Introduction

Christian belief is not a conceptual religious machine, conceived, projected and constructed in order to meet certain human needs or fulfil various human aspirations. Nor is it an intellectual structure erected in accordance with a set of criteria endorsed by a certain age or a particular group of people. Christian belief is not a construction that may be deconstructed and reconstructed, but rather a discovery of something already given. As life is something given, which preceeds any human action and exists as the prerequisite condition for any human activity, Christian belief is a discovery of the works and words of the Holy Trinity. And as life is known by being lived, so the Christian belief is known by living in this discovery. Christian belief is based on facts of Life. The Christian Church is one of these facts.

The Church between barren traditionalism and flimsy trendiness

The Church always finds herself in the danger area between a barren traditionalism and a flimsy trendiness. The Church has a tradition, something which has been handed over to her once and for all, and which has to be handed over uncorrupted to each new generation. Tradition literally means that which has been handed over. But tradition is not a deep frozen merchandise to be handled in an unbroken chain of freezers. Tradition is something living to be given to each new generation, and once taken over, it is formed and coloured by the people of that time, their concepts, questions, problems and needs.

Traditionalism stands for permanence and unchangeability. The traditional is semper idem, always the same. In an ever changing world there is at least one archimedic point: tradition. Of old is has been like this, and so it shall be for ever. G’imme that ol’time religion–it’s good enough for me. Here is security, but it may be bought at the cost of irrelevance: an incomprehensible religious idiom, a liturgy that no-one any longer understands, symbols that do not speak to anyone any more. So much is invested in the past that the present never gets a chance. The Christian faith becomes a fossil and a relict. There is a traditionalism in a bad sense, one that stands next to death: rigidity and petrification.

Trendiness arises when the sensitivity to all the contemporary whispers and calls is cultivated to the extent that the signals from “the faith which has been once and for all entrusted to the saints” is no longer heard or consistently misinterpreted. The ambition to be relevent and in tune with the times is purchased at the price of becoming deaf to tradition: the substance dissolves and the identity fades away. What remains is surfing on the waves of contemporary fads and trends, all the bad copies and the ever prevailing opportunism. What the world outside the Church since long has left behind for new waves and winds, the straggling Church takes up with drums beating and trumpets sounding. So the Church becomes the sum and substance of self-conceited officiousness. Everyone who has seen the cartoon showing a knock-kneed cleric as an ice hockey goal keeper with the balloon: “Dear lads, who is serving”, is once and for all cured from all ingratiating trend surfing. He who marries the zeitgeist will before long become a widower.

Church, humanum and Tradition

The history of the Church is a continuum, a flow through history. In every instant there is confrontation of the past and the future in the present. The tension between tradition and renewal, rigid perseverance resulting in irrelevance, indiscriminate listening ending in loss of identity, has followed the Church through the centuries. And, yet, the Church still lives. Why?

Tradition has no doubt always been questioned. Objections have always been abundant: tradition is obsolete, outworn, useless. Who needs a quill pen when there is the computer? Why should we take over an antiquated understanding of the world or an outmoded view of life? We know more about human existence than any generation before us. Look at technology! Look at transistors and transplants! Look at videos and virtual reality! We now live in a new world with new values and new views. Old answers simply do not apply. Convincing as this may seem, it not true because human life essentially remains the same throughout history. Therefore, it is not appropriate to compare quill pens to a computer and apply this comparison to the warp of life. There is a humanum which for all and for ever remains the same: a birth-giving womb and an open grave define the room in which all theological statements take place. There is a common human experience of birth and death, joy and suffering, meetings and farewells, toothache and orgasm: all this which has been the same within and between people through the ages; all that can be told, transmitted, communicated in talks, speeches, novels, poetry, drama, tales, sagas, myths, pictures, music, dance.

There is something given which can be handed over both when it pertains to the existential, common experice of the humanum, and the Christian belief. There is a substance that does not change. There is an identity which remains the same. But on the same time, there is a growth in humankind: new experiences, new questions, new answers colour and form the traditum, that which is transmitted. Here the lies difficulty: the meeting between that which is old, given, and that which is new, reflecting its age. The ideal is and remains a continuity which preserves the tradition uncorrupted, but makes it flow on enriched–non nova, sed nove–not new things but in a new way. In this sense, a good traditionalism certainly exists.

