Alexandermen (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} alexandermen) wrote,@ 2007-11-25 10:56:00 |
|
I-14 Dr Albert Raboteau "Fr Men and Contemporary Culture."
Dr Raboteau is former dean of faculty at Princeton University
and professor of African American studies. This paper is from
the Alexander Men Conference in New York 2004.
Father Alexander Men and Contemporary Culture
Albert J. Raboteau
“In the world but not of the world,” this phrase encapsulates a perennial
tension between the Church and culture. On the one hand, the incarnational
character of the Church establishes her firmly in history, in this particular
time, place, and culture. On the other, the sacramental character of the Church
transcends time and space making present another world, the Kingdom of God,
which is both here and now and yet still to come. Throughout the history of
Christianity, the temptation to relax this tension has led Christians to
represent the Church as an ethereal transcendent mystery unrelated and
antithetical to human society and culture. Or, on the other hand, it has
prompted Christians to so identify the Church with a particular society,
culture, or ethnicity as to turn Christianity into a religious ideology.
Because we are “not of the world” Christians stand over against culture when
its values and behaviors contradict the living tradition of the Church. So it
was that early Christians refused to conform to the world by honoring the
emperor with a pinch of incense offered before his image. “Being in the world,”
the Christian acts as a leaven within culture, trying to transform it by
communicating to others the redemption brought by Christ. Thus the early
Christian apologists stood within culture as they attempted to explain
Christianity in the philosophical and cultural terms of their times and
recognized within the culture adumbrations of Christian truth waiting to be
revealed.
Listen to the words of a second century document, called the “Letter to
Diognetus,” that poignantly describe the Christian’s cultural dilemma:
Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country
or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not
use a peculiar form of speech; they do not follow an eccentric manner of life.
This doctrine of theirs has not been discovered by the ingenuity or deep
thought of inquisitive men, nor do they put forward a merely human teaching, as
some people do. Yet, although they live in Greed and barbarian cities alike...
and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of
daily living, at the same time they give proof of their own commonwealth. They
live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in
everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land
is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land...
They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.
No less now, than then, we Christians continue to wrestle with our relationship
to culture – an issue which Fr. Alexander Men thought about deeply. His life of
active openness to the world and his historically informed reflections on the
Christian’s engagement with the world offer us important resources for shaping
our thought and action today.
In a talk on the role of the Church in the modern world, Fr. Men remarked:
If we ask ourselves in all honesty whether the presence of Christians reflects
the presence of Christ in the world, then our answer...will be negative. I am
fully aware that in the heat of apologetic fervor many of us, especially
neophytes, are eager to cast unbelievers in somber tones while equating the
word “believer” with light. But these simplifications are possible only in the
heat of such polemical rhetoric as: “black and white,” “ours and theirs,” “all
bad and all good.” I rather believe that we need to go deeper, be more serious,
and to have the courage to admit that to the question posed to us by society,
the Church, that is, we Christians, do not answer adequately according to [the]
criteria...[of] preaching, witness, and presence.... Such is the way of
history. (About Christ and the Church, pp.55-56)
“Such is the way of history.” These words remind me of that touching scene in
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, when Frodo, feeling the full dread of the task he
has undertaken, turns to Gandalf and says, “Why was I born in such times as
these?” And Gandalf with great kindness replies, “It is not ours to choose the
times in which we live, but only to choose what we do in such times.” It is a
mistake notion, both Gandalf and Fr. Men insist, to romanticize history,
especially the history of Christianity, seeking to retreat to some golden age
when society and culture where Christian. I remember a book I read as a college
student entitled The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries. I sometimes hear
comments decrying the current state of our country in comparison with some
previous period when “America was a Christian nation.” I am tempted to reply,
“And when, just exactly, was that?” Whether it is nostalgia for
thirteenth-century medieval Europe, nineteenth-century Russia, or the
“symphonia” of seventh-century Byzantium, the rose-tinted spectacles occlude
too much fallibility, venality, and evil. As Fr. Alexander succinctly put it:
Only short-sighted people imagine that Christianity has already happened, that
it took place, say, in the thirteenth century, or the fourth, or some other
time. I would say it has only made the first hesitant steps in the history of
the human race. Many words of Christ are still incomprehensible to us even now,
because we are still Neanderthals in spirit and morals; because the arrow of
the Gospels is aimed at eternity; because the history of Christianity is only
beginning. What has happened already, what we now call the history of
Christianity, are the first half-clumsy, unsuccessful attempts to make it a
reality.” (Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, p. 185)
Why do we have this tendency toward nostalgia? In a word, fear. The desire for
simple solutions, the need to see things in black and white, as us vs. them,
the Church vs. the world, rather than the Church for the world, is rooted in
the difficulty of living the paradox of being in the world but not of the
world. Fear pushes us to abandon one side for the other.
