We have the image of the two nations that today exerts a strong influence on our way of living: two loves have built two nations. Self-love to the point of contempt for God, the earthly nation. God's love to the point of self-contempt, the heavenly nation. Thus formulated, the distinction between the two nations seems to erect an antagonism that cannot do justice to a serious meditation on the role of the Christian in society.
For the relationship between the present of existence in society and the eschatological horizon is much more complex and entangled than it seems at first glance. It is in the shadow of such a reflection, anxious to restore such a dialectic, that I will try to deploy my remarks, alluding to some theological and biblical reflections. My purpose will not consist in opposing the celestial city and the earthly city, and especially not in identifying the former with the Church and the latter with contemporary society.
Rather, it will try to think theologically about how the two cities can coexist thanks to the role of Christians in a situation in crisis. In other words, how should the Christian faith deal with a social crisis? How to live as a Christian in the face of social crisis?
1. I. Living as a Christian is faith that allows the manifestation of the Gospel
What aroused my desire to tackle this subject is the assertion of Jürgen Moltmann in his book "Theology of Hope" in which he rightly points out that: "The world that 'proves God' has in fact been the object of Christian hope and not the object of an observation. But it is for this world that Christians are sent. The horizon of hope thus founds the apostolate and the commitment of Christians in political and social struggles. If they escape nihilism, it is because they know that history is open: they can inquire about the possibilities that God arouses in it, discern in them the face of the man of tomorrow not by reflecting on the general structures of the human condition but according to an end that is in the making.”
In the last chapter of his book, Moltmann sets the role of the Christian community in modern society. It is not simply to bring individual salvation, nor a liberation from the subjectivity endangered by technical civilization, nor a dream of universal unity between people, nor the security that belongs to a stable institution, all the more encouraging because it is dogmatic. All these roles are perhaps fulfilled by the churches, with varying levels of happiness. These are the tasks that our civilization gladly leaves to "religion". But what Christians are sent to by virtue of their hope is much more a concrete service carried out in solidarity with all their fellow men. With all, they have to promote the humanization of society, but they are led by the expectation of the Kingdom of God which is making itself near. Because it receives itself from God in hope, the Christian community can go wherever God leads it, "at the risk of being lost". And this very attitude is the most precious service it renders to humanity, the most effective critique of any closed ideology: the apostolate of its hope, introducing into the heart of every human project the contradiction that guides and preserves freedom[2].
Such an assertion brings us back to several questions, including the question of "how to live as a Christian in a society in crisis". In other words, the gospel, which has no social consequences, is not the gospel. A Church, whose existence is not marked by transformations with regard to the norms in force in society, is a Church which may have a religious function in society, but which does not assume the profound renewal of social life which is the consequence of the Gospel. Referring to the social consequences inherent in the Gospel, it should be said that this social cannot be reduced to social action. We are aware of what we do or should do for others; We are not always aware of what we are to them. As far as can be judged, the challenge of living as a Christian ina society is at the heart of God's plan. And, if there is a challenge, the challenge we face is the challenge of allowing the consequences of the Gospel to manifest themselves in the very life of the Christian community. Fidelity to the Good News is also fidelity to its consequences in a crisis situation. The gospel has social consequences because it is God's recreative power. Likewise, the project of God's renewal passes first and foremost, as already emphasized, through the Church. This is where those who recognize the meaning of Christ's death and Resurrection gather. This means that God's new creation begins now and begins with the Church. The Church is therefore a new social reality, but it is not a new place, in the sense that it would inaugurate a life elsewhere than within the framework of the same humanity that she always inhabits.