The Church has no other experience of the ordinary human experience of the humanum. This is the one side of the Church, her earthly, created, human side. But the remarkable thing about the Church is that she is, at the same time, the bearer of an experience, which as a gift has been given from the outside, and thus transcends herself as the receiver of this gift. This gift is the divine revelation. The Church exists because the God who created heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible, also created the Church as a sign of God’s intervention and presence in the world, the Church being not only a sign but also at the same time the mediatrix and milieu of this divine action and presence here and now.

What we call humanum has a divine sanction beacause it is created. Through his Word God has created man and woman in his image in order to attain to his likeness. God also blessed man and woman, and even if human existence is marred by the consequences of the Fall, God has never retracted his original blessing. God the Creator has also manifested a total committment, and solidarity with, his creation by becoming man in Jesus Christ: The Word was made flesh and lived among us. For us men and because of our salvation he came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. Therefore, the humanum has a double attestation: through creation and incarnation.

In the Church the encounter between the human and the divine takes place in a visible and tangible manner. In Christ the Church has an experience of what it means to be human, which cannot be found elsewhere. In the Church the meeting between the past and the future takes place harmoniously in Christ. As the divine Word he is the One in Whom all things were created, he is the Logos structure of all creation, he is the Last by whom all will be judged and the Ultimate towards whom all things tend. In Jesus Christ the Church is already perfected. This is one side of the Church: her essential side. In one sense the Church is already One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

However, there is also another side of the Church: the one in time and space. Placed in time and space the Church is always only one generation away from possible extinction balancing over the abyss between traditionalism and trendiness, petrified irrelevance and total loss of substance and identity. The religious, intellectual, moral and social environment in which the Church finds itself today is characterized by secularisation, which means that everything is measured and judged against the values and views of this saeculum. This presents a tremendous challenge to the Church, but this challenge is not greater than those which once confronted the Church in the past. The Church has always had to encounter the voices and whisperings of the times, the lures and threaths of the age, but her prime obligation and call have remained unaltered to this day, that is to withstand the temptations and fence off the dangers of compromising her integrity through various forms of servility to contemporary projects. It would be disastrous for the mission of the Church to mankind if she lost her catholic identity by compromising it for some contemporary syncretism. In every time and age the Church in a sense has to struggle in order to become what she essentially is: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

Human transcendence-experiences and divine revelation

The mountain, the sea, the desert are settings that divest man of all his outer props and decorations and make him encounter himself in his existential nakedness. Not the mountain that can be reached by a cable car, not the sea seen from the deck of a cruising ship, not the desert peeped at from some comfortable resort, but the mountain peak reached after hours of laborious lonely climbing, the vastness of the sea experienced from a tiny sailing boat, the desert extending as far as the eye can see–they all make man standing before the ultimate limits of his existence and reveal his existential situation: in the center and, yet, reduced almost to nothing.

Man is exposed to forces over which he has no control and which at every instant may threathen to destroy him. Death is near as is also life. Man is a little speck, hardly visible, and, yet, he is there, experiencing being in its complexity. He is alive. He lives. In these extreme situations man has the ecstatic experience of the nearness and intensity of being and of nothingness, of living and of death. “I am! I am alive! The world is there! And I know it is! But this intense feeling of life and vitality is instantly threatened by the harrowing insight “The world is going to be there, but not seen by me as I know I shall not be there”. Man is seeing himself and his existence no longer from his own perspective but from the from the outside, from the horizon which surrounds him. He has seen himself in a new way as if he had been seen by another. Man has experienced something infinitely greater than is own life and existence.

To be surrounded by the horizon and experience that one has been seen–if it were only by oneself–this remarkable experience of total nearness and ultimate distance is the beginning of a transcendence experience. Man finds himself standing before something numinious, which evokes in him a primordal shudder, and out of his depths breaks forth the ecstasty of being. Out of his depths also rises the horror of nothingness. And in the contrast between the experience of being and of nothingness grows an intuition: there is something unutterable, unspeakable which is, something which confers being and stands against nothingness.

