Jesus the Divine Teacher
What the Prophets Really Foretold
by
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What is the context of this book? It is the massive crisis of faith that has fallen upon modern man and is even penetrating widely within the Catholic Church. This twentieth century, as I write, about to turn into the third millennium since Jesus taught and sent his Church to teach all nations, saw the rejection of the entire revelatory past, the entire Word of God from Genesis to the Book of Revelation. We are losing our grasp of the unity and holiness of the Bible, allowing it to dissolve into a disparate group of merely human writings. It follows immediately that we are losing Jesus Christ. We are unable to see Jesus accurately according to the witness of the Holy Bible to him. This has left only modern mythical imaginations about him like the blasphemous Scorsese film!
The Modernist Heresy, growing inside the Catholic Church since 1835, is the cause of this doctrinal confusion and chaos. In recent decades it has penetrated with devastating results into the programs of religious education given to Catholic children. The Modernist Heresy, to use Charles Journet’s description, retains the traditional terms of Christian doctrine but only to reinterpret them. The words creation, incarnation, redemption, real presence, transubstantiation, justification, mystical body, and so on, take on new meanings.
We have only to recall what has become of the Apostles’ Creed from the Hegelian or simply the Modernist point of view. All the words are there, like an empty husk carried about by the winds of history and ideologies at their pleasure. See Charles Journet.
One recognizes here the denial of Jesus the Divine Teacher and a rejection of the very idea of the Divine Deposit which he gave to his Apostles and their successors to be guarded by faithful teaching and explained infallibly. The Holy Spirit, who inspired the Apostolic Writings, has an emphatically different idea: "I write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). "Anyone who does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God" (2 John 9). "0 Timothy, guard the deposit" (1 Tim.
This book is a direct confrontation with this elimination of Jesus the Divine Teacher and his Deposit of Faith and Morals. It studies the Bible in a new catechetical way that recovers and renews both the unity and divine authorship of the Holy Bible and the resulting accuracy regarding both the figure of Jesus Christ and the truth of his teaching. It sees Jesus as he actually was, the Rabbi or Teacher of the Torah in
For whom was this book written? First, for the general reader among Catholics, and also for inquirers who are seeking information about the Catholic Church, how it is rooted in the Bible, and where its Articles of Faith are to be found today, taught with the same meaning that they had when Jesus taught that meaning to his Apostles. Thus this book has in view all adults of today who are caught up one way or another in the confusions and deceptions of the times.
Second, this book is intended for all catechists who teach the Catholic Faith. These include students preparing for the Diaconate and the Priesthood, for they are to be the ordained and official catechists in the Church. But they also include all other catechists, the parents, and the CCD teachers, who need help to see what the Deposit of Faith and Morals is, how it is Jesus’ own teaching, and how it is taught today with the same meaning that it had for his Apostles. It is intended, furthermore, as a resource for training volunteer catechists in parishes. Priests and directors of religious education, according to their own purposes, may wish to base courses on a chapter or combination of chapters, perhaps assigning other chapters for outside reading, as the nature of each group indicates. Thus this book becomes a manual for Catechists according to the General Catechetical Directory, par. 121, exploring in the text the biblical sources of the message of salvation and giving pedagogical advice and suggestions about methods in the references. In this way they do not obtrude upon the general reader who may wish to omit them.
The approach to the Holy Bible and to Jesus the Teacher of the Bible will be explained in various places. For the present, suffice is to say that this approach is quite different from the recent aberrations in Bible study and exegesis that concentrate excessively on the human authorship as if nothing else were at hand. Here the emphasis will be the properly catechetical one, that of the divine authorship of the Bible. For this is the factor that gives the Bible its sacred character and its unity from Genesis to the Book of Revelation. This unity arises from the fact of Jesus Christ, "the Mediator and Fullness of all Revelations," as the General Catechetical Directory states in par. 12, citing Vatican II, Dei Verbum, no. 2. Catechetics is the actual contemporary mediation of this fullness, for it is the teaching that continues Jesus’ mandate to teach all nations and to baptize them into his new Way of Life (see Matt. 28:16-20). In this way catechists discover their true self-image and mission.
May this survey of the Bible from the catechetical point of view , especially the Gospels, help future priests and the catechists who assist them, especially the parents of Catholic children, to imitate and to follow Jesus the Divine Teacher in their own apostolates as teachers of the Word of God.
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About the Book
Christ said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Of this much I assure you: until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter of the law, not the smallest part of a letter, shall be done away with until it all comes true” (Mt. 5, 17-18).
For scholars at the time of Christ and for those who have come after, it has been reasonably clear how the teachings of Christ simply carried on and built upon the law of the prophets. However, Monsignor Kevane’s work, Jesus the Divine Teacher, makes the matter clear in a way which has not so far been achieved.
As a learned and recognized Rabbi of his time among the Israelites, Jesus had put Himself into a position where He could most effectively do precisely what He had come to accomplish: to fulfill the law. Jesus the Divine Teacher explains how Christ, in His Divine Wisdom, systematically explained the prophecies of old, built upon them, and gradually brought them to bear upon His basic mission which was to found His church against which the gates of Hell would never prevail.
This book, Jesus the Divine Teacher, is the next-to-last in the series of writings which Monsignor Kevane produced during his lifetime. Starting with the textbooks he authored for use at Heelan Catholic High School, Monsignor Kevane was a prolific writer: “The Lord of History,” “Augustine the Educator,” “Creed and Catechetics” – to name a few of his works. I believe there is a theme which lies at the foundation of all his writings and at the foundation of his own spiritual life, that God has been speaking to His people since the dawn of mankind, through His prophets, through His Divine Son, Jesus Christ, who came among us to fulfill the prophets, and through the Church which He founded to protect and pass on this Divine Message to His people until the end of time.
About the Author
Monsignor Kevane brought many years of preparation into the writing of this book. Born on a farm in
After ten years as principal of Heelan High School in Sioux City, Iowa, the central Catholic high school which as a young priest he was commissioned to plan, coordinate and build, Monsignor Kevane was released by the Diocese of Sioux City to become a professor in the Department of Education at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He later was named Dean of the Department and became the Editor of the Catholic Educational Review. He pursued and achieved his Doctorate, and in 1969 he was appointed Founding Director of the Notre Dame Pontifical Catechetical Institute for Catechetical Instruction and quickly established a number of affiliates throughout the
Monsignor Kevane passed away in 1996, leaving behind this manuscript which was first published in 2003 and is now being published for a second time with revisions, and another manuscript, a sequel to this one, entitled, “The Deposit of Faith,” published in 2004.
This writer is proud to have proceeded from the same grounding in the Faith as Monsignor Kevane did, to be personally acquainted for many years with his unswerving devotion to Christ and His Church, and to witness the depth of his personal spiritual life. I am proud to be his brother.
-Raymond A Kevane, S.T.L., J.C.D.