Christ as the Center of Culture

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series on Catholic culture.

I begin with the following proposition. It is one which, among committed Christians certainly, may be taken as a given, as axiomatic. Not a statement of fact, mind you, as in the sum of two plus two will always be four. It is instead a statement of value, the certainty of which is hardly a function of arithmetic. It depends rather on revelation, as in Divine Revelation, the truth of which derives not from man but from God. And what is this proposition? It is, quite simply, that Jesus Christ remains absolutely central to the life of the Church and, indeed, to the whole created order of the universe.  

It is a datum, then, a presumption absolutely fundamental to the discussion of a theology of the public life. Or, putting it into the context of these reflections, the possibility of there being a Christian Culture.  

I say this because, in a Catholic economy of salvation, the two orders of nature and grace, of man and God, are not sundered one from the other. We are not divided souls, after all, condemned to live out our days in a schizoid world. Cosmos and Covenant, history and Heaven, the grit of planet Earth and the glory of the heavens, these must not be treated as two perpetually antagonistic principles, always and everywhere at sword’s point. It was never intended that either should collide with or do violence to the other. Not from the beginning, it wasn’t.  

As both Creator and Redeemer, as Architect of a world that, from the moment it fell into sin, He became its Savior, God meant for each to harmonize its operations with the other. Author of nature, He is no less Giver of grace. Unlike, for example, in Calvinist or Lutheran theology, where the two realms are made to suffer an unnatural separation, a divorce divinely fated never to be overcome.     

Again, not a solution to the human situation likely to endear itself to anyone. To leave man and the society in which he lives—which is the only setting he has where his needs and desires can be met—hopelessly disconnected, has nothing to commend. Driving a stake of the deepest possible division between God and the world He made? In what universe would that be a good thing? And so, on a Catholic showing, hope, as the saying goes, springs eternal.  

Or, putting it another way, the whole weight of the truth concerning who Christ is (Christology), and what Christ has done (Soteriology), necessarily implicates everything, including the truth about ourselves (Anthropology). Including especially the Church He fashioned out of His own broken body as it lay helpless upon the Cross. All of which means that the truth about Christ carries an enormous, intimate even, bearing upon the question of who and what the Church is (Ecclesiology)—and, by extension, the whole shape and texture of the public life in which we live and move (Civil Theology).   All of which means that the truth about Christ carries an enormous, intimate even, bearing upon the question of who and what the Church is (Ecclesiology)—and, by extension, the whole shape and texture of the public life.Tweet This

It is Christ, then, who remains necessarily and indissolubly the idea of Christianity, of Roman Catholicism. How could He not be the animating source? How could He not provide the point of origin, the sustaining balance and finality as well? Whom do we see in faith when we look upon the face of Christ if not the Logos of God Himself? He is the Word who was with God from the beginning and without whom there could not be any beginning. And so, it is Christ who constitutes that which remains uniquely and irreducibly Christian about Christianity. He alone subsists at the center of all that the Church distinctively is and does in the world.

And what was His aim in coming among us if not to save all that has to do with man? Why would He be wearing a human face if not to rescue and restore all that we had lost? Not just in our private capacity, as if Christ cared only for the isolated self, the atomized self. But man in his relation to other men, in a context, that is, of communion and solidarity with other men, with the neighbor who wishes to know us better, and the stranger who wishes to become our brother. To a culture, no less, that wishes to consecrate itself to Christ.  

Thus, the question becomes at what height or depth will human fulfillment be found? Is there a point of ideal unity toward which we ought to be moving, some perfection the human heart longs to achieve, to experience? It is a question at the center of a wonderful little book written years ago by Fr. William F. Lynch, S.J. (1960), called Christ and Apollo. A quick look at its thesis will be helpful, hugely so, I think, to the claims that need to be made concerning the issue of Christian Culture.  

Most people, suggests Fr. Lynch, are often too quick to reply along the line of, “Why, union with God. Isn’t that what we all want?” But that is not the answer Fr. Lynch has in mind, nor the Church Fathers and the Medieval Schoolmen whose thought he is thoroughly steeped in. “I call it the Church,” he says, 

because the Catholic imagination does not force me to imagine at the end I must free myself from all human society to unite myself with God. Rather, it helps me to imagine that once I have embarked on a good thing with all its concreteness (here it is society), I can and I must carry it with me all the way into the heart of the unimaginable. 

Now, what exactly does that mean? Take a look at how the other side sees it and everything becomes clearer. Fr. Lynch says,

The Protestant imagination seems to conceive society to be a necessary evil, to be endured on all the lower levels of being, good to the next to the last drop, but to be abandoned with indecent haste before true insight or the face of the living God.

What is he getting at here? Only this: that for the Protestant imagination, the aim seems to be nothing less than “to stand in nakedness before God outside of society,” apart from all those connecting threads of kinship and love that join us to others, which is 

to make God a silence and an abyss. But He is not a silence; even He could not know Himself save through the Word; and are we better than God that we can know Him save through Christ; but the Church is Christ.

Now there’s an icebreaker for you. But if, quoting Chesterton, “It is not well for God to be alone,” then God Himself must be a communion of persons. From all eternity, in fact, God stands in relation to the Son whom He begets, and to the Sprit whom together they breathe forth. Why, then, assuming that is the case, should any of us be surprised if it is not well for man to be alone, either? Are we not made in His image and likeness? 

Indeed, if we are to believe St. Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians (1:3-6, 11-12), have we not already been “chosen…before the foundation of the world,” by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ no less, “to be holy and without blemish before him,” who “in love destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ…that we might exist for the praise of his glory, we who first hoped in Christ”?  

Admittedly, a tall order for anyone, but not for a Church confident in her claim to be His very bride and body, the clearest and most profound prolongation of His person and presence in the world. It is through her, therefore, that we shall find the point of entry for both an understanding of Christian Culture and the importance of its formation in helping Christians get more easily to God.