“The Church does have a mission in the world because it advances an incarnational faith, one in which God himself took human form. So we cannot deny the human, and hence, political dimension to the Gospel but if one does not get the mix right, one gets confused on one side or the other. One error says that we should abandon the world and run away from it, and the other error says that we should on the world and run it.”[1]
I have been reading Fr. Robert Sirico’s The Soul of Liberty. Father Sirico is the founder and President of The Acton Institute, an think-tank I highly recommend for their splendid work to promote a free and virtuous society based on human liberty and religious truth.
One of the most transformative implications of the Church’s mission in the world — proclaiming the Gospel of the redemption of all creation through Christ — is the dignity, worth, and entrepreneurial creativity of human persons made in the image of God. In human history, it has only been in societies rooted in this biblical worldview that equality, freedom, prosperity, and justice have flourished. Only a truly Christian, biblical view of the created order leads to an economic and political system in which “individuals have the right to own, to create, to contract, and to prosper” but where those rights are “tied to a profound sense of moral and social obligation.” Secular (rejecting religious truth) systems inevitably lead to either tyrannical despotism, fascism, or anarchy. The French (and Haitian) and Bolshevik (Communism) Revolutions, German National Socialism are three modern examples. Only a Judeo-Christian view of the world (and subsequently, economics, property, and law) leads to this necessary balance of freedom and internal moral, social obligation.
Sirico raises a very important point about the incarnational nature of the Church in the world as well as the need to get the mix right. The doctrine of creation means that the fundamental activities of human society — economics, trade, use of property, the rule of law, and politics — are not products of a fallen human society but rather expressions of the imago Dei in culture. And, as such, has profound implications for the our understanding of what it means to be a human being living in a physical world with others in a society. We cannot limit our understanding of the incarnational aspect of the the gospel merely to the spiritual or physical needs of individuals. Rather, the Creation and the Incarnation beckon us to speak to the economic, legal, and political systems of our day. Not in the effort to “run the world” but to point culture to its telios, its created purpose found only in God the Creator.
[1] The Soul of Liberty by Fr. Robert Sirico (The Acton Institute)