Fr. Men made a famous contrast between two stances of Christians to the world,
one open, one closed. The open stance is represented by Dostoevsky’s elder
Zossima, who is gentle, loving, embracing of people and creation. He sends
Alyosha back into the world from the monastery to deal with his dysfunctional
family. Zossima’s opposite, Elder Ferrapont is a rigorous ascetic, who condemns
the laxity of the former and vindictively celebrates his apparent victory over
his opponent when the corps of the deceased staretz starts to stink – a sign of
corruption instead of sanctity. Now most of us prefer Zossima over Ferrapont,
but Fr. Men, showing the capaciousness of spirit that ought to our model moves
beyond the literary antithesis created by Dostoevsky to offer a profound
reflection upon the contrapuntal traditions within Christianity. We need both
asceticism and compassion. He points to St. Seraphim of Sarov and the elders of
Optina as exemplars of those who choose not to simply embrace the world, nor to
use Christianity as a stick with which to beat the world over the head.
How does this play out in practice for us in the present.
In regard to the issue of pluralism, which seems so threatening to our
religious identity when we reduce it to relativism, Fr. Men has some
interesting, we might say radical ideas. His wide-ranging study of world
religions led him not to condemn them but to look at the good within them and
to claim that Christianity is exceptional only in the person of Christ, who is
God’s answer to the religious hunger of mankind expressed in other religions.
He is even so bold as to suggest that the divisions within Christianity may be
part of God’s plan to ensure pluralism within our fallible human history lest
we turn the Church into a monolithic idol and reduce the Gospel to an ideology
of national or ethnic pride.
He argues strenuously, moreover, that pluralism is a fact of life and that the
“secular state, which equally defends the rights of Buddhists and Hindus,
agnostics and Baptists in a society where many peoples live and there are tens
of millions of believers there can of course be no other way.” Toleration is
based not solely on political necessity but on freedom of conscience:
All our people will benefit from the secularization of the state. The
government, by guarding the holy of holies within man – his convictions and his
freedom of conscience – is helping to unite the citizens in a unity based on
religious tolerance. (Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, p. 137.)
Coming out of the Soviet experience he was fully aware that “the terrible
experience of dictatorship in the twentieth century may...serve as a lesson to
us believers...It enables us to see from the side what spiritual tyranny looks
like...This experience should lead us to refuse the very idea of state
religion.” (Ibid, p. 136.)
Religious pluralism, then, need not be accepted as a license for relativism or
a secularization of culture. Indeed, Fr. Men saw pluralism as the grounds for
ecumenical cooperation. “We need the combined efforts of people of different
views sharing the same ground which unites believers and non-believers. That
common ground is the revival of law and order, compassion, the protection and
development of cultural heritage.” (Ibid., p. 146.) Pluralism does not
represent a capitulation to mass culture but an opportunity for presenting our
faith. “The way to combat [the evils of mass culture] is not by prohibitions
but by making the best works available to people. You can’t graft on taste by
making prohibitions. This is true of all aspects and manifestations of culture.
