God or Nothing by Cardinal Robert Sarah & Nicolas Diat

Author:Cardinal Robert Sarah & Nicolas Diat [Sarah, Cardinal Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781681496733
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2015-08-31T06:00:00+00:00

CORNERSTONES AND FALSE VALUES

For love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.

—Song of Solomon 8:6-7

NICOLAS DIAT: How should we view the authentic connection between Christianity and morality? Benedict XVI thought that the two should not be confused, at the risk of distorting the nature of each. Do you agree with this analysis?

ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH: Yes, in Deus caritas est, Benedict XVI writes that at the origin of being Christian there is not an ethical decision, a philosophical or moral idea, but an encounter with an event, a Person. This man who comes to us, Christ, gives life a new prospect and, thereby, its decisive orientation.

Benedict XVI thus repeated an idea of the theologian Romano Guardini, for whom Christianity is not the result of an intellectual experience but an event that comes from outside to meet me. Christianity is Someone bursting into my life. This movement also implies the historicity of Christianity, which is based on facts and not on an insight into the depths of my own interior world.

Taking as examples the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Trinity, Romano Guardini correctly writes that we will not discover the three Divine Persons by appealing to our intellect.

Saint John Chrysostom says in his Homilies on Saint Matthew: “We see that Jesus came from us and our human nature and that he was born of a Virgin Mother. But we do not understand how this prodigy could have happened. Let us not weary ourselves in trying to discover it but, rather, humbly accept what God has revealed to us, without curiously investigating what God keeps hidden from us.”

For many cultures, Christianity is a scandal and foolishness: “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:22-23). This statement by the apostle Paul shows the extent to which our religion is essentially bound up with a person who comes to us to appeal to our hearts and to give us a new orientation that will upset our whole world view.

Although Christianity cannot be reduced to morality, it nevertheless has moral consequences; love and faith give to the life of a man a new orientation, depth, and breadth. Man leaves the darkness of his past life. His life is enlightened by the light that is Christ. He lives by Christ’s life. From now on he can walk only in the company of Jesus, who is light, truth, and life. After his encounter with Jesus, a real Christian changes his conduct.

In the same way, a society imbued with a Christian spirit advances with a new ambition that is entirely unlike the precepts of a pagan society. From this perspective, I am very fond of the Letter to Diognetus: “The Christians. . . are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

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