Thus, I will draw inspiration from two biblical texts to think, more broadly, about how we are a community. The first of these texts comes from the New Testament. This is the First Epistle of Peter, a letter addressed to pagan converts to Christianity at the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries. A text that simultaneously constitutes the Christian community as the People of God, while making exile one of its fundamental components. Paradoxically, this status of exile participates fully in the vocation of the Church, that is, the fact of being bearers, within this world, in relative precariousness, of God's blessing for humanity. The second text returns to a well-known passage from the Old Testament, the account of the reconstruction of the wall in the book of Nehemiah in chapter 3. This will be an opportunity to think about some features of the reconstruction of the wall. That is to say, the reconstruction of the wall is to be seized as a possibility, a mode of composition in which living together is likely to be damaged, especially when it closes in on itself, fascinated by a counter-project of society. And it is precisely against this destruction of the wall, which is a wound to the potentialities of each one and, above all, to their singularity, that God's action is exercised against those who are against the current.
Indeed, this biblical comparison will ultimately attempt to rearticulate the Church's call in this world with the vocation to which humanity is called. A vocation of which the Church is precisely committed to being the precarious and peaceful witness.
For today we live in an atmosphere in which faith in God is no longer self-evident. Belief in God is no longer a presupposition shared by all our contemporaries. It is at most a belief that some might maintain, an individual choice. Such an observation may seem anecdotal, but it is not. This transformation has a direct impact on the way in which certain values or ideas can be argued, particularly in relation to the dignity of life and the human person. Indeed, what public value - that is, outside ecclesial circles - can an argument be made that all life must be protected, because it is a creation of God? Such an argument cannot have any relevance to what philosophers are wont to call public reason, a fully secularized reason. It is then a question of adopting the codes of the surrounding culture without worrying about evaluating or sorting them. And contrary to what we might think, our churches are much more subject to fashions of this type than it seems. It is often popular culture that we take up and, with it, we sometimes adopt the moral parameters of society. Again, the problem is not to take up elements specific to the culture that we share with our contemporaries. It is above all a question of knowing which of these elements we want to take up because they are in agreement with the Gospel. Because being a Christian implies a difference in our identity. And being different is a tension, it's uncomfortable for others. Nevertheless, we are called to live as Christians.
"Living as Christians in society in crisis" may seem too vague or too general. I would therefore like to explain without delay that it has the value of calling and commitment, in a double sense. First, the verb "to live", which is in the infinitive, can also be put to the imperative: "Live, let us live as Christians in a society in crisis! "That is: let us accept and understand for ourselves that Christian newness, the newness of the Christian revelation of God, which is often ignored, or marginalized, or ridiculed, also passes through us and through our existence. Because the name of God is inseparable from the name of men and women who believe in and hope in Him: "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob", as God says to Moses and as Moltmann wrote in other words: "Reconciled with God by his. faith in the promise — of which the Resurrection of Christ is the mysterious pledge — the believer is at the same time led to fight everything in history that belongs to the reign of death: injustice, oppression, exploitation of man by man"[3]. Thus, "living as a Christian" is a responsibility and a way of life for every witness of the Resurrection.
2. II. Living as a Christian is faith that makes us the stranger at home
In fact, in the history of the Church, several Christian denominations have reconnected with certain social and spiritual realities relating to the situation of a Christianity that preceded Christianity[4]. Without foreseeing it, they experienced in anticipation the experience that most Christian Churches are experiencing today. They in turn note that Christianity no longer occupies a central role in society: Christians find themselves in the situation, no longer of the master in the house, but of the stranger and the exiled. In this, we are very close to the situation of the Christian communities to which Peter addresses his First Epistle[5]: "I, Peter, Apostle of Christ Jesus, "to you who live as strangers" or "to you who are as if in exile, scattered in the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. (1 Pet 1:1). Peter speaks to pagans who converted to Christianity, people who lived in their homes until they became Christians. For it was at the moment of conversion that they became strangers. Not that they chose to move. The mere fact of embracing the Gospel is enough to put them out of step with the customs, customs and norms of their community of origin. They ceased to be natives or natives to become "transients and travellers" (1 Pet 2:11).
