sign and truth. The mystery, in other words, was understood to be made present through the image.Footnote ⁴⁷ The modern suspicion of symbolism as well as its naïve interpretation makes religious communication more difficult, hence the importance of insuring that an adequate understanding of symbolism is at the center of religious education.

Symbolic expression is a permanent feature of religion; faith cannot do without this realm of meaning. Imagine the impossibility—or at least the undesirability—of a liturgy in abstract theological language with no biblical imagery, no ritualized gestures, no feeling-laden hymns, no stories, no symbols. For the vast majority of worshipers it would utterly fail to communicate the transforming message of the gospel. Still, if Christian life cannot do without its root images and stories, it is equally true that it cannot do without reflection on and control of those images, and that reflection requires some degree of differentiation of consciousness.

How might that methodical reflection be promoted in the training of our religious educators? The Internet is a largely visual medium for a visually oriented age. There are many techniques for manipulating still images and videos that can be educationally useful. Teachers are able to draw upon visual, musical, and literary arts, as well as the metrics that the social sciences display in charts and graphs. These easily accessible tools can, in given circumstances and used intelligently, serve the goal of promoting understanding. Moreover, as reflection on a sacramental faith, Catholic theology can never ignore or try to eliminate imagery. Still, looking at data in the form of anything visual, even words, is only the first element in assembling one's knowledge. Teacher and student must always ask whether the material or technique used in a course is serving the goal of understanding, and therein lays a danger on the technical side of online teaching.

Although the hegemony of undifferentiated common sense is certainly not new, there is a somewhat new but ambiguous situation that has been created by the advances in electronic technology. Anyone can post a blog and claim theological attention or even doctrinal authority by selectively quoting readily available (online) magisterial statements or interpretations of them, and then use them to legitimize the author's misleading or erroneous perspective. As unsuspecting users search the Internet for information in the midst of the Catholic culture wars, many unreliable blogs and websites readily present themselves. The problem is not with those Internet users who in practice take Fox News to be a higher authority than the good news; I am referring to people with every positive intention who want to improve their understanding of the faith and make their contribution to the church and society. There are, of course, excellent websites and blogs that offer tremendous advantages for theological education that were unavailable just a decade ago. But without adequate intellectual formation, how does one test everything and keep what is good?

My point is that someone with a commonsense grasp of the gospel may not lay down the law for those who have made the sorts of distinctions that I am pointing out here, by way of a differentiated consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁸ When an official diocesan organ of communication gives the impression that only a naïve, classicist understanding of the faith is authentic, then the gospel is not effectively being communicated to all, nor is it providing for its future transmission, especially if naïveté is falsely elevated to the status of orthodoxy. Catechesis would be quite lacking in catholicity if its practitioners were to imagine that the faith can live only in cultures that resist or retreat from historical consciousness, developments in natural science, and other significant cultural trends.Footnote ⁴⁹ Moreover, there is the question of the long haul. What sorts of Christian cultures are we constructing for the future? After the biases resident in modernity and postmodernity are identified and vigorously criticized, will the intellectuals be able to find an inviting place in the community of faith? Or will the popular presentation of the faith appear to exclude not only their curiosity but also the resulting intellectual development that provides them with the distinction between the realms of commonsense meaning and scientific meaning?Footnote ⁵⁰

Method as I understand it requires self-understanding, which provides a basic grasp of the structure of knowing inherent in any listener. Teachers need to know their subject matter, of course, but they also need to find out what is happening in the learner as the process of learning goes forward, and that discovery is possible only with the teacher's self-understanding. Attention to subjectivity is a necessary complement to an adequate understanding of community. Given the plural cultures and subcultures and therefore the multiple ways one can misunderstand Christianity today, there is a great need for local catechists to be educated in theological method, one that encourages an understanding of what one is doing when one is communicating the faith. In order to express the faith, the educator must know how to continue to learn new insights from the traditional sources, how to make sense of the changing circumstances and fresh challenges in their particular ministries, and how to communicate with people who are living primarily within a very practical pattern of experience. If it is difficult and therefore rare for most believers to move in the direction of a differentiated consciousness, local religious educators can still make some progress if method has been a prominent part of their theological training. Most people know the difference between warmth and temperature measured by a thermometer; they can distinguish between the enjoyment of birds in the backyard and ornithology; they know how to drive a car without understanding the internal combustion engine. People of faith know that their experience of God's grace in their lives can be articulated in a variety of poetic, narrative, or gestured ways. Religious educators should be able to exploit simple examples of the difference between symbol and theory to help the members of a community to think about their faith in a more integrated way.Footnote ⁵¹

