Church of the Ever Greater God by Aaron Pidel

Author:Aaron Pidel [Pidel, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2020-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Given the context of war-torn Europe, Przywara had little need to remind his audience of the judgment. More pressing was the need to recall how judgment prepares the way for mercy. In a poignant image typical of his evocative style of biblical commentary, Przywara recalls God’s command to Jeremiah to gird himself with a decomposed loincloth (Jer. 13:1–11) as a symbol of God’s discomfiting intimacy with Israel. Przywara draws out the implication for his day: “So great is the ‘folly of marriage,’ in which the ‘Head of all in heaven and on earth’ in each case causes himself to be girt anew into a ‘closed realm of the Church’ (from the Jewish-Christian to the Western [abendländischer] Church), to be girt, that is, to the point that the prevailing ‘garment’ must be burst asunder by a new ‘Babylon,’ to the point that it is Babylon that alone ‘frees the Lord.’”31 As the cited passage suggests, the freeing of the Lord from the encumbrance of a confining ecclesial garment is not a permanent achievement but an ongoing rhythm in the Church’s life.32 The temptation of the Church in every age lies in securing herself against her jealous God through dalliances with the surrounding “political, cultural, economic ‘fleshly powers,’” whether these be the religious power of Jewish Christianity, the imperial power of Constantine and Byzantium, the power of the sacral Nation, or the power of the confessional political parties.33 God uses the “Babylons” of every age to disambiguate the incomprehensible God in Christ in the Church from the instruments that God assumes, whether human cultural institutions or intellectual systems.34

God doffs the vesture of Western Christendom to free not only himself, moreover, but the Church for renewed mission. Just as God once used the Babylonian exile to deepen Israel’s sense of its mission to the nations, so God, through the rhythmic rise and fall of civilizations, continually directs the Church “beyond the covenant sphere.”35 With each death and resurrection, the Church asymptotically approaches the universality or catholicity that is her destiny. The twilight of the Western Church portends the dawn of a final era in this catholicizing process, when “Christ All-in-All becomes the all-encompassing ‘garment’: such that a ‘God-girding Church’ is no longer the measure of this ‘Allin-All,’ but the ‘All-in-All’ of the Head is the explosive and expansive measure of His body.”36 In the present hour, then, Christ and the Spirit reveal their plan to assume not only Western Christendom, but “the whole cosmos.”37

The coming transition from a prevalently occidental Church to a truly global Church will require a transition from a predominantly scholastic to a predominantly Marian and ressourcement style of theology. Writing in the middle of 1944,38 Przywara observes that scholasticism reflects the apogee of a westernizing trend in the Church’s culture and thought. Though the word of Revelation had its original site in Palestine, a land perfectly poised between East and West, historical factors soon favored a transfer of the “charism of the site of Revelation” from Jerusalem to Rome.39

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