The Mission of Christ and Christ-like Women
by Paul Mankowski
“If we go back to the beginnings of the Church, we find a clear affirmation that Christ is the one savior of all, the only one able to reveal God and lead to God. In reply to the Jewish religious authorities who question the apostles about the healing of the lame man, Peter says: ‘By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well . . . And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:10) This statement, which was made to the Sanhedrin, has a universal value, since for all people—Jews and gentiles alike—salvation can only come from Jesus Christ.”
—Papal Encyclical Redemptoris Missio [5]
There is something wryly amusing in the picture of the 16th-century explorer landing on some tiny spit in the North Atlantic, and—by thrusting his guidon into the sand some dozen yards up the beach—claiming the entire American continent for France or England or Spain, blithely unconscious of the diversity of terrain, the number of indigenous people, the variety of climate, and the sheer vastness of the land and of the enterprise of possessing it, an enterprise whose true scope was only fully understood three centuries later.
At the outset of Redemptoris Missio, Pope John Paul II advances—though far from naively—a comparably audacious claim: that all nations, all peoples, of whatever origin or religion or condition, are beholden to the saving power of Jesus Christ. He does not, of course, pretend that this claim is original—quite the contrary—rather he understands that the cross planted on Golgotha two millennia ago was and remains the definitive and final act of conquest—the conquest of human sin by divine love—and that all Christians are embarked on the project of bringing this good news, this gospel to the entire world. The burden of this encyclical is to expound the meaning of this claim for our own time and to awaken the Christian faithful to the responsibilities which follow from it.
The generally irenic and sanguine flavor of recent papal documents has led some readers to wonder whether the strength and nature of countervailing forces, especially those within our own house, are known in detail by the Holy See. No reader of this encyclical will have grounds for doubt in this regard. Such difficulties, the pope insists, are, in his own words, “the most painful of all.” In spite of the exhortation of the Second Vatican Council to increase and intensify the Church’s missionary activity, there is no denying that such activity has languished since the council. The current pope notes that his predecessor Paul VI already noted this missionary anemia, which he characterized as “a lack of fervor [which] is all the more serious because it comes from within. It is manifested in fatigue, disenchantment, compromise, lack of interest and above all lack of joy and hope.” [36] John Paul brings this into sharper focus:
One of the most serious [sources] for the lack of interest in the missionary task is a widespread indifferentism which, sad to say, is found also among Christians. It is based on incorrect theological perspectives and is characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’ We can add, using the words of Pope Paul VI, that there are also certain ‘excuses which would impede evangelization. The most insidious of these excuses are certainly the ones which people claim to find support for in such and such a teaching of the council.’ [36]
Nor is the pope naive about the consequences of these incorrect perspectives. He writes,
As a result of the changes which have taken place in modern times and the spread of new theological ideas, some people wonder: Is missionary work among non-Christians still relevant? Has it not been replaced by interreligious dialogue? Is not human development an adequate goal of the Church’s mission? Does not respect for conscience and for freedom exclude all efforts at conversion? Is it not possible to attain salvation in any religion? Why then, should there be missionary activity? [4]
Clearly, the pope has scored a bull’s-eye here. Consider this passage which appeared in America magazine this summer, from an article titled, “Being a Missionary,” in which a priest explains why he and his companions decided to pull out of Jordan last year:
We have many doubts about our operation, not because we doubt the Gospel, but because we are not sure of the best way to be of help to Arab Christians in realizing the Gospel. We are very conscious of living in a pluralistic world and of how much the Christian message has been expressed in limited cultural ways. Further, if I believe that in the past missionaries have been unintentionally harmful for some people, in my work among Arabs I am now very aware about the uncertain effects of our work. [8-8-91, p. 612]
“Fatigue, disenchantment, compromise, lack of interest and above all lack of joy and hope” describe the soul of this “enlightened” evangelization. It is so unsure of itself it has lost all confidence that it has any gift worth giving. These would-be missionaries are straightjacketed by what they perceive as the overwhelming complexity and novelty of their situation. That cultural differences present evangelical complexities no one could deny; to think awareness of this complexity is novel is an error that betrays an astonishing historical innocence. Consider the description given in the Acts of Apostles of that first Pentecost:
Paul Mankowski is a lector in Biblical Hebrew at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He has published Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew (Harvard Semitic Studies #47).
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