Christ’s Coming as Judgement and Grace (Updates)
Pope Benedict’s new encyclical, his meditation on hope, Spe Salvi, was released today.
My initial impression is that it is denser than Deus Caritas Est — the hand of the professor is evident. It could well serve for Advent reading: a lectio continua.
Here is a passage that caught my attention:
47. 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.39 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).
UPDATE I:
John Allen, with his usual perceptiveness, has identified a number of themes in the new encyclical that have been pillars of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological reflections over the years.
• Truth is not a limit upon freedom, but the condition of freedom reaching its true potential;
• Reason and faith need one another – faith without reason becomes extremism, while reason without faith leads to despair;
• The dangers of the modern myth of progress, born in the new science of the 16th century and applied to politics through the French Revolution and Marxism;
• The impossibility of constructing a just social order without reference to God;
• The urgency of separating eschatology, the longing for a “new Heaven and a new earth,” from this-worldly politics;
• Objective truth as the only real limit to ideology and the blind will to power.
What I find missing, in Allen’s helpful catalog, however, is the distinctive Christic substance [hypostasis!] that structures the encyclical. The foundation of the Pope’s eschatological vision is the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Christian hope has a personal form and face.
I’m certain that John Allen would not deny this. But it is important, I think, to underline it.
UPDATE II:
Ian Fisher in Saturday’s New York Times chimes in:
The document, called “Saved by Hope,” weaves a complex but elegant
argument for the necessity of hope, drawing deeply on history,
philosophy and theology. His first encyclical, issued almost two years
ago, concerned charity and love.
Thus, Benedict, whose nearly
three-year papacy has stressed a return to theological basics, has now
explicitly addressed two of the three fundamental Christian values:
faith, hope and charity.
As George Lindbeck was wont to remind his students at Yale, “hope” functions in St. Thomas in a way analogous to the way “faith” functions for Luther.
Apropos of political hope:
“a) The right state of human affairs, the moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed simply through structures alone, however good they are. Such structures are not only important, but necessary; yet they cannot and must not marginalize human freedom. Even the best structures function only when the community is animated by convictions capable of motivating people to assent freely to the social order. Freedom requires conviction; conviction does not exist on its own, but must always be gained anew by the community.
b) Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man’s freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.”
“39 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—”
It looks like the long arm of Gnosticism makes itself felt here. Does grace makes all earthly things cease to matter? It seems to me that grace makes all earthly things matter even more.
(Maybe I’ve been reading too much Claudel and the Pope has been reading too much Luther.)
Ann –
I think the point is that if it is “merely” grace – by which I think he means “just” or “only” – referring back to the passage -
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.
I think he means “earthly matters” as in “the way we live our lives”
I am sorry to seem like a broken record on this topic, but I found the following to be difficult to understand:
“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).”
It seems to me that a Jew could make claims very, very similar to those found in this passage, only it would be God who is the source of the fire that both judges and saves.
Now, my question is not intended to challenge the theology of the Incarnation as traditionally understood. Rather, I simply wish to understand what seems to be implied by the above quote: namely, that in the Incarnation judgment and grace, justice and mercy, most fully come together. I am curious to know in what way that would be the case.
John Allen talks about the encyclical in his weekly on line column today.
At the end, he notes several critiques already raised about oit.
One is how do ecclesial structures manifest this hope tpoday?
Gratia supponit naturam, so I think the question is relevant particularly in view of the discussion in the previous thread.
In this highly broken and divided world, hope needs to grow by having the imagination fueled by the living of the mysteries we talk about. It strikes me that many feel distanced instead not from Christ but from those who are supposedly the exemplars of His call.
Paragraph 47, which Fr. Imbelli quotes here, is, I think, a magnificent summary statement of so much of the Christian message. By chance, today I read the New American Bible translation of Psalm 65. It and this passage fit together seamlessly.
I notice the passage that reads: “… (O)ur defilementdoes not stain us forever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and love.” Since there is reason to think that many people learn to “reach out … towards truth and love” through the practice of other religions, e.g., Hinduism, why must we say that these religions are “gravely deficient?”
This caveat aside, if paragraph 47 is at all representative of this document, I couldn’t be happier. This is one encyclical I’ll have to read.
I’ve just finished reading Pope Benedict’s new encyclical. It’s marvelous. One might have wished that he would have said more about our hope for the salvation of the people who do not come to know the Christian God during their earthly lifetime but who do reach out toward truth and justice. And it would have been nice if he had explicitly stated that people like Marx and Horkheimer who, though they did not come explicitly to a Christian life, exposed seriously defective conceptions of God or Christianity and therefore deserve our thanks.
Nonetheless, Pope Benedict gives us an extraordinarily rich and profound expression of our faith. What he says about prayer, God’s judgment, the importance of things in this life, etc. deserves to be reflected on and taught by every Catholic religious educator, whether clergy or lay.
Finally, what the pope says puts into proper context the multiple arguments among us, e.g., clergy-lay relations, what counts as proper church music, the Latin Mass issue, etc. All these arguments have some earthly importance. But however they divide us, they ought never make us forget that we are all always to appreciate that Christ saves us as a community. As the pope says, we may never pray as though others are our enemies. Opponents, perhaps, but always at bottom beloved brothers and sisters.
What a document!!
Bob: Concerning ecclesial structures, the late Dennis Cardinal Dougherty offered wonderful advice to a bishop he was about to ordain: “(W)hen you face Jesus Christ in eternity as one of His bishops, He is not going to ask you how you got along with the Roman Curia, but how many souls you saved.”
I must say that this quote has helped me immensely in order to maintain proper focus and foundation.
Ann and Sean: Your comments made me think about the phrase “Justice tempered with mercy”. All of us should be thankful for the gifts of grace and mercy, but justice and grace inter-related help us both to accept responsibility without scrupulous anxiety and to be responsible for revealing the light of Christ. Through this twofold relationship, we seek to forgive as we have been forgiven. The performative sense as explained in this encyclical helps us to develop a proper performance.
Also, I think of the many people I have encountered who have sought to enter our Church and many of them have said no matter where I have been that they have witnessed in the Church Christians who not only spoke of faith but also acted upon it. (Referring to the Letter to James.)
I look forward to other comments and other reflections. They will help me reflect on this encyclical more.