“We cannot make the Church, we can only announce what He has done. The Church does not begin with our ‘making,’ but with the ‘making’and ‘speaking’of God. In the same way, theApostles did notsay, after a few meetings: now we want to make a Church, and that by means of a constituent assembly they were going to draft a constitution. No, they prayed and in prayer they waited, because they knew that only God Himself can create His Church, that God is the first agent: if God does not act, our things are only ours and are insufficient; only God can testify that it is He who speaks and hasspoken.”

Second, the author takes engaging culture to mean imposing one’s personal faith experience on others. The issue of affecting culture is far wider and deeper than that, and different from it. Often the influence is by way of leavening (“kingdom of heaven is like a woman who mixed leavening into three measures of flour”). The Church, or the Christian religion, like leaven, mixes in and causes a happy rising while itself remaining invisible in the process.

Third, a Catholic who attends to Vatican II could not fail to recognize that it is part of our mission to engage the culture for its own sake, not just to proseletyze but to influence for the common good. This is risky business, prone to error (as many Catholic social service groups have demonstrated, thinking they can promote error and evil for the sake of achieving good) but we must do our best, beginning with our own personal repentance.

Fourth, it grieves me to see C S Lewis cited in error, to make an erroneous point. What Lewis was speaking of in his discourse on Joy was the longing for heaven which is only satisfied by heaven itself, and not anything on earth–in particular one could say, not any political or economic system. This discourse did not mean for Lewis, and should not mean for us, that we should not influence culture. (It does mean that in doing so we should avoid utopian attempts to make heaven on earth.) In fact, if you read Lewis’ corpus you see at every turn, in his fiction as well as non-fiction, a focused, intense program of trying to influence culture for the common good–a program grounded in Christian principles.

As Dr. Patrick and Lewis before him affirm, the Christian commits the same error if he attempts to repossess culture. If one seeks to grasp, possess and “Christianize” culture, he will fill that void with an impress of his image rather than that of Christ. Culture is never something than one can truly “have” or “possess” and one who attempts to do so will find himself chasing an abstraction. Abstractions, since they are abstract non-entities, are always vehicles for power and ideological images will fill the missing void where one seeks culture.

No one can create Christian culture, since such a phenomenon is “experienced only as the fruit of something else”–namely the lifelong encounter with Christ, primarily in the life of the Church. Any attempts to bypass this lifelong religiosity, lifelong relationship, ultimately reduce Christianity to an item and an ideology. Christ becomes an alibi for an ideological agenda that may even contain some virtuous aims but ultimately lacks an integral point and criterion beyond the self.

Nevertheless, and this is where Dr. James Patrick falls short, the life of the Church is intrinsically and inseparably an engagement with reality.

The consumptive view of Christianity treats the encounter with Christ as a private purchasing item–something we possess in order to evade a total engagement with reality. This view reduces Christ to an ideological checklist or guideline for our projects–once the agenda is set, we discard the item and move on to the more pressing activist concerns. Yet a Christian cannot truly engage culture without at once living a truly committed life of faith in the Church. Reciprocally, a true Christian faith cannot bypass reality. The consumptive or voluntarist view of Christianity treats the relation to Christ as something extrinsic, something that we need to voluntarily initiate first. Likewise, such an ontology also sees the human person’s relation to others and the world in extrinsic terms–thus nature, religiosity, culture, even friendships, are treated as things to possess.

Yet, the Catholic ontology recognizes that the human person’s relation to God is constitutive in human nature. Furthermore, the human person’s constitutive relation to God constitutes her relation to other persons and the natural world. Thus, Guissani affirms that “according to the Christian tradition so tenaciously taken up by John Paul II [and now Benedict XVI] culture is a phenomenon of man’s humanization, a path to man’s humanization and therefore concerns human ‘being’ [nature].”

In other words, culture is a natural path in the journey of the fulfillment of human nature. Cultural flourishing is never inevitable, but neither is culture something that we can seek out, grasp and posses. Culture is the fruit of an encounter than we can neither grasp nor posses. Rather, the encounter continually and constantly seeks us in every circumstance and we can freely say yes or no to this provocation. Every human inquiry into reality, the concrete facts of existence and human life, is a response to Someone who first seeks us. As Pope Benedict XVI affirms, “Human reason bears within itself a demand for what is perennial valid and lasting. This demand constitutes a permanent summons, indelibly written in the human heart, to set out to find the one whom we would not be seeking had he not already set out to meet us. In Him, all the anguish and longing of the human heart finds fulfillment.”

In responding to life’s provocations according to our abilities, we live our vocations and give witness to an encounter with what all persons desire. In living with interest and without censure, we are protagonist for a concrete and reasonable fact that concerns all persons. Such a fact is never an ideological projection that reduces and enchambers the human heart. The saints are builders of a culture, not a power-hegemony.

Saints desire neither power nor culture. Saints desire simply that in every instance than can truly affirm that, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” This human desire is the source of all true friendship, culture and joy–a desire for “thou who makes me” to live and remain in me.

We have let the world re-define Christian basics like love and forgiveness and now we have whole Christian denominations promoting homosexual ‘marriage’ or pastors in the name of “love.”
But where do we see any Christians serious about getting back to basics and clarifying them?
http://tinyurl.com/ajnu5rr