Someone who has this experience–and people have in all times had it–can learn how this intuition of something “greater”, “higher”, “deeper” manifests itself in a “thou”. This experience, however, is ambigious and even contradictory. Man feels as if there were a possibility of contact, even communion, with this “thou”. At the same time man also acutely becomes aware of the fact that there exists an unbrigdable gap, an infinte distance between himself, the world in which he lives and this “thou”. The world for man seems to be both transparent and opaque, open and closed. Man cannot escape from the ambiguity of of his own existence: nothingness, despair, distance on the one hand and intuition, longing and hope on the other.

Has not the prophet Isaiah put into words the longing of humankind when he prophesies:

Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the water to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nation may tremble at thy presence! When thou didst terrible things which we looked not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence. For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him. Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness (Is. lxiv. 1-5a).

That which in Isaiah’s prophecy is a passionate longing and an ardent prayer has been fulfilled in the Christan belief. The Incarnation, God becoming man in Christ, God in the flesh, is the answer to man’s yearning. The divine address, the divine action, takes shape in a Visitation, in a young women’s yes, in a pregnancy, in a male baby. This is the great miracle of the Christian belief. The gulf between the human and the divine has been bridged. No longer does there exists an unbridgable chasm between time and eternity, finite and infinite, material and spiritual. The yearning and the intuition of man transcending his limited existence is met by one Person of the eternal Godhead entering into time and space. God is meeting man by being born into the world he himelf has created, thereby subjecting himself to its boundries and limitations. In Jesus Christ heaven and earth, uncreated and created, God and man, meet and unite.

Reflecting on the significance of the Incarnation the Church sees a pattern for the Christian understanding of life as a whole. All that is created, all that is human, is in one sense already sanctified through the assumption of humanity by Christ, by his life, his passion and death, his resurrection and by his returning to Father as the glorified One. All that is created, is already perfected in the presence of God. If Christ could come to a particular people at a particular time, and this particularity was an integral part of the Incarnation as constrasted with some abstract idea, a kind of gnosis which never becomes incarnated in a particular person at a particular time in history, then the Christian belief can encounter people just where they are in the very circumstances in which they live. The contingency of the human, the cultural and the historical conditions is the raw material in and through which the Christian belief is incarnated and takes shape. Traditions, customs, concepts and ideas can become integrated parts of the whole. The Christian belief has been inculturized, i.e. it has entered into the cultures it has met, christened them and incorporated them into the Church.

Inculturisation is a consequence of the Incarnation and the basic sacramental view of life which flows from it. Some of the most beautiful flowers of Christianity have grown out of this flower bed. But something which in itself is good and wonderful can be misused. This has also happened to inculturisation. It has been used as an alibi for a never- accomplished conversion or change of heart and mind. Things have been “christened” that cannot in any sense be compatible with the Christian belief. There is a limit which cannot be passed when it comes to what can be taken over and incorporated.

The mountain peak, the vastness of the sea, the desolate desert are settings which reveal man’s nature and position in this world. There, man can learn a lot about himself, about the world and even about God, but certainly not all. In order for man to attain to a true self-knowledge and a adequate understanding of his existence, he needs the divine revelation, which puts man in God’s perspective. This perspective meets man in the icons. Here, the spiritual world looks at man and not the other way around. Man’s perspective is once and for all reversed. God’s perspective of man also encounter him in God’s Word as the Bible reveals how God looks upon man. The divine revelation in the Bible portrays man as created in the image of God in order to attain to his likeness. Therefore, there is always a longing for God in man. Man for ever bears the hallmark of his Maker.

But the biblical revelation also tells a story about man who wants to become like God without God, and who because of this rebellion against God is driven away from him. In his attempt to be like God, man forfeits his place in Paradise. In the crucifixion at Golgotha man accomplishes what he began in the Fall: by killing God man finally becomes what he originally intended to be: an atheist. Man is the contradictory creature who is both yearning for God and killing him. Thus, man’s existential situation cannot only be determined by his own experiences of transcendence. The Word of God has to reveal to him that he is not only a seeker of God but a sinner against God. Through his rebellion against God, the source of being and life, and the transgressions of his will, the way to perfection, man has become a slave under sin walking on a path leading away from the final goal which God has set for him. As a transgressor of God’s will, man does not live in a new freedom but is heading for destruction on his way towards the nothingness, which he dreads, while he at the same time being corrupted by developing crookedly, being incurvatus in se instead of being open to God and his fellow man.

