In his introductory remarks to this week’s catechesis during Benedict XVI’s Wednesday General Audience, the Pope addressed a common error about the nature of Christianity:
According to general opinion, Christianity is a European religion that has exported the culture of this Continent to other countries. The reality, though, is a lot more complex, as the root of the Christian religion is found in the Old Testament, and therefore in Jerusalem and the Semitic world. … Also, its expansion during the first centuries was both westward — toward the Greek-Latin world, where it then inspired the European culture — and eastward to Persia and India, thus contributing to stimulate a specific culture, in Semitic languages, with its own identity. Along the same lines I would like to speak today of St. Ephrem the Syrian, born in Nisibis around 306 into a Christian family. He was the most important representative of Syriac Christianity.
Notice what the Holy Father is doing here. He is making it plainly clear that Christianity, while originally rooted in a semitic culture, has no more claim to be ‘European’ than it does to be ‘Syriac’. Christianity found itself inculturated (integrated) into the very fabric of the cultures that were evangelized by either the Apostles or Christian missionaries.
The “error”, as I put it, is to presume – or, more aptly, to demand – that Christianity is only an imperialistic export of the European culture, and that any culture who encounters Christianity will be unnecessarily “corrupted” by the (self-depricatingly) “evil” of the imperial culture. At the same time, those who advocate this position – many times in South American theological circles – advocate inculturating Christianity without any reference to the historical or geographical development of Christianity through the ages. They envision a Christianity ex nubes, unstained by the corrupting influence of the ‘dominant’ (and in their opinion, the dominating, “oppressing”) culture.
The Prots also got this wrong when they sought to re-invent Christianity. They had to create the myth that the integration of Christianity into the Roman culture had irretrievably corrupted the original, pure, unsullied teachings of Christ and the Scriptures he dictated to the four Evangelists. (Obviously, this is a polemical position, but here it is.) They didn’t realize that without the inculturation of Christianity into the Roman culture, there would’ve been no Europe as they found it; nor would there have been a Europe worth preserving by their own religious reformation endeavors.In every age, the task of Christians have been to bring the Gospel (not just its mere ‘truths’ as C.S. Lewis would want, but the whole of it) to cultures that have yet to experience the Joy, Freedom, and Beauty of the Gospel.
The challenge today is to re-Christianize Western Civilization. That is indeed a challenge. A culture that was originally a manifestation of a united, Christianized conglomeration of nation-states has gotten ‘over’ Christianity. It now thinks in terms of being beyond good and evil. It has grown tired of it’s perception of Christianity as being oppressive, repressive, and regressive. However, much like our own perception of our parents as we entered adolescence, we rebelled against them because we “knew” that they didn’t know what they were doing, much to our own downfalls.
Only in hope can we see a time in which Western Culture is able to be re-baptized anew and see with fresh eyes and a child-like heart the new life originally intended for us by God our Father.
