How to Speak of the Christian Faith Today: Two Instructions for Winning the Gold
They are a book from the diocese of Rome on the Creed and an article by “La Civiltà Cattolica” on the "Our Father". Both are very proud of the primacy of Christianity – and very severe against the skeptics and rival religions
by Sandro Magister
ROMA – In the middle of summer, two authoritative written works have been published in Rome, both seeking to provide guidance for the way in which the Christian faith is proclaimed to the world.
The first is a book that presents itself as "an aid to the Christians of Rome for expressing the reasons for their faith." Instead of an author's name there is written "The Diocese of Rome." The preface was written by Camillo Cardinal Ruini, who as the pope's vicar is the titular head of the diocese. The publisher is Lateran University Press, which is run by the Pontifical Lateran University, of which Ruini is the grand chancellor. The rector of the Lateran is Ruini’s former auxiliary, Rino Fisichella, who was responsible for drafting much of the book. The title is taken from the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 13: "I Believed, and therefore I Spoke." The subtitle: "For an Understanding of the Faith." The cover image is the preaching of Paul in Athens as painted by Raphael.
The second work is an article that appeared in the August 7-21, 2004 edition of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the magazine published by the Rome Jesuits which by statute must pass inspection by the Vatican secretariat of state before going to press. The author is Jesuit Fr. Roland Meynet, professor of New Testament exegesis at the Pontifical Gregorian University. The topic is the "Our Father," the distinctive prayer of Christians which Jesus taught to the disciples, included in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the Sermon on the Mount.
Both of the writings go to the heart of Christianity: the Creed and the "Our Father." They deliberately insist upon the original and unique features of the Christian faith. When they place Christianity beside other religions, it is only to show that it can by no means be assimilated with them. But let's begin at the beginning.
1. The “Credo” of the Diocese of Rome
In his preface to "I Believed, and therefore I Spoke," cardinal Ruini explains that the idea of this brief volume came to him at the "citizens' mission" that he has promoted in recent years in the diocese of Rome. He realized, he writes, that "we are unable to express coherently the originality that Christianity possesses." And thus "this text aims to propose some of the reasons why faith in Jesus Christ deserves to be welcomed, chosen, and lived. This faith does not place itself beside other religious manifestations, as if it were one of the traditions one comes across in today's globalized world. [...] Communicating the faith in the contemporary world demands the primary commitment of knowing what one believes and being able to see it in its truth and originality, without syncretism of any kind."
And again:
"Dialogue, which Christians employ particularly at this time with those who do not share their own faith, is not an impediment, but an incentive to verifying more closely the uniqueness of Christianity, and thus to touch with one's hand the differences that distinguish it from the other religions. Respect for those who do not share our faith is not the same thing as a generic form of tolerance to which one often hears appeals being made. Respect is much more profound and demanding than tolerance, because it understands the ultimate objective: not a general leveling of religions, but the search for truth, which can only be one, and which must be sought in complete freedom. Varying forms and other differences do not create obstacles, but rather prompt us to verify where truth lies and, once we have found it, to become its intimate friends."
The fact that many different religions live together in the capital of Catholicism is nothing new, and shouldn't be a barrier, Ruini writes:
"Rome has always been a 'patria communis.' When the first Christians arrived within its walls, they found the Roman religion, Judaism, and other religious expressions that originated from regions that Rome had conquered. No Christian assimilated himself to any of these religions, but on the contrary felt the need to communicate his faith in Jesus Christ, because in him everything bore the marks of the fulfillment and the decisive resolution of the meaning of life. Other religions were not an obstacle; if anything, the opposite is true. What they did was to live the faith in a most consistent manner, in order to show by their way of life that they had attained the truth. [...] Our own days demonstrate the forceful presence of many close to us who profess another religion. Our history and our way of life do not change. We are called to live the faith with the same intensity as the first Christians, with the same conviction and the same certainty that the fullness of truth is found only in Jesus Christ."
In the book, "the superiority of Christian revelation over other religious forms" is affirmed many times without timidity. Even resemblances are denied. For example:
"Christianity, unlike Judaism and Islam, can never be defined as 'the religion of the book.' The revelation of Jesus goes far beyond codification in a text. [...] The proclamation that Jesus makes is not separate from his making himself present and showing his face: this is an incomparable unity that history never knew before and will never see the likes of again."
