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n. 1
gennaio 2012
Altri articoli
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Italiano
The
Lord our God
Images of God in the Church
edited by
FRANCESCO COSENTINO
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The
present situation of Christianity, at least in the West, is felt by many
in the Church as a "time of crisis." The so-called Christianity, which
mould the vision of life and culture, slowly and quietly gave way to a
general apathy affecting all areas of life and that, in religious terms,
translates into spiritual atrophy. It leads, in the heart of the old
western continent, the forgetfulness of God and a progressive
irrelevance of the Christian faith. For this reason the Church, driven
by Benedict XVI, feels the urgency of a new evangelization. The Church
will have to "complain faith" and to encourage a renewed freshness. Do
not think it is misplaced in this context, and tried to explain the
reasons that a new evangelization has an important aspect of the
announcement of faith: the question of God's image
God:
who is he?
Such a
challenge is not to be underestimated for its underground and hidden
potential of Christian received message and explicit acceptance of
faith. Indeed, we can say that without a deep reflection on the image of
God, will be almost impossible, despite good intentions and efforts
costly, to effectively convey the Gospel message and to take on the
spirit of our contemporaries, making them available to the comparison
with the demands of faith. Each man, in fact, before investing in terms
of trust on a reality, in addition to being persuaded by intellectual
arguments, need to feel what is proposed as something that meets their
desires, their own emotional world, their hopes and research of
happiness.
A strictly perfect truth, that does not show the traits of goodness
and beauty capable of agreeing to the human, is often
perceived as hostile, antagonistic and violent. The same history of
atheism shows us that is often distorted and negative image of God has
to be fought and rejected. The problem today, therefore, there appears
primarily that of research into new media or new strategies to awaken
the faith (which is also necessary) but, rather, a question that the
Church must honestly make to itself: as the image of God present
in the today's world through our languages, our structures, forms of
belief, the practice of living in society?
The
Church and the image of God
On 27
October 2011, speaking in Assisi, Pope Benedict XVI has addressed this
issue in a really bright, stating that among no-believers there are
"people seeking the truth, seeking the true God, whose image in the
religions, because of way in which they frequently are practiced, is not
infrequently hidden.
What
they can’t find God also depends on the faithful with their distorted or
reduced image of God. So their inner struggle and their question is also
a reminder to us believers, all believers to purify their faith, so that
God - the true God - becomes accessible".
The Pope points out a challenge for the evangelization of the future,
but also a question that the people of believing must put at the center
of his own life: which image of God the Church is passing on? The
question – it is obvious - calls for a response, not simply theoretical
or intellectual, as a true pastoral, spiritual and structure conversion
of the Church. We offer, of course, only a small map without denying the
great strides that the Church has made since Vatican II, about her
relationship with the world and a renewed image of God.
The God of Fear
It is
the image conveyed by a Church that often struggles to get out of a
religious scheme based on outside observance of the law and on an
explicit, often formal, obedience. It is not uncommon, unfortunately, to
meet experience of churches focused in the forms and language of
preaching more on sin than experience to be loved by God.
The God who dwells unconsciously the imagination of many religious
people today - perhaps mainly for experiences of their past times’
Church - God is a judge, before whom we are filled with guilt. A God
before whom we are called to be more pure and perfect. The Dutch
theologian Houtepen has an effective expression: a God like a "strong
eye" which scans the whole of our life.
The "stopgap" God
The
expression of the Protestant theologian who died under the Nazis,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In a world as an adult, weaned from some mythical
conceptions of reality and the universe, thanks to the emancipation of
science and knowledge, you can no longer tolerate a naive, gullible
faith, closed to the advancement of the humanities and positive, caged
in a pre-modern worldview. On this road the Church has made considerable
progress. However, a creeping resentment harbored towards modernity and
progress, often makes it look like a small village on the defensive and
"outside world". Some devotional practices and languages, generate the
idea that faith imposes a sort of blind and irrational belief.
The
German philosopher Nietzsche wrote, with biting irony, that Christians
believe in the providence roughly like this: when it ‘s raining they
think that God will open the umbrella. Too many Christians, even today,
think so and heir faith unfortunately slips into superstition and
idolatry, or at least becomes a habit to escape from the world becoming
irresponsible. A situation that calls for more mature believers, more
open to the thought and do not intend to God as a "quick fix" that
solves their problems when the man fails to arrive.
The God of suffering
On this
aspect, the speech would be theologically very large and delicate. It is
undeniable that the Church proclaims one truth: Christ and him
crucified. However, there are many and varied forms and languages
of
the Church who have obviously distorted the meaning of Christ's
suffering and his sacrifice, slipping into sacrificial visions marked
the limit of masochism. Now, appealing to the theology of the twentieth
century has beautifully illustrated, we want to clarify: the sacrifice
of Christ does not invite to a faith that seeks suffering, not even the
faith thinks that the Father willed the suffering of the Son to appease
his anger towards humanity.
It is love that makes a gift to become a means of salvation and
liberation and not the suffering itself. A credible Church when
proclaims the God of love, who wants to give the life in abundance and
the joy to his children, requires a radical conversion from an image of
God related to the search for pain and suffering. The conversion
requires a more radical idea: we can never say that suffering is God's
punishment for my sins, or God's will that I have to embrace.
The perception of many our contemporaries is, although not so
explicitly, that the Church is looking with suspicion our deeply human
joys and is bringing out a certain idea of
sacrifice.
Perhaps, most of our words, these are speaking: a few pictures of
popular piety, especially during Holy Week, which impress in popular
collective imagination and that require deep purification.
The "powerful" God
Once
again it is urgent to recall the centrality of the Crucified. He shows
us the image of a weak God, the poor, who marries the cause of the least
and the despised. Jesus shows us this way in whole his life that
culminates in the Cross. This God who invites us: don’t sit at the first
place and don’t want to be the first, he is the first one who
stoops to wash the feet of injured humanity. He is a poor and calls for
the radical inner poverty that makes free: from themselves, from own
claims, from the call of command, from the temptation of owning. A
single application will suffice to highlight another frontier of
conversion for the whole Church and individual believers: let’s show
really a poor and free God when, in the institutional forms as well as
in the management of the ordinary life of the community, we are tempted
to appear, from manias of grandeur, from careerism, by unrestrained
attachment to money and the inability to give up certain privileges,
social and economic, as well as forms of triumphalistic presence?
For a
new image of God
Many
other images transmitted by the Church may be likely to second thoughts
and conversions. To paraphrase the great French theologian Henri de
Lubac, who intends to be the faith as a continuous journey and not as
inactivity.
Those who remain anchored to the nostalgia of the past and the new
locks in stiffness of the Spirit, risks becoming a "remaining
spirit" that de Lubac would not hesitate to set one of those spirits
that, for an excess of zeal in defending Christian truth, make it a dry
tree that never changes. Certain images of God, however, must be
transformed.
We need a Church that present to the world an image of a lover and
loving God, exquisitely human and deeply open to life. We need to dream
a Church that presents this God to us: a Church of love, a Church open
to men and history, a joyful Church and, above all, a poor and free
Church. It will be the only possible way to be the Church of tomorrow.
Francesco Cosentino
Pontificia Università Lateranense
Via XXIV Maggio, 10 - 00187 Roma
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