In addressing these paganistic Christians, Peter will use terms that applied to Jews who lived in the diaspora, outside Palestine and, much more, categories that state the constitution of Israel as God's people. "Thus: Draw near to him: he is the living stone which men have eliminated, but which God has chosen because he knows its value." In 1 P.2, 4-10, the author summons two stories from the Old Testament to evoke the status of these Christians who, from natives, became foreigners. It will be first and foremost, and in a subtle way, a reference to the couple formed by Abraham and Sarah, both chosen by God to carry his blessing: The Lord said to him: " Go out of your country, leave your family and your father's house, go to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will become a blessing. I will bless those who will bless you, I will curse him who despises you. In you will be blessed all the families of the earth. (Gen 12:1-3). Abraham and Sarah's voluntary exile carried with it a promise to be bearers of a blessing that extends to all nations. God calls some to save them all. And these first Christians to whom Peter addressed his letter were the beneficiaries of this blessing. Abraham and Sarah were chosen—they were elected—to carry the blessing.
Likewise, those Christians of Asia to whom Peter addresses, after describing them as "strangers" or "exiles", he continues his greeting by saying of them that they were "chosen - chosen - according to the plan of God the Father, in the sanctifying Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be purified by his blood" (1 Pet 1:2). This promise of salvation for humanity that Abraham and Sarah carried, it is the turn of these Christians of pagan origin to make themselves the bearers. In turn, they are called to become a source of blessing. But this means that they must accept the precarious status of the pilgrim on his way to a heavenly city.
Not the pilgrim who flees the contact of human society, but the one who resides in a place precariously - rather than temporarily - in the manner of a foreigner established in a city without yet being able to claim to enjoy all the civil rights proper to the citizen. A resident who knows he is the bearer of a difference and who introduces a difference - an opening to an otherness - into the city.
Moreover, being an exile is not a flaw or a defect. This is the constitutive condition of Christian identity. If we are partially uprooted, it is also to be grafted onto a new community, that of living stones that participate in the construction of a heavenly city capable of welcoming all humanity (1 Pet 2:5-6). This humanity among which we walk and which we are called to love as Christ loved him to the point of giving his life for it.
It is here this paradoxical affirmation lodged at the heart of the Gospel: it is on the cross, in this man whom society has chosen to exile definitively, that God makes himself present to humanity. And it is from this exile that he chooses to build a refuge for all human beings. Our exile is the form that our participation in the redemption of the world that God is working and that we are already anticipating, by our worship and praise, and by the love we have for our neighbor, but also by our way of relating to society, not as citizens endowed with a title deed. but as foreigners in precarious situations. And, on such a condition, Scripture in its entirety attaches a promise: that of being in the midst of our fellow men, a "House inhabited by the Spirit", "a holy priestly community" (1 Pet 2:5).
Translating into another language, Moltmann would say that it is a "revision of life" designating in the hic et nunc the God who happens. This is even the scope he recognizes in the "proofs of God." In other words, the Christian is the witness of Christ's Resurrection in a world whose activities it is up to him to sanctify.
However, if the Church, as God's people, is that community from which God leads humanity into a dynamic of redemption, what about his reaction in society in times of crisis?
3. III. Living as a Christian is faith that responds to a call of commitment
The story of the reconstruction of the wall of Jerusalem tells of a runaway. Human beings are excited about a reconstruction project, which is a social project. But what does this mean for this society?
Before considering chapter 3 in detail, let us say a few words about what the building of the wall means to us, just as we have sought from the book of Ezra what was the typical meaning of the rebuilding of the temple.
It is a high vocation for the Christian to work for the edification of the assembly, to bring materials to the house of God, and to build upon the foundation which is Christ (1 Cor. 3:10-16); But he has yet another duty, the raising of the walls of his society.
The walls are both a separation from outsiders and a defense against enemy attacks. They surround and enclose the city and serve to constitute it as a whole. It thus forms an administrative unit, having its own laws, customs, and government, self-sufficient, separated from foreign elements, and guaranteed from any mixture. In Jerusalem, the walls enclosed God's people and defended the sanctuary at the same time.
The walls are also, as we have just said, a means of defense; They repel the assaults of the enemy, and serve for the safety of the inhabitants of the city and its citizens. If we apply this description to the present circumstances, we can easily see its importance. The city is ruined by our fault, and has become invisible to the eyes of men. Should we abandon it to this state of destruction? No way. If we have the intelligence of a Nehemiah, we will understand that it is urgent to group together the citizens of the heavenly city, to work for their visible unity, even though we know perfectly well that this unity exists only in the councils of God.