Another resemblance the book contradicts is that between the Christian and Muslim martyrs:
"Faith is the serious business of life. And there is a word that permits us to encapsulate the overall meaning of faith: martyr. Martyrdom is the sign of the greatest love because it gives the supreme testimony for the sake of the faith, that testimony that freely chooses an inflicted death through the certainty of being in the truth and of having life. [...] Shahid [also] has a great value for both Sunni and Shiite Islam: those who prove that they have renounced earthly life for the glory of Allah, and struggle and die for jihad, gain paradise. [...] But shahid causes the death of other persons, it creates a situation of violence and death without making any distinction of innocent persons among its victims. Its driving purpose is a will to impose its plan of life. [...] We therefore maintain that the definition of martyrdom should not be ascribed to this case; in fact, what is offered is not a testimony, but an exhibition that is placed subjectively at the service of an ideology of violence that cannot be compared or confused with any other expression of dedication, solidarity, and love."
In another passage, the book reveals the superiority of Christianity, not only over Islam, but also over the great Asian religions:
"The [Christian] act of faith is situated before the truth of God and of man in such a coherent way that it has no rival in other religions. Man is not asked to humiliate himself beyond measure, annihilating himself before God. God is not required to immerse himself in all things, confusing himself with his own creation."
As for the "problem of the salvation of those of other religions," the book puts the reader on guard against a "subtle trap" which it describes in this way:
"If one may be saved in any religion, [...] everyone should remain in his religion, and there is no need for conversion. This dampens the sense of the need for mission, and it also prevents one from analyzing whether the religions as such are in a state of tension, awaiting their fulfillment and the one truth that is made present in the one true God. All of this in the end seems to be resolved today in an historical and phenomenological understanding of the other religions, without debating the comparisons and judgments that must be made."
He makes a critical assessment of modern skepticism and of its most famous proponent, Umberto Eco:
"At the bottom of this theory lies a profound lack of faith in regard to the truth. Relativism here shows its most pleasant and convincing face, but it is no less dangerous and mistaken for this. We need only examine an innocuous expression like that of U. Eco in 'The Name of the Rose' to verify the intention and the ideology hiding behind this way of thinking: 'Truth means only this: freeing oneself from the morbid passion for truth.' As one will note, at the bottom of this is an idiosyncratic form of truth, because one wishes to maintain that truth does not exist, but that there is only a personal truth that deserves to be lived without being offered to anyone else." But "the theme of truth is essential for all religions. Without it, one would arrive at an equivocal relationship with divinity, without ever being certain of his existence and of the efficacy of prayer."
The central chapters of the book are entitled "God is Father" and "Jesus, the Revealer." The end of the first of these chapters is exemplary:
"Jesus certainly used the word 'abba' in addressing God; the historicity of this usage has been firmly proven by objective scholarship. [...] 'Abba' expresses love, confidence, intimacy, and submission; this gamut of sentiments is contained in the use Jesus makes of the term. This reveals his primordial experience of God, his awareness of belonging to him in a unique way. For this reason, he distinguishes himself from the disciples when he speaks of the Father [...]: the others can call God 'our Father' only after he has revealed and pronounced the 'my Father.' [...] Never, in the Old Testament or extra-biblical literature, did a man have such a relationship with God. A Jew never would have dared to address himself to JHWH by invoking him in this way. [...] In this expression we find further confirmation of the originality of the Christian faith. [...] This is seen in terms of the Jewish religion, but neither could the Muslim ever address Allah by invoking him as 'father': the name 'father' is missing from the 99 names that the Koran attributes to him. [...] Nor may the singularity of the filial relationship of Christianity be confused or identified with a generic relationship of paternity founded upon creation. Since ancient times God was called 'father of all things,' and in this sense the term makes reference to his creative work. To say – as is often said – that we are all brothers is true in a sense founded in reference to creation. Inasmuch as we are men and women of this world, we are all brothers and sisters in reference to the one Creator who is at the origin of all, and who for this reason is called 'father.' [...] But even more than this, Christians are brothers and sisters because they believe in Christ, who is the Son of God, and in him they can address God by calling him Father. For this reason, the relation of sonship goes beyond the generic sphere of creation and is inserted in the specific sphere of the faith that asserts having God as Father because we have received his life in the water of baptism, our pledge for now of what we will receive in eternal life. In the Son, therefore, we are truly sons, and through faith we can recite with full confidence the prayer that he taught us as his disciples: 'Our Father'."
And this very 'Our Father' is the subject of the article published in the August 7-21 edition of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the second text presented here.