What is bad must be combated by affirming what is valuable, enriching,
beautiful.” (Ibid, p. 150)
Offering a strong critique of materialism, he argued that people are hungry for
what Christianity has to offer and that is simply the authentic within
Christianity, the Gospel. Realization of this profound fact should lead the
Christian not to triumphalism, but to repentance. For church history teaches us
that what we have preached so often has not been the Gospel, but ourselves.
Ultimately, we have confidence, not in ourselves but in the Spirit, who will
achieve the transformation within us and within our culture. Let me end my
remarks with another quotation from Fr. Men’s words, a source of hope and
humility, as we, like Frodo, face the times in which we live and choose what to
do within them.
And now, if we are to speak of the future, lit us pose this question to
ourselves: “What does God require of us in the remaining time, which, we, that
is the Church, should focus our attention on precisely now, in these days?”
Preaching. This means we have to find a common language with the people of our
time, not identifying with them completely, yet not isolating ourselves from
them behind an archaic wall. We have to state anew, almost as if for the first
time, all those questions which are placed before us by the Gospel. Witness.
This means that we still have to determine – if we have not yet determined –
our life’s goal, to find our place in life, our place not in the usual sense of
the word, but in our relationship to all of life’s problems. And finally,
Presence. This means we must learn how to pray at all times and deepen our
experience of the Mysteries, so that our witness may not be a witness about
ideology but of the living presence of God in us. It seems to me that the
problems of the future can be entirely approached from these three points... If
we witness to Christ and the Gospel, if we live in His Spirit, then in some
measure we will participate in what He envisaged, and His aim was never to
abandon this earth. He accomplishes this even without man, but He desires that
it be accomplished with the participation of man. This means that we will act
together with Him. And it follows, that then everything else necessary will
take place. Through such an approach, each culture will be the beneficiary only
of good. (About Christ and the Church, pp. 64-65.)
May it be so!
.
Dr Raboteau second from right. To his right John N Perkins
psychologist from Princeton and to his left Olga Bukhina,
two of the other speakers at the conference.
Dr Raboteau is former dean of faculty at Princeton University
and professor of African American studies. This paper is from
the Alexander Men Conference in New York 2004.
Father Alexander Men and Contemporary Culture
Albert J. Raboteau
“In the world but not of the world,” this phrase encapsulates a perennial
tension between the Church and culture. On the one hand, the incarnational
character of the Church establishes her firmly in history, in this particular
time, place, and culture. On the other, the sacramental character of the Church
transcends time and space making present another world, the Kingdom of God,
which is both here and now and yet still to come. Throughout the history of
Christianity, the temptation to relax this tension has led Christians to
represent the Church as an ethereal transcendent mystery unrelated and
antithetical to human society and culture. Or, on the other hand, it has
prompted Christians to so identify the Church with a particular society,
culture, or ethnicity as to turn Christianity into a religious ideology.
Because we are “not of the world” Christians stand over against culture when
its values and behaviors contradict the living tradition of the Church. So it
was that early Christians refused to conform to the world by honoring the
emperor with a pinch of incense offered before his image. “Being in the world,”
the Christian acts as a leaven within culture, trying to transform it by
communicating to others the redemption brought by Christ. Thus the early
Christian apologists stood within culture as they attempted to explain
Christianity in the philosophical and cultural terms of their times and
recognized within the culture adumbrations of Christian truth waiting to be
revealed.
Listen to the words of a second century document, called the “Letter to
Diognetus,” that poignantly describe the Christian’s cultural dilemma:
Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country
or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not
use a peculiar form of speech; they do not follow an eccentric manner of life.
This doctrine of theirs has not been discovered by the ingenuity or deep
thought of inquisitive men, nor do they put forward a merely human teaching, as
some people do. Yet, although they live in Greed and barbarian cities alike...
and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of
daily living, at the same time they give proof of their own commonwealth. They
live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in
everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land
is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land...
