Christ's Inculturating

In my World Christianity class, we have talked a lot about the process of inculturation, which is basically the process by which Christianity engages a culture and seeks to incorporate some of its customs, rituals, etc.

This semester's class load has been a wonderful synthesis of learning between World Christianity, my Theology of Benedict XVI class (Benedict writes a lot on modernization, secularization, relativity, and much more), and my poli-sci class on Globalization. The crossovers have been wonderful, and I enjoy when each class doesn't have to be isolated to a corner of my brain.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and go after a crossover that might be a bit of a stretch but cool to consider nonetheless...

The Incarnation--God becoming man as Jesus Christ the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit and the motherhood of Mary and establishing for us the Church as an eschatological and social institution for His believers--is the first and ideal form of inculturation... eh? eh?

My basis: another crossover--my work on the Kingdom of God, especially in the Gospel of Luke, has made me really sensitive to any considerations of the Kingdom. Maybe I was just oblivious before, but the Kingdom is everywhere in theology, more so than I previously imagined.

My sensitivity to the Kingdom piqued my attention when reading Benedict's treatment of the Our Father. Scrutinizing each part of the prayer, Benedict's attention to "on earth as it is in heaven" opened up a new idea for me. Here's the bit that got me:

"[W]here God's will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God's will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes 'heaven' when and insofar as God's will is done there; and it is merely 'earth', the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that it may be on earth as it is in heaven--that earth may become 'heaven'." (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 147-148)

The way that we most profoundly and effectively have access to God is through Jesus Christ, the Son, who became flesh, who walked where we walked, who did the same things God asks us to do, the reason why we sing, "Let us go, where he has gone, rest and reign with him in heaven." (Jesus Lives, a Folk Choir favorite).

Christ invites us into our earthly mission--love, in both suffering and triumph--and to our eternal salvation with Him in Heaven. The beauty of His love, of our Incarnational Christology, and of the Trinitarian God that reigns in Heaven, came to earth, dwells with us as Spirit--all of this has come to us in fullness through Christ.

Meanwhile, we endure, seeking to love and serve Him through the Church, the bride of Christ that is the fullest means to salvation. The Church was instituted by Christ and left in the hands of Peter and his successors under the guidance of God's Holy Spirit. The Church is not the Kingdom, but it is an eschatological reality that unites us with Christ in anticipation of the fullness of heaven. The Church is how we manifest our faith and our Tradition and "do this is memory" of Christ.

Christ came from heaven and engaged the culture of earth. It is by His Incarnation, ministry, Passion, and Resurrection that we have gained the fullness of Truth. The human, earthly culture has the fruits of Christ's presence. It is up to us to incorporate the elements of heavenly culture into what we practice on earth.

The basic way we can do that is through the mass, in which we praise God with the angels and celebrate the Paschal feast with the high priests and heavenly choirs that we hear in the Book of Revelation. Branching out from the Word and Sacrament, our Church seeks to make real and evident the power of Christ.

It is up to us to consider the heavenly elements of our faith and our Church. Only if we truly believe that the Church can prefigure heaven will this become more strongly realized, for it is only inasmuch as we do God's will on earth that we experience heaven in this life. So may we go where He has gone, both on earth and in heaven, and enter the cultural exchange between earth and Our Father in heaven.