That which is created and human is not immediately fit to be united with the divine. All that is, exists under the conditions and consequences of the Fall, being contaminated and marred by sin. Inculturisation–the Church meeting the world–cannot be based on the Incarnation alone. It has to pass through Golgotha and the atonement at the Cross. In Christ alone the humanum exists in its pure and sinless form. It does not exist in the world. In Christ, however, creation, human nature and human conditions can be atoned for, reconciled, purified, sanctified and consummated. A Church who wants to retain her integrity and identity, therefore, asks how that which is created and human is lived and manifested in Christ. At the same time the Church marvels when she perceives how Jesus Christ is wondrously manifested in and through her, because it is through, with and in Christ that the Church receives her true and abiding identity.

The modern project and the syncretistic project

The word project in a way reveals its own time. A project is something man pursues from his perspective. Out of himself man projects into time and space his thoughts, dreams, hopes, his ideology.

The modern project may be used as a shorthand term for the seculari­sation, characterized as it it by its lack of transcendence, its anthropocentricity and its attendant rationalistic reductionism, together with the sole trans­cendence it can accept, that of time: the future in which the perfection is to be found, that is to say, Utopia. The modern project is throughout pervaded by perspectivism. There are no truths and no absolutes. All depends upon from which, or in whose perspective, things are seen.

The modern project has been shaken to its foundations. Its positi­vistic scientism does not any longer reign over the in­tellectual rostrum. That the modern project is on the retreat can also clearly be seen in the compromise and collapse of the utopian socialism, which is one of its the most conse­quent and spectacular embodiments and manifesta­tions, and of which the fall of the Berlin Wall is the spectacular and defini­ti­ve em­blem.

Secularisation alone does not characterise our time. In the post­modern era various and different modes of thought and sentiments of life meet and exist side by side. The world is no longer a closed box. A new awareness of transcendence is clearly to be discerned. Everywhere there seem to be signs of a new spiritual awareness and new attitudes to life which has left rationalism and atheism far behind. There is a new openness to new worlds and values.

Religion and spirituality are on their way back, not in the form of traditional historic religions, however, but rather as a eclectic amalgam of elements taken from diffe­rent sources: ideologies, reli­gions, esoteri­cism, occul­tism etc. The term attached to this multi­facetted and in many re­spects contradictory contemporary pheno­menon is New Age. Whereas secularization confined its perspective into this saeculum and what can be measured in time and space solely by man’s senses, this perspective literally opens up a new age: a novel under­standing of reality, of knowledge, of man. Yet, in both per­spectives the individual stands as the center. In the religous and ideological supermarket of New Age man strolls as the consumer who fills his trolley with merchandise according to his preferences and taste: reli­gion on private, individual terms.

The crucial question facing the Church today and which she eventual­ly has to answer, is whether the modern project to which the Church for so long has addressed itself at the risk of having lost her identity, is about to be superseded by the syncretistic project.

If this is the case, and everything speaks for it, the Church is confronted with a tremendous challenge. The Church may, of course, go on surfing on the trend waves of moder­nity and in the end become a mausoleum of recent fads and fashions. The Church my let herself be influenced and even dominated by this syncretism, which is in a one sense the heir of theological modernism: religion as the crea­tion of the human spirit or as man’s reaction to the eternal myste­ry of life, the evolu­tionary, dynamic, inclusive religion. With the mystic experience or the gnostic pattern serving as the ultimate criteria for Christian belief, or that which is understood to be the genuine Christian faith as it is defined by American and Continental univer­sity theologians, this religion will easily mix with all prevalent contempo­ra­ry ele­ments. A religion of the new age in cyberspace and virtual reality.

The program of the syncretistic project can be descri­bed in this way: the unknowable and unfathomable mystery of life may be expres­sed and manifested in various ways, and this has also happened in the great traditional religions. But now we have reached the stage in the evolution of man when we can disregard external dividing dogms and doctrinal opinions and unite in a knowledge, a gnosis, which is the common denominator behind, beyond, beneath all words and concepts in the historical religions with their rites and be­liefs, a know­ledge that is embedded deep inside every human being only waiting to be awakened.

The syncretistic project involves an attempt at com­bining elements or fragments of Christian faith with non Christi­an ideas, beliefs or manifestations. The gnostic pattern with a knowledge behind, beyond, beneath, common to all religons in some cases already function as an unifying and uniting factor. Characteristic of the syncretistic project is the search for and the creation of an universal reli­gion.

