“The Church of Christ’s primary, essential, irreplaceable mission is to remind us constantly, opportune, importune, of our divine supernatural vocation and to communicate to us through her sacred ministry the seed, still fragile and hidden, yet real and living, of our divine life. This seed must not remain sterile. The revelation of our divine vocation, along with all that flows from it, ordinarily produces its first results not only in the depths of people’s hearts but likewise on the outside, in the affairs of time and of history. But in this area the supernatural impulse will afford good results only if it couples itself with all the resources of human knowledge, experience and wisdom; and experience has shown us often enough that it is very often choked, or at least slowed down, by the contrary forces. On the other hand, the role of the Church, especially in the person of her ministers, cannot be reduced to such a task; however urgent this may appear in certain cases it is never anything more than a secondary end — even when in the temporal order it may have to be put first, here or there, so as to open up a path to the Gospel. Otherwise the Church would be unfaithful to Christ, who did not preach the Kingdom of God [in the word of George Hourdin] ‘in order to provoke a general liberation of his people and to vanquish the Romans once for all.’ She would succumb to that ‘temporal heresy’ which as Péguy observed (Péguy, who understood so well the value of the temporal) consists in proposing that the temporal should end up by ‘absorbing the eternal’. Thus losing her own soul, she would be reduced to a mere human organization, and a totally ineffective one at that. She would only be a parasite, duplicating or trying to duplicate — without having either the qualified personnel or the necessary means — the institutions that men can freely create for themselves. At that stage, she should simply disappear. And this is precisely what those whose minds are totally closed against the supernatural have been demanding for a long time. This is also — what a paradox! — just what in practice some of her misguided children are clamoring for today, when they talk about wanting a ‘new Church’. A Church secularized, naturalized, which would willingly give up her ‘cult’ and replace it with ‘culture’, seeking her ‘lights’ not in the Gospels (even if lip service were still paid to them), but in the world; a Church which would pretend to be born today from some kind of radical ‘mutation’’ which would no longer concern herself, even with disinterested zeal, with anything but the organization of life on this earth — such a Church would have no right to exist any more in the society of men, and would not be long in meeting dissolution.”
— from Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (Ignatius Press, 1980)
Related reading and listening
- Unmasking claims of “secular neutrality” — Lesslie Newbigin on the Church’s prophetic duty concerning public life
- The kingdom of God has public consequences — Lesslie Newbigin on the subversiveness of the Church’s message to the world
- Sports in America — FROM VOL. 21 Robert Higgs looks at the history of sports in American experience and at how organized religion has interacted with that history. (12 minutes)
- Divorcing the spirit of the age — Thomas C. Oden on overcoming the theological faddism of the late twentieth century
- Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
- Consecrating the world — Paul Evdokimov on the cosmic effects of the Incarnation
- Properly this-worldly by being fundamentally other-worldly — Hans Boersma on the necessity of affirming the links between Heaven and Earth
- David K. Naugle, R.I.P. — Philosophy professor, author, and compassionate mentor David K. Naugle (1952-2021) explains the long history of the concepts of “worldview” and “happiness.” (26 minutes)
- Questioning the “sacred-secular” division — With the stage set by Michael Sandel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David L. Schindler, and John Milbank, Andrew Willard Jones examines a medieval alternative to the modern liberal paradigm. (61 minutes)
- Hans Boersma on For the Life of the World — Drawing from Alexander Schmemann’s book, Hans Boersma asserts that a recovered understanding of the relationship between God and Creation is essential to addressing a host of modern cultural crises. (17 minutes)
- Fr. Chad Hatfield and Peter J. Leithart on Alexander Schmemann — Alexander Schmemann’s book asks a set of questions about “Christianity and culture” that typically don’t get asked, questions that re-center our lives in gratitude and worship. (20 minutes)
- Word becomes flesh, Reality becomes fact — Henri de Lubac on the Incarnation and history
- Not just a counterculture — Peter J. Leithart on the public (and prophetic) mission of the Church
- Assimilation or identity in Christ — Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández on the modern choice given the Church to conform or die
- The Church as a public reality — William Cavanaugh on how we must be disciples in public, not just citizens
- Intellectual apostasy and Christian witness — Harry Blamires on unfashionable beliefs about the ends of human beings
- Cultural participation in reconciliation — Jonathan Wilson on faithfully representing Creation in the culture of the Church
- The publicly inert Christ of modernity — Dom Anscer Vonier on secularism’s confidence in its freedom from Christ
- Which story is ours? — “Instead of allowing the Bible to shape us, we may in fact be allowing our culture to shape the Bible for us.”
- The dead-end of privatized faith — T. S. Eliot on the Church’s duty to interfere with the World
- True transcendence, true immanence — D. C. Schindler on how believers can be practical atheists
- The disabling consequences of winsomeness — Stanley Hauerwas on how many modern Christians offered atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.
- Crowd Culture — Bernard Iddings Bell: “It is because the Church has thus obscured the socially prophetic note that it seems to most people to have no relevancy.”
- Who strangled God? — James Turner examines the ways in which the pursuit of “relevant” theology helped to make atheism plausible in Western culture
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jake Halpern, Stephen J. Nichols, Richard M. Gamble, Peter J. Leithart, Bill Vitek, and Craig Holdrege
