by Abbot Joseph
[You can read this at Word Incarnate or continue below.]
I’ve begun reading In the World, of the Church, an anthology of some of the writings of the late Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov. His voice was both prophetic and ecumenical, but most of all profoundly Christian. I would like to reproduce here some passages from his article “A Message to the Churches,” written over a half-century ago, but quite relevant to the state of the Church in the world today. When I read this prophetic critique, I can’t help but think of the Gospel passage: “the sons of this world are wiser in their own generation than the sons of light” (Lk. 16:8). That’s an obscure saying, but the way I see it in light of what follows here is that those promoting the agenda of the world have a sharper vision of their goals, and a clearer grasp of the means necessary to implement them, than the Church has of her own mission. For in recent decades the Church, in significant ways, has turned to the world for guidance and example, instead of being the Spirit-animated Light to the world.
“We are faced with a brutal historical reality. For various reasons the Church now appears to be thrown back to the pre-Constantinian era. The Church is a remnant, a tiny minority in a world quite hostile to her message and without a grasp of history… [The world] listens to other gospels and to other prophets. Dynamic forces are at play, seeking to establish a new integration of the world with realities incompatible with the Christian ethic… This is a treacherous and offensive era. In the throbbing daily scene of life, God cannot find a voice sufficiently pure and detached to be his herald. All is horribly compromised to the point where roles have become reversed: now the Church is being judged by the world.
“Christians have done just about everything to sterilize the Gospel. One can say that it has been plunged into a neutralizing solution. Everything that is striking in it, all that transcends and turns things upside down, has been moderated, sterilized to death. Religion, having become inoffensive, is now flat, shrewd, and above all, reasonable, and remains simply to be vomited out [the allusion here is to Rev. 3:16]. ‘God does not demand much of us’—such a conviction makes the salt of the Gospel insipid and tasteless, that salt which is God’s terrible jealousy, his insistence on the impossible… Today the Gospel meets total indifference…
“The Church is no longer, as in the first centuries, the triumphal march of Life through the graveyards of the world. In all the recent theological definitions of her nature, the Church is conceived of in an astonishingly static manner, as essentially a self-serving, self-preserving institution. She has settled on maintaining the subsistence of her own membership… Christian faith has thus strangely lost its character of ferment, of disrupting everything. She is no longer the leaven which raises the dough… After two millennia of Christian history, the worst judgment that the world can pass upon the Church is that she has become a faithful reflection of the world itself…
“The average Christian today testifies to a striking phenomenon. Christianity is not at all a ‘new people,’ but just one typical sociological group among many, and it is here that we come to the heart of Christianity’s failure. Faith is no longer the source but has become an imposition, something merely added to the structures of the world in which the faithful engage… The Church, mystery on the march, the Bride awaiting her King, has become a ‘religious association,’ dependent upon the laws of natural evolution. And the consequences are disastrous…
“The Incarnation has been accommodated to this age. The Temple of God has become a huge ‘insurance company’ for eternal life with minimal risk (for Pascal, ‘the wager’), with techniques of consolation and ‘strategies’ for every imaginable situation. The Christian faith is preached as the healthiest, happiest, most effective arrangement for human life… The Gospel, however, is not adaptable functionally. It is explosive. The Gospel is the demand of metamorphosis, transformation… In the behavior and thinking of the average Christian, however, there is no place for the further, other Reality which transcends, which by its existence announcesthe wholly Other. Faith here appears as one of the elements of a functional sort, a sociological category, and thus the Christian message is emptied of all its transforming power…
“Having been tossed on the sociological trash heap, is it at all possible for Christianity to become once more the place where the presence of the God-Man shines forth? Can the face of Christ again ‘radiate in the faces of those who belong to him,’ as an ancient liturgical text puts it? Here lies the entire matter. The only message which is powerful any longer is not the one which simply repeats the words of Christ, the Word, but the one which makes him present. Only his presence will make the message, as the Gospel says, light and salt for the world.
“The Gospel is an explosive seed. It is revolutionary. It overturns not the structures of the world but those of the human spirit. What is important here is the manifestation of God in us, the coming of Christ in humanity… Now is not the time for Christian spirituality to reflect the age. Rather in every aspect our spiritual life must point to the Other… By one’s interior attitude, each Christian can make everything around him beautiful and light, can turn them into icons, images of their true nature. Such an authentically spiritual life would accomplish much, much more than many sermons… Christ is so often kept from us by theological and religious mumbo-jumbo. You don’t worry about adjusting the furnace when the house is on fire, nor do you wallow in secondary, unimportant things while the world is going to pieces. All of our creativity ought to focus on lifting the generation before us into the immense joy of freedom, the joy of serving others, into the joy (as St John the Baptist) of being the friend of Christ, the Bridegroom…
“The historical task, however, is not the search for the forms of primitive Christianity, but for her cry: Marana tha—‘Come, Lord,’ for union with the Church in the final hour. This hour makes all the other hours real. This last hour makes the Christian message real again, for us.”
There are endless examples of how the Church has allowed the ways of the world to diminish her vital energy and to silence her prophetic witness in the world. There’s one I just read, though, that is symptomatic. A former Archbishop of San Francisco (Quinn) has just written an article defending President Obama’s speaking and receiving an honorary degree at a (once) prestigious Catholic University. After his ridiculous statement to the effect that not allowing a pro-abortion president to speak at a Catholic University manifests “racial hatred” simply because he is black (everyone knows that has nothing to do with the abortion issue), he asks: “If the president is forced to withdraw, how will it impact the image of the Church? Will it enhance the mission of the Church? Will it create a more positive attitude toward the Catholic Church?” The whole point of his article is that it will negatively affect the image and mission of the Church. Why does he think that the Church (or any organization, for that matter) will be negatively affected when it simply stands up for what it believes in? His approach (and hence his understanding of the Church) completely contradicts the prophetic force and mission of true Christianity and exemplifies the eviscerated sociological entity that Evdokimov criticizes above.
The former bishop shows his true colors toward the end of the article. This is the bottom line; this is what many American bishops are all too often worried about: “the consequences if the American bishops are seen as the agents of the public embarrassment of the newly elected president by forcing him to withdraw from an appearance at a distinguished Catholic university.” It doesn’t matter that Obama is a promoter of evil and will be publicly honored by a Catholic institution. The bishops don’t want to be agents of public embarrassment for proclaiming the Gospel to secular powers as a witness to the nation. They want to be good citizens (i.e., they want to look good in the eyes of the media). They don’t want to be embarrassed by making it known that they are uncompromised followers of Christ. Crucify Him, then, and give them Barabbas.