They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.
No less now, than then, we Christians continue to wrestle with our relationship
to culture – an issue which Fr. Alexander Men thought about deeply. His life of
active openness to the world and his historically informed reflections on the
Christian’s engagement with the world offer us important resources for shaping
our thought and action today.
In a talk on the role of the Church in the modern world, Fr. Men remarked:
If we ask ourselves in all honesty whether the presence of Christians reflects
the presence of Christ in the world, then our answer...will be negative. I am
fully aware that in the heat of apologetic fervor many of us, especially
neophytes, are eager to cast unbelievers in somber tones while equating the
word “believer” with light. But these simplifications are possible only in the
heat of such polemical rhetoric as: “black and white,” “ours and theirs,” “all
bad and all good.” I rather believe that we need to go deeper, be more serious,
and to have the courage to admit that to the question posed to us by society,
the Church, that is, we Christians, do not answer adequately according to [the]
criteria...[of] preaching, witness, and presence.... Such is the way of
history. (About Christ and the Church, pp.55-56)
“Such is the way of history.” These words remind me of that touching scene in
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, when Frodo, feeling the full dread of the task he
has undertaken, turns to Gandalf and says, “Why was I born in such times as
these?” And Gandalf with great kindness replies, “It is not ours to choose the
times in which we live, but only to choose what we do in such times.” It is a
mistake notion, both Gandalf and Fr. Men insist, to romanticize history,
especially the history of Christianity, seeking to retreat to some golden age
when society and culture where Christian. I remember a book I read as a college
student entitled The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries. I sometimes hear
comments decrying the current state of our country in comparison with some
previous period when “America was a Christian nation.” I am tempted to reply,
“And when, just exactly, was that?” Whether it is nostalgia for
thirteenth-century medieval Europe, nineteenth-century Russia, or the
“symphonia” of seventh-century Byzantium, the rose-tinted spectacles occlude
too much fallibility, venality, and evil. As Fr. Alexander succinctly put it:
Only short-sighted people imagine that Christianity has already happened, that
it took place, say, in the thirteenth century, or the fourth, or some other
time. I would say it has only made the first hesitant steps in the history of
the human race. Many words of Christ are still incomprehensible to us even now,
because we are still Neanderthals in spirit and morals; because the arrow of
the Gospels is aimed at eternity; because the history of Christianity is only
beginning. What has happened already, what we now call the history of
Christianity, are the first half-clumsy, unsuccessful attempts to make it a
reality.” (Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, p. 185)
Why do we have this tendency toward nostalgia? In a word, fear. The desire for
simple solutions, the need to see things in black and white, as us vs. them,
the Church vs. the world, rather than the Church for the world, is rooted in
the difficulty of living the paradox of being in the world but not of the
world. Fear pushes us to abandon one side for the other.
Fr. Men made a famous contrast between two stances of Christians to the world,
one open, one closed. The open stance is represented by Dostoevsky’s elder
Zossima, who is gentle, loving, embracing of people and creation. He sends
Alyosha back into the world from the monastery to deal with his dysfunctional
family. Zossima’s opposite, Elder Ferrapont is a rigorous ascetic, who condemns
the laxity of the former and vindictively celebrates his apparent victory over
his opponent when the corps of the deceased staretz starts to stink – a sign of
corruption instead of sanctity. Now most of us prefer Zossima over Ferrapont,
but Fr. Men, showing the capaciousness of spirit that ought to our model moves
beyond the literary antithesis created by Dostoevsky to offer a profound
reflection upon the contrapuntal traditions within Christianity. We need both
asceticism and compassion. He points to St. Seraphim of Sarov and the elders of
Optina as exemplars of those who choose not to simply embrace the world, nor to
use Christianity as a stick with which to beat the world over the head.
How does this play out in practice for us in the present.