If Nehemiah had wanted to wait until all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, scattered in Persia, Media, and the province of Babylon, had returned to their homes, before undertaking the construction of the wall, his mission would have been in vain and his activity unemployed. Once the city was enclosed, God, as we shall see, did not leave it deserted, and his Spirit knew how to awaken the zeal which, in some small measure, came to fill the void produced by the absent. — We will still understand that in the presence of the assault, waged by the world under Satan's leadership, to prevent the distraught faithful from standing firm for Christ, we have to rebuild the wall that preserves them. This wall is Christ, it is God, it is His Word, the Word of salvation and praise (Zec. 2:5; Jer. 15:20; Isaiah 60:18; 26:1), the only security we have to offer God's children. Finally, we will understand that the duty of every servant of God is to separate the family from the faith, the fellow citizens from the saints, from all evil, from all servitudes in whatever form it may take its form: individual or collective, moral or doctrinal, religious, or worldly, carnal and earthly, so that this family may be visible to the eyes of the world and may be recognized by it.
Faced with the chronic poverty of a population that is the victim of various crises, exploitation and embezzlement, both local and foreign, if the Church acts in collaboration with the components of civil society, is she not entitled to denounce the unjust order that prevents the African people from consolidating their development and the People of God from being truly "salt of the earth" and "light of the world" » ? Should we remain silent, sink into indifference, ignore it and continue on our way like the priest and the Levite of the parable of the Good Samaritan? Or do we have the duty to be alert, to revolt, to be indignant, like Jesus with the sellers of the temple? (Mt 20:12)?
Nehemiah was at Susa, at the court of the same Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who had protected Ezra, when he ascended from Babylon to Jerusalem. It was at Susa that he received from one of his brothers and some men who had come with him from Judah, news concerning the "survivors" domiciled in the "province" beyond the river (that is, in the land of Israel), with details of the miserable condition of Jerusalem. What he learns from the misery and opprobrium of the people, from the ruins of the city to the destroyed walls, fills him with deep affliction. After being restored, this weak residue was continually threatened with falling prey to enemies conjured to annihilate it. He had not yet, and this through his own fault, established anything lasting. What had the men of Judah done for so many years? Their energy, for a moment awakened to purify themselves from evil, was now lacking to guarantee it. And what would happen next? Ezra had sensed that the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem must be the necessary continuation of the building of the temple, if the people continued to walk in the spirit of revival (Ezra 9:9); But that had not been the case. Many years had passed without any event that marked activity or energy; Nothing, except growing misery and opprobrium.
When he heard these things, Nehemiah, like all men of God in the days of ruin, humbled himself deeply: "I sat down and wept; and I mourned for many days, and fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven" (Ne 1:4); not, however, like Ezra, for a positive sin, but because of the misery that the people had caused by their lack of perseverance and trust in God. Nehemiah begins by acknowledging God's faithfulness to those who obey Him, and then confesses Israel's sins against God, without in any way excluding his own sins and those of his father's house, and their common disobedience to His Word (vv. 5–7).
Despite the opposition and accusations of their enemies, the wall is built and the enemies silenced. The people, inspired by Nehemiah, gave the tithes – which, combined, amounted to a lot of money – of materials and labor, to finish the wall in the record time of 52 days, and all this despite opposition. This effort at unity was short-lived, however, because Jerusalem fell back into apostasy when Nehemiah was absent for a time. It was 12 years before he returned, discovering the city walls fortified, but the people weakened. He decides to teach the people morality without mincing words. "I rebuked them, and cursed them; I hit some of them, pulled out their hair. (Nehemiah 13:25) He restores true worship, which is done through prayer and by exhorting the people to spiritual revival by reading and clinging to the word of God.
