Charles J. Chaput Quote

Christians can relax a bit about the world and its politics: not to the point of indifference or insouciance or irresponsibility, but in the firm conviction that, at the extremity of the world’s agony and at the summit of its glories, Jesus remains Lord. The primary responsibility of Christian disciples is to remain faithful to the bold proclamation of that great truth, which is the truth that the world most urgently needs to hear. 7 Or, as John Henry Newman put it, [ The Church’s task is] not to turn the whole earth into a heaven, but to bring down a heaven upon earth. 8 Christians, then, have the task of leading the world to the truth about itself. But in our time—as in the time of Diognetus—the world doesn’t want to hear it. The world hates the story Christians tell. It no longer believes in sin. It doesn’t understand the forgiveness of sinners. It finds the ideas of a personal God, immortality, grace, miracles, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the whole architecture of the sacraments and the supernatural more and more implausible. It sneers at the restraints the Gospel places on appetites and ego. And in place of the Christian narrative of history, it lowers the human horizon to a relentless now of distractions, desires, and suppressed questions about meaning. This empty shell of a life leads in small, anesthetic steps to nihilism: In effect, the truth of our time in the world seems to be that there is no truth, that life has no point, and that asking the big questions is for suckers. The Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has observed that we live in a world that has lost its story. 9 Thus the Church’s task is to tell and retell the world its story, whether it claims to be interested or not.