New Old Faces (Part 3): The Old Yet New Face of Christ
Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash
This is the final instalment of my three-part series on New Old Faces, focusing on the Theological Reflection of the Plenary Council’s Instrumentum Laboris, with a special focus on the passages under the heading “the Joy of the Gospel”.
In my first column, I focused on what Pope Francis called the “New Pelagianism” and its resultant posture of frenetic activism, while my second column on the “New Gnosticism” obsessed over abstract belief and a disengaged quietism. I wrote that these tendencies were the new faces of ancient heresies, which were at work in every Christian, including those who might be regarded as “good Christians”.
I wrote that so long as these tendencies persist, the striving for genuine renewal in the Church sought by the Plenary Council would end up instead regurgitating the same old things and putting them in shiny new packages.
In this final piece, I wish to focus on a third ancient face, one whose presence reverberates through each paragraph in this section in varying and subtle ways which I want to make explicit. This is the ancient face of Christ.
The document rightly preferred the more theologically correct “incarnate” to denote this presence. Be that as it may, what risks getting lost in the dogmatic formula is the visceral experience that the dogma makes possible: a living, breathing and abiding encounter with God, who became a living breathing person with a face.
The segment’s use of the words “incarnate”, “encounter” and “presence” may be intended to denote something that can be experienced, yet even these could slide into the realm of abstractness.
However, a face denotes something different, for we cannot hold in our minds an abstract face (since an abstract face is no face at all). Instead…
Read the full article at the Catholic Weekly
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