The Tablet on Spe Salvi
The latest issue of the Tablet has an article on the Pope's encyclical letter, Spe Salvi (you can check out the quickie summery of the letter at Wikipedia or read the complete text of it at the Vatican's site). The Tablet article - A virtue saved from neglect by Fr. Bruce Williams, O.P. - brought up some interesting points, so I thought I'd post a bit of it. I've interspreced the excerpts from the article with my thoughts on them .....
Most of the media coverage of Spe Salvi has emphasised its criticisms of modern philosophical and social movements, particularly Marxism and other forms of atheism. What appears most noteworthy about them is their benevolent and respectful tone. Marx and Engels are credited with having described "alarmingly" and "with great precision ... the situation of [their] time", i.e. "the dreadful living conditions" of the industrial proletariat (n. 20). Modern atheism more generally is acknowledged to be motivated by "a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history" by people who find themselves unable to accept such a world as "the work of a good God" (n. 42) ...... Those hopes are illusory because they both rest on an unreliable foundation (human effort devoid of God) and they are directed to an unrealisable goal (earthly paradise). Countering these two basic errors, Pope Benedict offers bracing reminders: a: defectible human freedom can never guarantee permanent happiness (n. 21); b: even the noblest human efforts cannot eliminate all suffering from earthly life (n. 36) .....
I actually find depressing this idea that human freedom and noble human efforts are doomed to failure in their quest for peace and happiness. I do harbor the admittedly fragile hope that we humans will eventually create a society without war, hunger, or inequality. If there's no hope of that ever being accomplished here on earth, then what are we saying .... that the journey is what's important (keep working towards the goal), not the destination (but the goal will never be reached)? I'm not ready to give up on this secular hope.
If it is appropriate for us Christians to criticise "deceptive" notions of hope characteristic of secular modernity, it is also incumbent on us to address the impoverished dynamic of hope too often evident in modern Christianity. The Pope identifies this impoverishment in a common tendency among Christians to focus too narrowly on "the individual and his [eternal] salvation" with inadequate concern for the condition of the human community in the present world. "In so doing, [modern Christianity] has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognise the greatness of its task" (n. 25) .....
Yes! Go Liberation Theology! :-)
The unbalanced individualism and otherworldliness of much recent Christianity is seen by Benedict as a response to modern historical influences traceable to the Enlightenment (and Francis Bacon in particular). Unmentioned here is the fact that by the time Bacon and later Enlightenment philosophers gained prominence, significant numbers of people had already ceased to regard the Christian Church as a creditable bearer of hope. In other words, the obscuring of authentic Christian hope did not simply originate with the Enlightenment movement; to some extent at least, it also preceded and enabled that movement. How did that earlier loss of confidence in the Church come about? ...
I thought this was a good point .... Francis Bacon is said to be the father of the scientific method and the originator of the phrase knowledge is power .... interesting guy!
If, as previously mentioned, many have felt driven to atheism by the scandal of pervasive injustice in the world, should we not also recognise that many Catholics feel alienated because their experience of ecclesiastical life does not allow them to relate to the Church as an agent of hope for them? And are there not analogous difficulties in the way many outsiders perceive the Church? As it was put some years ago by one Canadian ecclesiastic who has served in church ministry at several levels, those who do not recognise the Church as a source of hope will instead perceive it as a burden - one more burden they do not need in their already overburdened lives ...
Yep.
Finally, in the last major section, we are presented with a discourse on the Final Judgement as hopeful assurance of the ultimate vindication of all justice (nn. 41-48). Included here is an instructive and appealing explanation of Catholic teaching concerning hell, heaven and purgatory, along with a likewise appealing instruction on how prayer for the dead is encompassed within Christian hope. This section serves to tie together the individual and communal concerns of hope ....
This is an interesting topic, given the popularity of the Left Behind books which dwell on the Rapture and the Tribulation. Also interesting, the stuff about worldly suffering and justice .... Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an "undoing" of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. ..... Benedict's theodicy. The part about indulgences just seems strange to me, and the part about hell and justice is upsetting ... I like the idea of restorative justice of the kind about which David Hart writes, and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, "Behold, I make all things new." ... but I'm afraid of justice in the shape of eternal punishment. I'd rather hope that all will be saved, as did Hans Urs von Balthasar.
I was especially intrigued with this bit of the Pope's letter on what purgatory might be like ......
*************
Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation "as through fire". But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the "duration" of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming "moment" of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart's time, it is the time of "passage" to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our "advocate", or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1) ....
***********
Most of the media coverage of Spe Salvi has emphasised its criticisms of modern philosophical and social movements, particularly Marxism and other forms of atheism. What appears most noteworthy about them is their benevolent and respectful tone. Marx and Engels are credited with having described "alarmingly" and "with great precision ... the situation of [their] time", i.e. "the dreadful living conditions" of the industrial proletariat (n. 20). Modern atheism more generally is acknowledged to be motivated by "a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history" by people who find themselves unable to accept such a world as "the work of a good God" (n. 42) ...... Those hopes are illusory because they both rest on an unreliable foundation (human effort devoid of God) and they are directed to an unrealisable goal (earthly paradise). Countering these two basic errors, Pope Benedict offers bracing reminders: a: defectible human freedom can never guarantee permanent happiness (n. 21); b: even the noblest human efforts cannot eliminate all suffering from earthly life (n. 36) .....
