The Catholic Church is being
invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer
and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has
received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great
Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by
the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity
that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.
Unfortunately as Weigel fleshes out what this
means, I think he betrays his ideal for something that is anything but
evangelical, but that is somewhat beside the point I want to make today.
I was at a wake last week and speaking with a
Protestant pastor who was there when someone with little ecumenical sensitivity
said to him: “you guys need to have a Vatican II.” The minister good
naturedly replied: “We did, it was Vatican II.” His point was that the
Second Vatican Council has impacted most of the Protestant Churches as much as
it has Catholicism. This is obvious enough in the mainline Churches—the
Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Churches, the Methodists and Presbyterians, all
of whom have revised various liturgical practices and even some church polity
to harmonize better with one another and with us Catholics. But when one
gets to the so-called Evangelicals, it is not always so obvious.
I say “so-called Evangelicals” as I think a lot
of people who refer to themselves as “evangelicals” or call their denomination “evangelical” are anything
but. Evangelical comes from the Greek word, εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good
news” and specifically the news of a victory. The Greek word for Gospel
is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ over sin
and death. But so many people who call themselves evangelicals are about
bad news of judgment, condemnation, and the defeat of Grace and in reality they
are anything but bearers of Good News.
There is a movement among some evangelicals,
however, that shows a remarkable move away from the gloomy Calvinism in which
many of the so-called Evangelical denominations were rooted towards a faith
that is more in line with the New Testament optimism that God’s Saving Work in
Jesus Christ may actually be a victory over sin. This movement, which is
not a Church or a denomination but a loose-knit connection of Churches and
individuals who have realigned their theological thought in some dramatic ways,
parallels much of the shift that has gone on in Catholicism over the last sixty
years and has received a fresh new impetus under the direction of Pope
Francis. It is called the “Emerging Church” and it has drawn a
wide range of Christians from Lutherans to Methodists to Baptists to members of
the Free Churches and to Christian fellowships who decline to identify with any
particular denomination. The main
characteristics of the emerging Church seem—from what I have read—to be:
1. an
emphasis on a personal spirituality that calls the individual to be conformed
to Jesus Christ—to live a life in which he or she learns to model himself or
herself on Jesus.
2. A
belief that God is vitally concerned about this world and has given us, both as
communities and individuals, a mission in this world to infuse the world with
Gospel values and thus transform it.
3. To be
an inclusive and welcoming Christian fellowship in which each is called to
personal conversion but in which no one is judged. (Sounds familiar, Pope Francis?)
4. A
model of leadership in the Church that does not involve power or control.
5. An
openness to dialogue that sees the faith of the Church as a progressive
appreciation of the truth rather than inflexible and dogmatic axioms that are
imposed in the name of an ahistorical and immutable “Tradition.”
6. An
openness to the contributions of the various cultures in which Christians find
themselves rather than an Euro-American cultural hegemony.
7.
An ability to live with ambiguity that helps us
realize that God us ultimately a Mystery in whose life we are invited to
participate and that defies our ability to define and delineate.
This type of Christian faith requires a spiritual
maturity that permits us to walk in faith through a darkness of the intellect
that was described by Saint John of the Cross: to come to the knowledge you
have not, you must go by a way in which you do not know. In other words, to come to know God we must
give up whatever knowledge we think we have.
When we are confident in our “knowledge” of “God,” the god we think we
know is invariably a god of our own imagination. To come to know God, we must let the slate of
our knowledge be wiped clean and be willing to start over with an “unknowing,”
the term that many of our Catholic mystics have used to talk about the direct
encounter with God in which the human faculties, including the intellect, fall
silent.
What is particularly interesting about the
Emerging Church movement is that it does not show the fear of spirituality and
mystical experience that has characterized much of historical Protestantism.
This is one of the tensions in Christianity—in Catholicism as well as
Protestantism—the need for an orthodoxy that is rooted in doctrinal objectivity
and the need for a personal encounter with God that transcends (though does not
contradict) that doctrine. Paul Tillich
spoke of this tension, or at least one aspect of it, with the Protestant Principle
and the Catholic Substance. For too long
perhaps we Christians, in our desire for doctrinal objectivity have substituted
an embalmed deity for the Living God.
The Emerging Church movement is a call for us all to go again on the
search for the Living God. This is not a
new call. Read the Documents of the
Second Vatican Council and you will hear the same summons. Pope Francis has made this call a theme of
his papacy which has rekindled the light of Vatican II among some and the anger
over Vatican II among others.
No comments:
Post a Comment