The catechetical process is not, however, a one-way street. Educators are also being educated by those whom they encounter. It should be clear that I am not suggesting there is anything defective in the faith of an undifferentiated consciousness. The message of Christianity is massively communicated in every generation by the commonsense faith of millions of people in thousands of communities; they largely constitute the sensus fidelium of the church. Often this sense of the faithful of what constitutes the essence of the gospel is not respected as a source of theological reflection. Worse still, sometimes it is dismissed as inhibiting authentic faith. In fact, there is something like a “theoretical bias” that gives too little credit to commonsense faith, failing to recognize the multiple ways and diverse Christian experiences that deliver the gospel to others and to the next generation.Footnote ⁵² Certainly, the social processes that pass on the tradition will always be in need of intellectual reflection and control, but without that process those processes there would be nothing about which to theologize. The recent statement of the International Theological Commission, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church” expresses it this way: “By placing itself in the school of the sensus fidelium, theology [and all religious communication] steeps itself in the reality of the apostolic Tradition which underlies and overflows the strict bounds of the statements in which the teaching of the Church is formulated, because it comprises ‘all that she herself is, all that she believes.’”Footnote ⁵³ The educator's life and openness to learning with the learning church is an essential dimension of what Cardinal Suenens, one of the leading figures at Vatican II, has called the coresponsibility of all members of the church.Footnote ⁵⁴

The faithful, however, live in and not above culture, and so theology must reckon with the socialization process of local communities. In a culture flooded with imagery, learning sometimes requires liberation from a fixation on images and concepts if they block understanding.Footnote ⁵⁵ A methodologically sophisticated online program in theology can educate local educators on how to discriminate among the various religious sites vying for their attention amid the flood of Internet images. It is here that theology teachers in the virtual classroom must be wary lest the tail not wag the dog. In their laudatory efforts to provide the teacher with the latest and most dazzling digital tools, the instructional technology department of one's institution can unintentionally promote the cultural hegemony of technique. For example, some instructional technologists discourage the use of words such as “understand” and “explain” in the course's stated objectives and assessments. They consider them to be abstract and ambiguous; instead, they tend to recommend words that incline toward the pictorial. Concepts, in their approach, need to be imaginable. But what is a concept? The fundamental and verifiable fact is that insight or understanding precedes concepts; we get the point before we can conceptualize or articulate it. When a discovery is made for the first time, a new concept must be invented and not merely selected from an already existing fund. Preexisting images and concepts can help to provoke the insights needed for getting the point, but they are not identical with understanding. If insight (understanding) does not precede concept, there can be no intellectual progress. Understanding happens first; one then develops concepts to express the understanding. Those new concepts will have borrowed in some ways from preceding ones but will not be identical to them.

Christological examples come to mind. The Hellenistic (largely Stoic) concept of the logos seemed to some early theologians, such as Justin Martyr, to be ready-made to express Christ's relation to God. But the subordination of the logos in that Stoic concept proved itself inadequate. Later, some theologians of the fourth century, wanting to be loyal to the biblical witness, opposed the use of homoousios because prior to Nicaea, the concept often expressed “the same material or physical stuff.” The defenders of Nicaea's formula, especially Athanasius, insisted that the word as used at the council did not connote material stuff but rather the logical claim that what God is, the Logos is. The “what,” however, is unimaginable—not the physical stuff that is the referent of the earlier concept.Footnote ⁵⁶ The same word points to a different meaning, and one can only know that if the insight precedes the concept.

My point is that when following the technical recommendations of instructional technologists, online teachers need to be on the lookout for any tendency to reduce explanations to pictures or descriptions. Inevitably the technology department will operate within a philosophy of education grounded in certain assumptions (acknowledged or not) about what happens when one is thinking and learning. (Sometimes the issue is even simpler: what the administration thinks is best for retention.) Students need clarity in the statement of objectives and assignments in order to understand what the teacher is requiring of them, but that need is not satisfied exclusively by the choice of words, images, or concepts. Fascination with the burgeoning panoply of audio and video tools, as enriching as they might be, can detract from learning if they are not used wisely. The teacher needs to be wary of ways that the technology and the growing industry of online instructional methods, unacknowledged and unintended by those assisting in the process of creating a virtual classroom, will obstruct the goals of the course.

Restriction of one's language to the words that are already familiar to students is neither helpful nor necessary, especially given the ease with which online students can access Internet dictionaries. No teacher wants students to experience an utterly discouraging aporia because of language, yet words that feel comfortable for the student because they are experiential or pictorial can discourage understanding. If the need, in a particular context, is to rise above the student's commonsense world, the introduction of technical words is simply necessary. As an example, we return to the early development of Christology. It is common for students to latch onto an image of Jesus as “partly human” and “partly divine,” and it is easy to correct this mistake on the level of language: replace “partly” with “fully.” But has the correction improved the student's understanding? What one hopes for is that such confusion engenders a question: “How can someone be both fully human and fully divine at the same time?” A student's intelligent query opens the way for a possible shift in thinking about how religious and theological language functions, and thus the possibility for some progress in their understanding of the terms “God” and “Christ.” Otherwise, any effort to imagine the hypostatic union will lead only to frustration, confusion, or mythology.