Nehemiah then pleads the cause of the restored people (1:7-8): they were now servants of Jehovah. Would he disavow them? Impossible. He, too, Nehemiah, was a servant of Jehovah. How could God not listen? Nehemiah identifies the people with themselves in service, conscious of having to continue the work; he has the ardent desire for it, knowing how to be in communion with the will of God, since He has restored these survivors of his people. But at the same time, and this is what is found, in the midst of the ruin of the people, in all men of faith, Zerubbabel, Ezra, Daniel and others, Nehemiah does not seek to escape the yoke of the nations, for that would be to disregard before God the unfaithfulness of the people, He only asks the Lord to make him "find mercy before this man". » (1. 11). This is how he appoints the king when he speaks to God, for what else is there for the Sovereign who shapes the hearts of the highest and mightiest, so as to make them accomplish his purposes? When he stands before the king, Nehemiah changes his language and honors him appropriately (2:3), but before God he gives honor and power to Him alone. As emphasized in 1st chapter of 1 Peter, Nehemiah thus saw himself as the bearer of God's blessings to the children of Israel.
4. IV. Living as a Christian is an example of living faith in the city
In Nehemiah, therefore, we notice that the message of the Christian does not divert men from the construction of the world and does not incite them to lose interest in the fate of their fellow men: on the contrary, they need a more pressing duty. In other words: All Christians must become aware of their special and proper role in the social and political community: they are obliged to set an example by developing in themselves a sense of responsibility and dedication to the common good. By engaging in political life and the life of the city, the Christian lives his mission as a Christian acting in the world. Indeed, to live as Christians, Christians must express the anthropological vision and social doctrine of the Church in public life, including politics. Thus, the Christian is called to promote the values of the Gospel in all dimensions of daily life (social, economic, political). It thus contributes to respecting the dignity of the human being and to building the common good. The commitment of the Christian is a precious help to help people to be led to God through the service of society and neighbor. Of course, politics is not man's all. The limits of politics are dictated by the service of man. Politics cannot give the ultimate meaning and why of human existence.
However, every Christian should feel concerned about the life of the city. Whenever he can, he is called to be an active citizen, always avoiding minimizing the results of his action. In today's societies, the "places" where the future of men is at stake are multiplying: we can act at the level of a company, a region, an association, a municipality, a neighborhood, a party etc. The wider the scope of social life, the more the Christian demands a thoughtful commitment. Indeed, it is the whole daily life (work, housing, leisure etc.) of each one that depends on the decisions of economic, cultural and state powers. The choices of social, economic and political activities have not only an immediate scope but also a long-term scope, they engage subsequent generations.
For let us know that in Roman society, Jews, slaves, women, foreigners are the marginalized. And the Church, the People of Christ, is the possible place of their dignity, of their gratitude. It is a new society where no one can deny them their rights: they are members of the house of God.
From this observation let us draw a conclusion. The social dimension of the Gospel cannot be reduced to charitable and humanitarian action. The Gospel gives birth to a Church that is in itself a place of integration of marginalized men and women into society. Thus one cannot detach the question of what the Church is doing from that of what the Church is. The Christian community must ask itself about the place of the poor within it. Does it still represent an alternative for recognition and integration today? Evangelical attention to the poor presupposes recognizing for them the full place that God has prepared for them in his Church. Social action, as a charitable gesture towards the most disadvantaged, can disguise a failure. A church can have effective and useful external social action but maintain within it the hierarchies prevailing in society. The letter of James (ch.2) calls on us not to duplicate the hierarchies of society in the place given to the Christian community. Where do we really stand?
Jimi ZACKA, PhD
[1] I. MOLTMANN, Theology of Hope. Studies on the foundations and consequences of a Christian eschatology. Coll. Cogitatio Fidei, 50. Paris, Ed. du Cerf-Marne, 1970, p.22 _X \\ 434.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Cf. Duquoc, Christian. Christianity. Memory for the future. Paris: Cerf. 2000.
[5] For the Petrine authenticity of this epistle, we refer to the classical introductions, among which: Brown, Raymond E., What do we know about the New Testament? Paris: Bayard. [1997] 2000.
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