2. The “Our Father” of “La Civiltà Cattolica”
The article by Fr. Roland Meynet in the authoritative magazine of the Rome Jesuits also makes a comparison between Christianity and Islam; to be precise, between the "Our Father" and an analogous prayer from the Muslim tradition:
"Our Lord, who are in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
may your rule be over heaven and earth.
O God, as your rule is in heaven, so also bring your mercy upon us on the earth.
O God, Lord of the good, forgive us our faults, our sins, and our failings, and shed upon us your mercy, and a healing from among your healings on what one suffers, and may he be healed."
But the similarities, Meynet immediately notes, are only apparent:
"From the first word, the one to whom the prayer is addressed is not called 'Our Father,' but 'Our Lord;' here already lies all the difference. Many Christians, so accustomed to considering God as Father, cannot even imagine that he could be considered differently among other believers. Now Islam is distinguished from the Christian faith on this fundamental point of divine filiation. For Islam, Jesus is not by any means the Son of God; even less so his disciples! One thus understands why the central petition of the 'Our Father,' which is the petition specific to the son, is entirely absent from the prayer that Muslim tradition attributes to Mohammed himself."
And the "specific petition" absent there, to which Meynet refers, is the same one that is at the center of his exegesis of the "Our Father":
"Give us this day our daily bread."
This is central to the "Our Father" not only because of the position it occupies – fourth among seven petitions – but above all because of its significance.
It joins, in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, another great series of seven, that of the beatitudes. These, in turn, have as their fourth and central beatitude a request for nourishment:
"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied."
In the overall scheme of the beatitudes, Meynet notes, justice is identified with Jesus:
"The bread requested at the center of the 'Our Father' thus has something to do with justice, and, if Jesus is identified with justice, we have the right to understand the bread as 'the bread that comes down from heaven' (John 6:32). The words of Jesus related in the fourth Gospel – 'I am the bread of life, he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall not thirst' (John 6:35) – directly echo the central beatitude."
But there's more:
"The petition for daily bread is the one that best fits with the name of him to whom the prayer is addressed: 'Our Father.' [...] The first words that God addresses to man as just created, male and female, are a dual blessing. The first is 'be fruitful and multiply' (Gen. 1:28). [...] God is father, and the first gift he gives to man is paternity. The second word of God, which includes the verb 'to give,' concerns nourishment: 'Behold, I give you every plant...' (Gen. 1:29). [...] What God gives is food. Nourishment is the life that sustains and develops itself. By giving nourishment, God thus behaves as a father. [...] It is certainly not insignificant that the proof of proofs [for the progenitors] hinges upon eating, or more precisely, on the gift of nourishment. And this will burst forth in the cursing of the soil, with this word of God to Adam: 'In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread' (Gen. 3:19). This is the first time the word 'bread' appears in the Bible. The central petition of the 'Our Father' corresponds with it. [...] What the petition for bread implies is that it will no longer be with the sweat of his face that man will eat bread, but he will receive it freely from the hand of God. [...] The bread that Jesus makes us ask for in the 'Our Father,' the bread he himself will give, is his body given, along with his blood poured out, 'for the remission of sins' (Mt. 26:28). Jesus is the new Adam, who gives instead of wanting to take, and thus redeems from original sin. [...] We must also remember that, at his birth, Jesus was placed 'in a manger'; if the narration in Luke 2:1-20 insists three times on the manger, it is to indicate that the newborn is a kind of nourishment, which will be realized at the end of the Gospel in the gift of the body of Jesus during the Paschal meal (Luke 22:19-20). Finally, it must be added that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which means ‘House of Bread'."
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The exegesis of the "Our Father" in “La Civiltà Cattolica” deserves to be read in its entirety, and likewise for the book of the Diocese of Rome, "I Believed, and therefore I Spoke."
They are signs of a new attitude toward giving the reasons for the Christian faith today: an attitude more of rupture than of conformity with the spirit of the age, more of distinction than of adaptation, more of mission than of dialogue.
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The book:
Diocesi di Roma, “Ho creduto per questo ho parlato. Per una intelligenza della fede”, Lateran University Press, Roma, 2004, pp. 152, euro 8,00.
A link to the publisher:
> Pontificia Università Lateranense
And to the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that published, with the Vatican's imprimatur, the article by Fr. Roland Meynet:
> “La Civiltà Cattolica”
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English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.com
Go to the home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, to access the latest articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister’s e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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27.8.2004