The Christian Church, however, has a deeper calling than pursuing either the modern project or carrying out the syncretistic pro­ject. Its deepest calling is to realize the catholic synthe­sis.

The catholic synthesis and eucharistic theology

The Christian faith is trinitarian. God is one Gud, but when the Church speaks of her experience of the One in whom she believes, the Church find herself talking about the Father and Creator, the Son and the Saviour, the Spirit and the Sanctifier, because of the way this One God has revea­led himself. The God who revealed his name to Moses at the burning bush as I am the One I am has made himself known as the God who is one God and, yet, a communion of “per­sons”. In the modern project trinitarian belief was dis­carded as impossible and illogical. In the syncretistic project the traditional belief in the Trinity is reinter­preted in a way that will match contemporary demands and expectations. For the Catholic synthesis it is of cruci­al importance that the traditional trinitarian belief of the Church remains in­tact, is deepened and not distorted, as the Trinity is its ground and ultima­te reference.

The Church is the sacramental means God is using to achieve the ultimate goal of his creation. The catholicity of the Church cer­tainly has many dimensions, but the essence of her catholicity lies in her relation to the Trinity: the Crea­tor of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invi­sible. The Church is the work and crea­tion of the trinune God and as such she is God’s people, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Spirit. It is the call of the Church to be catholic, en­compassing the totality of God’s creation.

The Church may be understood as a symbol, an instrument, an icon, a sacra­ment, but more than anything else: a commu­nion. In and through the Church all that is created is restored to its full integrity and revealed in this entire potentia­lity: to be united with the divine in a sacramental way of which the Incarnation is the ground and pattern on its way towards the final goal, which is the transfigura­tion and consumma­tion of all creation. The catholic synthe­sis has as its ground and goal the Holy Trinity: the Creator, the Redeemer, the Lifegiver, Father, Son and Spirit.

All that exists is not there by chance. For the Christian all that is is created, because God through his Word let there be has called it into being. All that is is because God has willed it to be there. Therefore, the Christian has a basic trust in creation. A Christian dares to believe that there is a correspondence between God and man, between the divine and the human. Man’s thirst for God is caused by God himself in order that he may quench it. Also, there is a corre­spondence between man’s in­tellect and the In­tel­lect that once crea­ted all there is and in this very moment sustains it. Delving into the depths of crea­tion through reason in order to learn to know its secrets and, in this way attaining to an intuition of a Supreme Rea­son and seeeing the back of the Creator is entirely in line with the Christian belief: a boundless optimism together with a realistic insight of the grandeur of creation and the limita­tions of human power.

A Christian has a basic trust in creation and its orders. God does not cheat. The fundamental attitude towards life is trust the basic design. The fact that there is an enemy as Jesus calls evil, which threathens and destroys this order, cannot upset this basic trust. When a Christian encounters evil both in the form of moral evil, that is evil which people do and non moral evil, that is evil which hap­pens to people without their fault, e.g. illness and natural dis­asters, he reacts with sorrow and wrath. The is Jesus' own reaction against evil. A Christian passiona­tely in love with creation, finding joy in it in and feeling an awe for life, has the right to rage against the the evil that people do, and the evil manifested in Horton’s head-ache, Huntington’s chorea, VACTERL-syndrome and other af­flictions that man has to live with. Originally, it was not meant so. There is an usur­per and destroyer of God’s good creation. God does not want it to be this way. A Christian may hope and believe this, not as a gullible daydream esca­ping from a grim reality, but rather as a prohpecy and a real hope that all things in the end will be well, when God’s will finally has prevailed.

Everybody knows from his experience that creation in its beauty and frality is broken and fractured. Yet, there is so much beauty and wonder in life that also the severly handi­capped man, who is only able to communicate through his word machi­ne by blowing in a mouth­piece, writes: I don’t want help to die; I want help to live!” The call and task of the Chris­tian is that of offering all creation to God in order to let Christ encompass it in his sacrifice and perfect it through his resurrection, saved, healed, clean­sed. The eucharist displays what its is all about. A High Mass on Thanksgiving Day provides a glorious illustra­tion.

