First Paper Done!

Turned in my paper today. Following is what I think think is the strongest part of it:

A third thesis of Aidan Kavanagh in On Liturgical Theology has very much to do with cosmos. Kavanagh argues that, figuratively speaking, over time the church left civilization for the outer reaches of society, where individuals would have the freedom to reduce all of experience to that between one and oneself.

Kavanagh wants to blow the doors off this paradigm and insist that the church, to be the church, transacts with “the real.” He disparages exclusivism and “false cosmologies,” cosmologies that are merely human constructs developed to help us feel good about our solipsism, whereas true cosmology is accessible only when the church is at the center of civilization a witness to the redemptive power of Christ. The liturgy is addressed primarily, not to the assembly, but to the world; it is a public enactment of the church.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners in DC and author of the best-selling God’s Politics, says God is personal, but never private. I suspect it would prompt no great controversy in a Christian forum to say members of the church have privatized their faith or to say that in many cases we have become so heavenly minded we’re of no earthly good. I suspect most would simply nod their heads in agreement. Why has this happened? Part of it has to do with our post-Christian times. People no longer want a passive chaplain to culture, which they did want back in the fifties. Kavanagh points to Rousseau’s elevation of the human individual. Another reason for faith’s privatization is that Christians have felt as though they had to give the world all the answers to its problems. They finally realized they don’t have all the answers, were ashamed, and thus retreated from the world to lick their wounds and console themselves with their own company.

But what if we did have the answer all along and didn’t know it? And what if the answer is not a list of propositions but an event to which we invite all to come? And what if this event is an encounter with the living God? Maybe the greatest service we can offer civilization is showing up for worship to demonstrate for the uninitiated as well as each other that walking to the brink of chaos by the grace of God is something we can do. We can do it, even if we leave with a limp.

One reason any people becomes anti-Christian, as I would argue American culture has become, is because such a people recognizes the violence inherent in an encounter with God. To this the Christian can answer, yes, you’re right, there is a violence to encountering God; let us endure it together, for the wounds will be “as deep as they are salutary.”