HOMILETICS

101
RATIO# 124 OBJECTIVE:

Adequate preparation for preaching is to be

given to seminarians through courses on
homiletics.

Focus is to be placed on biblical preaching that

nourishes the faith of the preacher and listeners.

Conscious use of the idiom of contemporary

Filipinos is to be aimed at in the practice of
preaching.
 Religion is the key of history. We cannot
understand the inner form of society unless
we understand its religion. We cannot
understand its cultural achievements unless
we understand the religious beliefs behind
them. In all ages, the first creative works of a
culture are due to religious inspiration and
dedicated to a religious end. The temples of
the gods are the most enduring works of man.
Religion stands at the threshold of all the
great literatures of the world. Philosophy is its
offspring and is a child
which constantly returns to its parent.

–Christopher Dawson
 Theology must constantly correlate the
response of faith with the human question,
which draws on experience. And this
correlation comes about if the human
question can be framed as a question about
the meaning of reality and existence, followed
by human responses which try to articulate a
meaning but which only from the Christian
response receive superabundance of
meaning , an ultimate and definitive meaning.
The Cristian response is, then, the definitive
response to the human question, which is
articulated in a radical question and partial
responses. ”
–Rosino Gibellini
SECULARIZATION DOES NOT INVALIDATE THEOLOGICAL
DISCUSSION IN THAT THE SELF UNDERSTANDING OF
SECULAR MEN AND WOMEN REMAINS OPEN TO THE
MYSTERY, AS CAN BE PROVED FROM THEIR RADICAL
TRUST IN REALITY, THEIR COMMITMENT TO OTHERS, AND
THEIR CONCERN TO DO GOOD AND FIGHT AGAINST EVIL.

-EDWARD
SCHILLEBEECKX.
 “It was necessary for the salvation of man that
certain truths which exceed human reason should
be made known to him by divine revelation.
Even as regards those truths about God which
human reason could have discovered, it was
necessary that man should be taught by a divine
revelation; because the truth about God such as
reason could discover, would only be known by a
few, and that after a long time, and with the
admixture of many errors.

–Thomas Aquinas
 “In the statement: we believe that the Bible is the Word of God,
we must first emphasize and consider the word “believe”.
Believing is not an obscure and indeterminate feeling. It is a
clear hearing, apperceiving, thinking and then speaking and
doing. Believing is also a free human act, which as such is
conditioned and determined by an encounter, a challenge, an act
of lordship which confronts man; which man cannot bring about
himself, which exists either as an event or not at all.

Therefore, believing is not something arbitrary. It does not control

its object. It is a recognizing, knowing, hearing, apperceiving,
thinking speaking and doing which is overmastered by its object.
Belief that the Bible is the Word of God presupposes, therefore
that this over-mastering has already taken place, that
the Bible has already proved itself to be the Word of God, so that
we can and must recognize it to be such. But when and where
there is this proof, it must be a matter of the Word of God itself.”

-KARL
BARTH
 “He is not worth calling a theologian who
seeks to interpret the invisible things of God
on the basis of the things that have been
created.”

–Martin Luther
 What kind of Theology of the Cross
is necessary today?

To return today to the theology of the Cross means avoiding one-sided

presentations of it in tradition, and comprehending the Crucified Christ in the
light and context of his resurrection, and therefore of freedom and hope.

It is to go beyond the limits of the doctrine of salvation and to inquire into the
revolution needed in the concept of God. Who is God in the cross of the
Christ who is abandoned by God?

It means to go beyond a concern for personal salvation, and to inquire

about the liberation of man and his new relationship to the reality of the
demonic crisis in his society. Who is the true man in the sight of the Son of
Man who was rejected and rose again in the freedom of God.

What does it mean to recall the GOD who was crucified in a society whose
official creed is optimism, and which is knee-deep in blood?
-Jurgen
Moltmann
 “The liberation of Israel is a political
action. It is the breaking away from a
situation of despoliation and misery and
the beginning of the construction of a just
and fraternal society. It is the suppression
of disorder and the creation of a new
order….Creation is regarded in terms of
the Exodus, a historical-salvific fact which
structures the faith of Israel. And this fact
is a political liberation through which
Yahweh expresses his love for his people
and the gift of total liberation is received. ”
–Gustavo Gutierrez
 “Faith is the act of response to and of
communion with a personal God, who on
his own initiative enters into conversation
with men and establishes a communion in
love. In accord with the logic of love, this
God enters into the life of the ‘other’, and
makes himself man in order to bring this
act to its full reality. Divinization thus
comes by means of humanization. All this
may seem to the unbeliever nothing but
myth or illusion, but it is the very object of
faith and governs its design and structure.
”
–M-D. Chenu
 “Divine revelation is not a doctrine, but the
free initiative of God which communicates
itself by manifesting itself in facts which
determine an experience of salvation that is
interpreted and fixed in a written message.
The message contains a doctrine, however,
the doctrine is not the primary element, but
the experience. ”

–Edward Schillebeeckx