The sanctuary abounds with all that fields and gardens have yielded: golden corn sheaves, well scrubbed root crops and vegetables, dazzling flowers and mellow fruits and berries, mingled with pro­ducts from local industries and factories. There are files documen­ting well handled commissions, business contracts of transactions benefiting both seller and buyer, stands for plastic bags with in­trave­nous drip from the hospitals, journals of surgery, rolls of cash register receipts, diskettes containing ma­nuscripts of novels, scientific articles, calculation of the strength of bridges, blueprints for houses, childrens paintings and drawings from schools and nurseries–all that man has made and been the steward of can be brought to the altar represented by bread and wine in the offertory.

In every eucharist the Christian congregation carries bread and wine to the altar gifts of the fruits of the earth and of man’s work representing the whole creation. This offe­ring is embedded in prayer, intercession, thanks­giving and praise. The bread and wine offered at the altar are united with the word of Christ according to his institution and become a sacrament. The Word comes to the the elements and a sacra­ment is called into existence. Christ takes up into himself all that which the Church has brought to the altar and he bears it in his sacrifice before his Father. The whole creation in its brokenness and sin­fulness Christ brings in his sacrifice which has taken place once and for all and, yet, is for ever present in every celebration. When the priest elevates the paten the transfigured bread anticipa­tes the transformation of all creation in Christ for which the Church longs and prays. When the chalice is trimphantly lifted up the wine is anticipatingly trans­figured into the new crea­tion wit­hout evil, sin, suffering, which all crea­tion in birthpangs groans for. Already in this saeculum, marked as it is by death and decay, the life forces of the world to come break in. The calling of the Church is that of being a bearer carrying the creation in an offer­tory to God in Christ in the hope of a final trans­figuration. The calling of the Church is that of giving the dying world a living hope and make it visible, tangible and edible.

In this process of praise and hope every individual and the Church as a whole are engaged. The process of dying and rising with Christ which has been initiated in baptism for every Christian is intensi­fied and accelerated in the eucharist. Every communicant who approa­ches the altar in order to receive Christ under bread and wine has repented of his or her sin, confessed and received forgiveness. Evil has lost ground in the world in this person, and God has reclaimed another part of his creation. The eucaha­rist is a meal which gives the forgive­ness of sins, because Christ is truly present and bestows the fruits of his death at Gol­got­ha: forgive­ness and annihiliation of sins. The eucharist is the anti­cipation of what will happen in the end when the will of God reigns.

The eucharist is concrete. When bread and wine have been united with the word of God they are not put on display in a gilded showcase beyond the reach of the congregation. The sacra­ment does not remain on the altar only to be looked at. The priest as an icon and repre­sentative of Christ gives it back to the people to be eaten and drunk. Trust the basic design! Man has to eat in order to live. Which fundamental func­tion of life does God choose in order to come as close to us as our own hearts? God meeets us in the eating and in the drinking, the very acts that keep us a alive. God comes as spiritual food for the new man he has created in Christ. In order to become like God man in Paradise ate what God had forbidden. Now, in his love God in the eucharist gives himself as food and drink in order to make man what God intended him to be: like God in total communion with him.

What a sacramentum, what a mystery! Ordinary unleavened bread baked from ordinary wheat flour, ground in ordinary mills, sown and har­vested by ordinary people–gifts from the fruits of the earth and from man’s la­bour. The world is sanc­tified thro­ugh this bread and wine, as is all crea­tion. Walking on this earth is walking on holy ground. This is the Christian understanding. The world in itself is not divine and shall not be revered or worshipped as the Mother Earth mystics propose. There is, however, a deep element of truth in this New Age mysticism. Creation is sanctified because bread and wine can become bearers of Christs' full and total presence in the eucha­rist, as he is totally and fully present as both God and man in the one person of Christ. A Christian who receives the Lord Jesus in the form of bles­sed bread and wine longs with every cell in body, with his whole being, for the final defeat of God’s enemy and the libe­ration and ulti­mate trans­figuration of all crea­tion.