In regard to the issue of pluralism, which seems so threatening to our
religious identity when we reduce it to relativism, Fr. Men has some
interesting, we might say radical ideas. His wide-ranging study of world
religions led him not to condemn them but to look at the good within them and
to claim that Christianity is exceptional only in the person of Christ, who is
God’s answer to the religious hunger of mankind expressed in other religions.
He is even so bold as to suggest that the divisions within Christianity may be
part of God’s plan to ensure pluralism within our fallible human history lest
we turn the Church into a monolithic idol and reduce the Gospel to an ideology
of national or ethnic pride.
He argues strenuously, moreover, that pluralism is a fact of life and that the
“secular state, which equally defends the rights of Buddhists and Hindus,
agnostics and Baptists in a society where many peoples live and there are tens
of millions of believers there can of course be no other way.” Toleration is
based not solely on political necessity but on freedom of conscience:
All our people will benefit from the secularization of the state. The
government, by guarding the holy of holies within man – his convictions and his
freedom of conscience – is helping to unite the citizens in a unity based on
religious tolerance. (Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, p. 137.)
Coming out of the Soviet experience he was fully aware that “the terrible
experience of dictatorship in the twentieth century may...serve as a lesson to
us believers...It enables us to see from the side what spiritual tyranny looks
like...This experience should lead us to refuse the very idea of state
religion.” (Ibid, p. 136.)
Religious pluralism, then, need not be accepted as a license for relativism or
a secularization of culture. Indeed, Fr. Men saw pluralism as the grounds for
ecumenical cooperation. “We need the combined efforts of people of different
views sharing the same ground which unites believers and non-believers. That
common ground is the revival of law and order, compassion, the protection and
development of cultural heritage.” (Ibid., p. 146.) Pluralism does not
represent a capitulation to mass culture but an opportunity for presenting our
faith. “The way to combat [the evils of mass culture] is not by prohibitions
but by making the best works available to people. You can’t graft on taste by
making prohibitions. This is true of all aspects and manifestations of culture.
What is bad must be combated by affirming what is valuable, enriching,
beautiful.” (Ibid, p. 150)
Offering a strong critique of materialism, he argued that people are hungry for
what Christianity has to offer and that is simply the authentic within
Christianity, the Gospel. Realization of this profound fact should lead the
Christian not to triumphalism, but to repentance. For church history teaches us
that what we have preached so often has not been the Gospel, but ourselves.
Ultimately, we have confidence, not in ourselves but in the Spirit, who will
achieve the transformation within us and within our culture. Let me end my
remarks with another quotation from Fr. Men’s words, a source of hope and
humility, as we, like Frodo, face the times in which we live and choose what to
do within them.
And now, if we are to speak of the future, lit us pose this question to
ourselves: “What does God require of us in the remaining time, which, we, that
is the Church, should focus our attention on precisely now, in these days?”
Preaching. This means we have to find a common language with the people of our
time, not identifying with them completely, yet not isolating ourselves from
them behind an archaic wall. We have to state anew, almost as if for the first
time, all those questions which are placed before us by the Gospel. Witness.
This means that we still have to determine – if we have not yet determined –
our life’s goal, to find our place in life, our place not in the usual sense of
the word, but in our relationship to all of life’s problems. And finally,
Presence. This means we must learn how to pray at all times and deepen our
experience of the Mysteries, so that our witness may not be a witness about
ideology but of the living presence of God in us. It seems to me that the
problems of the future can be entirely approached from these three points... If
we witness to Christ and the Gospel, if we live in His Spirit, then in some
measure we will participate in what He envisaged, and His aim was never to
abandon this earth. He accomplishes this even without man, but He desires that
it be accomplished with the participation of man. This means that we will act
together with Him. And it follows, that then everything else necessary will
take place. Through such an approach, each culture will be the beneficiary only
of good. (About Christ and the Church, pp. 64-65.)
May it be so!
.Dr Raboteau second from right. To his right John N Perkins
psychologist from Princeton and to his left Olga Bukhina,
two of the other speakers at the conference.
