DEBATE
The Key to the Christian Life
BY LORENZO ALBACETE
According to Cardinal Ratzinger, today’s Man is someone for whom Christianity
is a past that does not concern him. It is not that the Christian faith’s
contribution to history is not acknowledged (approvingly or disapprovingly).
Many still see the Christian faith as an important source of values, ethical
behavior, and religious or artistic inspiration.
What is seen as irrelevant or as unnecessary is the point of departure that defines
and specifies the Christian reality, namely, the historical events of the Incarnation,
death, and resurrection of Christ. These are considered “ways” of
expressing Christian spirituality and ethics that have essentially been surpassed
by other, more credible ways of saying the same thing. The key word here is concern.
The historical events at the origin of the Christian claim are no longer of concern.
When something happens that shows how true it is that we live in such a post-Christian
world (in spite of surviving and even impressive manifestations of Christian “folklorism”),
we are tempted by two possibilities. Some insist on the need to promote or recapture
Christian doctrinal orthodoxy, that is, the need to emphasize and teach the intellectual
convictions that properly proclaim the Christian faith. For others, what matters
is promoting and defending Christian morality as an ethical orientation (“liberal” or “conservative”),
a system of “moral values” to guide our behavior. From this perspective,
the relationship between the Christian faith and contemporary culture is seen
as a culture war to be won, or a cultural contribution to be made by looking
for a common point of departure for dialogue. Both “tactics” are
in fact useless.
As Father Giussani has written, Christian evangelization is destroyed when we
embrace the illusion that a non-Christian culture (where Christianity’s
originating events are of no concern) should be confronted and overcome by a
Christian culture (cf Dal temperamento un metodo, p 53). This, he says, is a
deadly “fundamental error” that can tempt us, but which must be firmly
rejected.
We cannot place our hopes on the creation of a “Christian culture,” and
even less on going back to an idyllic past where Christianity maintained cultural
hegemony. Such historical developments are not for us to design or plan. We do
not know and will never know the “time plan” which the Father has
for human history.
Instead, we must place our hope not on cultural proposals but on the event of
Christ, on something that has already happened. Evangelization is to give witness
to the fact–to the verifiable fact–that this event can and does still
happen today because it has happened to us as something unforeseen, something
amazing that surprises us, something that is not the result of our efforts or
our particular ethical and spiritual predispositions. It is this that gives rise
to concern, because an event is something that touches the heart, that changes
us, that gives us a new vision of life’s possibilities.
Evangelization within a non-Christian culture is a matter of what St Augustine,
writing about his own conversion, calls confession. Augustine wonders why God “made
him” read the books of Plato (cf Confessions, VII, 20, 26). He concludes
that the reason was so that after his conversion he could tell the difference
inter praesumptionem et confessionem, between presumption and confession. To
believe that one becomes a Christian through the proper philosophy, theology,
spirituality, morality, or cultural project, is a presumption; it is to see our
efforts as the cause of our belonging to Christ. Instead, we become Christians
because the Incarnation happened in history, because the Paschal Mystery happened,
because Pentecost happened, and because those events continue to happen in the
world today. They happen now because they happened then and because the Church
exists in the world as the life of a communion of persons created by these events,
and making them present today through the sacraments. They happen because Christ
has risen from the dead and can be encountered today with exactly the same results
experienced by Andrew, James, John, Peter, Mary Magdalen, the Samaritan woman,
the man born blind, Zaccheus, and the criminal at the cross next to His. Something
happened to them. It was an event. The key to the Christian life, the point of
departure, is not an intellectual or cultural proposal. It is this event. This
is what creates the concern which post-Christian man has so tragically lost.
Evangelization is to give witness of our amazement at this unimaginable event.
Evangelization is confession.