I actually find depressing this idea that human freedom and noble human efforts are doomed to failure in their quest for peace and happiness. I do harbor the admittedly fragile hope that we humans will eventually create a society without war, hunger, or inequality. If there's no hope of that ever being accomplished here on earth, then what are we saying .... that the journey is what's important (keep working towards the goal), not the destination (but the goal will never be reached)? I'm not ready to give up on this secular hope.
If it is appropriate for us Christians to criticise "deceptive" notions of hope characteristic of secular modernity, it is also incumbent on us to address the impoverished dynamic of hope too often evident in modern Christianity. The Pope identifies this impoverishment in a common tendency among Christians to focus too narrowly on "the individual and his [eternal] salvation" with inadequate concern for the condition of the human community in the present world. "In so doing, [modern Christianity] has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognise the greatness of its task" (n. 25) .....
Yes! Go Liberation Theology! :-)
The unbalanced individualism and otherworldliness of much recent Christianity is seen by Benedict as a response to modern historical influences traceable to the Enlightenment (and Francis Bacon in particular). Unmentioned here is the fact that by the time Bacon and later Enlightenment philosophers gained prominence, significant numbers of people had already ceased to regard the Christian Church as a creditable bearer of hope. In other words, the obscuring of authentic Christian hope did not simply originate with the Enlightenment movement; to some extent at least, it also preceded and enabled that movement. How did that earlier loss of confidence in the Church come about? ...
I thought this was a good point .... Francis Bacon is said to be the father of the scientific method and the originator of the phrase knowledge is power .... interesting guy!
If, as previously mentioned, many have felt driven to atheism by the scandal of pervasive injustice in the world, should we not also recognise that many Catholics feel alienated because their experience of ecclesiastical life does not allow them to relate to the Church as an agent of hope for them? And are there not analogous difficulties in the way many outsiders perceive the Church? As it was put some years ago by one Canadian ecclesiastic who has served in church ministry at several levels, those who do not recognise the Church as a source of hope will instead perceive it as a burden - one more burden they do not need in their already overburdened lives ...
Yep.
Finally, in the last major section, we are presented with a discourse on the Final Judgement as hopeful assurance of the ultimate vindication of all justice (nn. 41-48). Included here is an instructive and appealing explanation of Catholic teaching concerning hell, heaven and purgatory, along with a likewise appealing instruction on how prayer for the dead is encompassed within Christian hope. This section serves to tie together the individual and communal concerns of hope ....
This is an interesting topic, given the popularity of the Left Behind books which dwell on the Rapture and the Tribulation. Also interesting, the stuff about worldly suffering and justice .... Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an "undoing" of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. ..... Benedict's theodicy. The part about indulgences just seems strange to me, and the part about hell and justice is upsetting ... I like the idea of restorative justice of the kind about which David Hart writes, and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, "Behold, I make all things new." ... but I'm afraid of justice in the shape of eternal punishment. I'd rather hope that all will be saved, as did Hans Urs von Balthasar.
I was especially intrigued with this bit of the Pope's letter on what purgatory might be like ......
*************
Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation "as through fire". But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the "duration" of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming "moment" of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart's time, it is the time of "passage" to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our "advocate", or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1) ....
***********
posted by crystal | 7:01 PM
5 Comments:
sounds like and interesting encyclical. Haven't read it yet but a couple of people are talking about it around here already so i better get on it.
I like the comment that the Church might do well to look (belatedly) outside of the whole Enlightenment/Relativism realm for some answers as to why people find it increasingly irrelevant and burdensome.
I also find it a little discouraging that Benedict sees that there is no hope for peace in this world as it is. I can see where he's coming from, this is not the Kingdom and perhaps the question could be raised as to whether or not we should expect the Kingdom to be fully realized on planet Earth as a purely human endeavor.
At the same time, my momma always said "God don't make no junk" and I think those comments neglect the belief that Creation and humanity as a whole are, by their nature and at their root, inherently 'Good', blessed and fulfilled by the touch of the Creator's hand.
I think the problem lies in human beings, whether they be atheists or popes, trying to work out for ourselves how God is going to able to reconcile this tension. All the know for sure is that, in the end, both the Heavens and the Earth will be made new.
That is the perennial realm of hope.
Great post!
Cura,
I always think of Star Trek TNG, where at that time on Earth there was no more war or poverty and everyone was a vegetarian (though they could eat replicated meat) .... it could happen, or so I'd like to think :-)
Mmmm...replicated meat.
I can't wait.
hehehehe ;o)
Cura said…
I like the comment that the Church might do well to look (belatedly) outside of the whole Enlightenment/Relativism realm for some answers as to why people find it increasingly irrelevant and burdensome.
I agree. I wish this perpetual war waged by the Church against “modernism” and “post-modernism” and certain negative aspects of the enlightenment would come to an end. There were certain good things that came out of the enlightenment too. Good things that never would have come about if left up to the “Church Militant” on its own. Vatican II recognized this, although there has been some retrograde thinking that’s been pulling back against that recognition in the last couple of decades. These categories are fading fast in the rear-view mirror. Mankind is face with a whole new set of challenges now. We are too close to being able to destroy ourselves both militarily and environmentally. Concerted and cooperative action by humans to bring about change is crucial and necessary if we are to survive (OK, with God’s help to be sure). I think that Benedict, as a perceptive thinker, is somewhat aware of this as seen in his recent appreciation of “green” issues. At least one can hope so.
Jeff, I think you're right. Some of the best scientists before and during the enlightenment were actually religious but you'd never know that from the perceived war between science and religion. It's almost like the Church is afraid to trust the goodness that can be in people and in knowledge when both are not crushed into a mold.
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