Christian faith is sacramental because it is incarnational: the assumption of humanity, the uniting of divine nature and human nature without confusion, without change, without division, without separa­tion in Christ is the ground and the pattern. Christian belief cannot but take the crea­tion seriously because of the incarnation. There­fore, humanity given in creation and assumed in the Incarna­tion, in all its various and variegated forms and manifestations, is the fundament common to all human beings. This is the common ground for all human fellowship, humanism and huma­nity. There is a common humanum which applies irre­spective of conditions of time, place and culture: the instant when the pain looses its grip, the joy of cut­ting the umbilical cord of the first born, the grief when the hand of the dead cools in the hand of one still living. All that is a common ex­perience of the human condition, which one life is far too short to exhaust, and yet fills every life to the brim. There is a humanum because all men are created in the image of God in order to attain to his likeness, and be­cause of the fact that all there is, is God’s crea­tion. And even to those who do not believe in God or understand life, the world and huma­nity as something created, still, the huma­num remains for all people in all times a fundamen­tal, recogni­sable and intersubjectively verifiable experience, common to all mankind.

The great task and call of the Church in the world is that of bring­ing together all that is truly human in its immense richness, mani­folded­ness and variety and bring it to C­hrist. As the grains of corn have been harvested from various fields, have been ground and baked into one bread, so people from all times and from all corners of the world once will be united under Christ in his kingdom. Unique in­dividuals who share a common humani­ty will be brought together as the Bride of Christ. Everyone will bring his gifts and riches into this cosmic wedding feast. All forms, all colours, all combinations, all in and under one Christ, who is great enough (Col. 1:15-20) to encom­pass all that is truly human, being the one after whose image man is created. Jesus Christ is God’s image, and man is the image of the Image.

Jesus Christ is the prototype for creation and the first perfected sample of the new creation. In and through Jesus humanity becomes truly human because his human nature has its ground and being in God self. Man was meant to be like Christ, and in the end, this is the way it is going to be.

The basic Christian attitude towards creation is one of love for all created beings, a joy at all there is and a profound respect for life. Evil and suffering are not deni­ed, but taken up in Christ’s suffering, in his atoning and healing sacrifice. With Christ as prototype and pattern the Christian is called into leading a life of service, self giving and sacrifice: being a bread for others. As Christ’s arms are stretched out on the cross, so the arms of the Christian are open and stretched out to the world. But there is one great difference: the hands of the Christian are not pier­ced and nailed to the cross. In Christ the pardoned and released sinner can with open arms embrace life in a jubi­lant thank­fulness and joy. As a human being man belongs to God’s creation. Man is at home in God’s world. “I am Chris­tian and nothing human is alien to me; all belongs to me and I belong to Christ”.

Christian life is lived in the world but cannot exist without the Church. The Church is the Risen Christ as he is present in the world after his resurrection and into whose body the Christian is incorpo­ra­ted through baptism. In the Church all barriers of race, sex, social stan­ding, cultural background, level of educa­tion are over­come. There is a basic God-given equality between man and woman, and there is also a God-given var­iety of roles and functions in the Church and in the family. There is room for all the var­ious in­stru­ments in the divine sympho­ny. This is the catholic vision which in every age has to be presented and vindica­ted anew in its entire width, breadth and depth. The catho­lic vision and the catholic synthesis are not optional to the Church; they belong to her essence.­

Christian life is a life lived in the time after Easter and Whitsun­tide: in Christ and in the Spirit. It is lived in total open­ness towards God’s creation in a total world­li­ness. The world as God has created it, redeemed it and sanctified it through the Son and the Spirit, is not to be left, despised or denied. It is to be loved, served and borne back to God to whom it rightly be­longs and in whom it is already perfected.

The final consummation

The world is to small for the Church as it is for man. Time and space cannot hold the Church nor man. The perfec­tion of life will not be accomplished in a future Utopia, but in a consummation which breaks all barriers of man’s limited being and imagination. The per­fec­tion of man’s life lies in a communion and union with God in the eternal life, for which man has no adequate words. The Orthodox Churces call this theosis, deifica­tion. The New Age religiosity, which even in its name tries to imita­te the age to come, may open one’s eyes for the possibi­li­ties and stir up a longing in man by presenting shadow images. But the real­ity, the Body, is Christ. In Christ man has his union with God and the consummation of life. The glorified Christ al­ready sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty, and thence he shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, es­tablishing his eternal king­dom. Already Christ is now what man is going to be. In him, in his resurrected and glorified Body the whole creation is pro­leptically trans­figured and consumma­ted.

The catholic synthesis encom­passes all that God has created and trans­cends all limits of time and space. Its commences at the crea­tion and is perfec­ted in the life of the world to come: the new aeon. When God once will be all in all, the catho­lic synthe­sis will be final­ly accom­plis­hed.