Bound in Love

St. Paul says to the Corinthians: “though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” (II Cor 10:3-4)

The Scriptures make clear that the kingdom established by God is founded on sources of strength and proceeds from dynamics very different from the way things proceed in the world. Jesus says plainly to Pilate: “my kingdom is not of this world.”

In a world dominated by progressive religious dogma, Christians need to be careful not to unconsciously embrace the weapons and tactics of the world in their effort to build up the kingdom of God. This means that we should fight against the temptation to view the church as primarily a political or sociological entity. We need to fight the temptation to think that the prosperity of the church will be assured if we can just maneuver politically well. We can slip into the falsehood that it will be money, influence, talent, political power, and intelligence that will keep the church alive and thriving. The reality is that to gain a supernatural kingdom we need to use supernatural means.

Christ did not spread his gospel by inflaming the passions of his hearers. He did not rely on anger and outrage to spur them to action. He did not entice them by promises of an easy life. So the gospel of prosperity will find no support in the New Testament. In the Gospel of John (16:33), we read “in the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

When Jesus aroused fear in his hearers, it was due to their conscience being touched by truth. The goal was always repentance, a return to God, and the putting on of a new mind that will lead to the joy of a new life. Our emotions are meant to follow the perception of truth and to support but truth and goodness demand. Jesus from time to time hit himself lest they make him a king, for he did not come to establish a kingdom on earth but to provide a way for us to go home to his kingdom in heaven.

The winning stance

Each of us will have a missionary vocation that will demand all the prudent thought we can muster. But we will all share a fundamental stance as servants of Christ.

It is important that we stand

St. Paul says, “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.” (Ephesians 6:10-17)

The Christian suit of armor is made up of truth, righteousness, peace, and faith. These are all really defensive in nature. The one attack weapon is the sword of the spirit, the word of God. St. Paul’s own ministry was preaching the good news and responding to attacks by those who would pervert the truth of the gospel.

The resistance

The church operates as a kind of resistance movement behind the lines of the demonic enemy. We know that Satan is the ruler of this world, and so we are guerrilla fighters for Christ. We know that the world will come to an end and that we will be victorious at that end. All the devil can do is end our earthly lives, so he can never actually defeat us. The only way that he can overcome Christians is to find a way to get Christians to either abandon the truth or to lose hope and quit the fight. So we have to be alert to these two critical tactics of the enemy. The church is weakest and most vulnerable when it most relies on worldly categories of strength and success. It is strongest when it is most reliant on God and least attached to the powers of this fallen world.

Presenting the gospel in our apostolic age

Here are some suggestions that might inform how we present Christ and the Christian faith in light of our current cultural world. None of these is new, but they may need greater emphasis at this time.

The centrality of the person of Christ

The only answer to the identity crisis the world finds itself in, feeling lost and alienated and oppressed, is coming to know Jesus Christ. All the many facets of our faith are centered on one great foundation: the person whose name is Jesus. To be a Christian is to belong to Jesus, to know him, to be in union with him, to become a part of him. Christ is the absolute center, the beginning, and the end. Our time needs once again to be amazed and overwhelmed by Christ himself.

The importance of awakened minds

If Jesus is someone we need to get to know personally as brother, master, king, and friend, he is also someone we need to encounter as the wisdom of God who enlightens our minds. He said himself that he came to bear witness to the truth. An apostolic time demands of every Christian and instructed intellect. We need to receive instruction from Christ. The Catholic intellectual life is a vast storehouse of riches, and modern technology makes it extremely accessible to us. We need to dig into that storehouse and awaken our own minds.

The necessity of the true narrative

The early evangelists as recorded in the acts of the apostles all shared the same approach. They told the story of salvation. They preached Christ, but they did so in the context of the overall narrative that made his significance crystal clear. Much of what it means to be converted to the Christian faith is to embrace the true narrative of humanity. We need to reinvigorate our grasp of this true story, that it is an epic saga of high drama, and that it is also the story of each human person’s individual life, and that it is the only story that will provide the meaning we are all so desperately seeking.

The primacy of ministry in the invisible world

In the Christian sense of the word, a mystery is not something we do not happen to know; it is something we cannot know in full because it is beyond the grasp of our limited minds. That is why we speak of the mystery of the Trinity, or the mystery of the incarnation, or the mystery of the Eucharistic presence of Christ. How our human nature is made up of both bodies and souls is another mystery. If we are to be in relation with an infinite God, we need to be ready to face mysteries. This means coming alive to the realities of the invisible world. Neo-Gnostic progressivism wants nothing to do with mystery or an invisible world. Yet the human soul knows somewhere in its depths that the visible measurable world is not all there is. Our age is starving for the mysterious and the invisible. Finding ways to call ourselves and our age back to the unseen and mysterious world is an important task for our time.

Making real what is notional

Those who have grown up in a transitional time like ours often possess a good amount of abstract knowledge about Jesus and the Christian faith. We know lots of Bible stories, and we may have learned a lot of the basic Christian doctrines. This is notional knowledge. It needs to become real. It needs to become alive. It needs to be a living truth that guides the inner person and points out the way forward in life. It is necessary to engage the imaginative faculties to drive home ideas and help them to come alive. Jesus often taught and imaginatively powerful parables. He used images and metaphors that caught your attention and they drove home powerful truths. Just think of what you take away from hearing the parable of the prodigal son, and often you take away something new each time you hear the same parable.

The proper context is true friendship in Christ

We know that the Christian faith is not simply an individual pursuit. God has counted the very hairs on our heads. At the same time, he draws us into a corporate life so that in our earthly lives as Christian pilgrims we can in some mysterious way have some connection to the communion of love that is the Trinity. St. Paul describes the church as parts of the body. We live in a time of increasing personal isolation, where superficial relationships are the order of the day, yet the human heart longs for genuine communion with others.

Christ makes such communion possible. Genuine friendship is a supernatural outgrowth of the life of Christ in each of us. Christians are joined to each other in ways that go beyond our natural abilities for union with each other. This opens up possibilities for a very deep kind of friendship.

The most effective witness to the life of Christ will come more likely in a group of people than through a completely individual witness. Many will be drawn to Christ by meeting a group of Christian friends, or by getting to know the Christian family. They will recognize a deeply attractive quality among those they are getting to know.