Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of adherents as a sign of mourning and repentance to God. The ashes used are typically gathered from the burned palms or Palm Crosses of the previous year’s Palm Sunday. This practice is common in much of Christendom, celebrated by Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans. In the Western Christian calendar, Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent and occurs 46 days (40 days not counting Sundays) before Easter, occuring as early as February 4 (February 5 on leap years) or as late as March 10.

Christians look to the Old Testament as the origin of the practice of marking oneself with ashes. It says for instance in Jeremiah 6:26, “Oh, daughter of my people, put on sackcloth and roll in ashes” (see also Isa. 58:5; Dan 9:3; Jonah 3:6). The New Testament picks up this theme emphasizing ashes as a sign of repentance. For instance, "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes" (Mt 11:21, Lk 10:13). While the opening Millennium had just a few references to ashes in Christian liturgy, it was in the 12^th Century when the modern tradition of burning palm branches from the previous Palm Sunday and applying their charred remains to the penitent developed.

When a minister applies the ashes to one’s forehead, he often conveys an admonition such as the following:

Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.

   —Genesis 3:19

Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

   —Mark 1:15

Repent, and hear the good news.

   —Mark 1:15

While many of us low-church types may not actually receive ashes, the day is nevertheless a golden opportunity to evaluate the state of our souls and express to God a healthy measure of repentance and contrition. Along this line, D.L. Moody (not exactly a high-churchman) has a timely word of exhortation for us:

I firmly believe that the Church of God will have to confess her own sins, before there can be any great work of grace. There must be a deeper work among God’s believing people. I sometimes think it is about time to give up preaching to the ungodly, and preach to those who confess to be Christians. If we had a higher standard of life in the Church of God, there would be thousands more flocking into the Kingdom. So it was in the past; when God’s believing children turned away from their sins and their idols, the fear of God fell upon the people round about. Take up the history of Israel, and you will find that when they put away their strange gods, God visited the nation, and there came a mighty work of grace . . . The judgment of God must begin with us.¹

If confession of sin is deep among believers, it will be so among the ungodly also. I never knew it to fail. I am now anxious that God should revive His work in the hearts of His children, so that we may see the exceeding sinfulness of sin.²

Footnotes:

¹ Dwight L. Moody, Prevailing Prayer (Chicago: Moody Press, 1990), 28.

² Ibid., 32.

“More people live alone than at any other time in history,” said Eric Klinenberg in his New York Times article “One’s a Crowd.” In major U.S. cities, such as Atlanta, Denver, and Minneapolis, 40 percent of households contain a single occupant. In Manhattan and Washington, D.C., nearly 50 percent of households consist of one person. Throughout the country, 32 million people live alone—15 million of them between the ages of 34 and 65. Once, most people thought about living alone with a sense of “anxiety, dread, and feelings of loneliness.” But today, many appreciate the freedom and independence from intrusive family members, annoying roommates, or spouses that turn out to be “the wrong person.” And the advent of online social networking makes the solitary existence less isolated still, allowing us to “engage with others when and how we want to, and on our own terms.” Klinenberg concludes by suggesting that “All signs suggest that living alone will become even more common in the future, at every stage of adulthood and in every place where people can afford a place of their own.”

Before disengaging from one’s family and friends, it is worth listening to the insight of Kerry Egan from CNN.com.

“I am a hospice chaplain. I visit people who are dying—in their homes, in hospitals, and in nursing homes. What do people who are sick and dying talk about? Mostly, about their families, their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it is not. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. That is how we talk about the big spiritual questions of human existence. We don’t live our lives in theology and theories. We live our lives in our families: This is where we find meaning, this is where our purpose becomes clear.”

As a pastor, having sat beside many a hospital bed containing men and women on the threshold of eternity, I find Kerry Egan’s testimony to be entirely convincing. This is not to suggest that solo living is therefore wrong or inadvisable. The truth is that we can live in a full house with a spouse and children and be aloof. Kerry’s insight speaks to all of us. When we look back upon life from the vantage point of our final breaths, it will be relationships with family and friends, especially those in Christ, that are the greatest gifts under heaven. 

The world’s attention turned to the Vatican last week where Pope Benedict XVI created 22 new cardinals from 13 countries—including three from the United States and Canada—placing red hats on their heads and calling them to lives of even greater love and service to the church. The event raises numerous questions of interest for evangelicals, including the pontiff’s continued emphasis on the “new evangelization.” Also of interest are the implications that such appointments have on the selection of Benedict’s replacement. In what follows, evangelical pastor and theologian, Leonardo De Chirico, explains how the new class of cardinals may influence the choice of the next Pope.  

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Opening the Pontifical Yearbook is not an easy task. This thick book of more than 2350 pages contains all sorts of information about who’s who in the Vatican and what happens there. Despite the practical problems of handling it, it is nonetheless a mine of precious information about the center of the RC Church and the Vatican city.

For example, one reads that the official titles of the Pope are the following: “Bishop of Rome”, “Vicar of Jesus Christ”, “Successor of the prince of the Apostles” (i.e. Peter), “Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church”, “Primate of Italy”, “Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province”, “Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City”. The last title, “Servant of God’s servants”, is in stark contrast with the grandeur of the previous ones.

1. Absolute Power, with one Exception

The list of papal titles is somewhat astonishing and covers religious offices, political tasks and organizational responsibilities. He is one of the last examples of absolute sovereignty. In his person, the executive, legislative, and juridical powers are all concentrated. Until he dies, the Pope remains the Pope. The only restriction on his power is that he cannot choose his own successor. In other words, the papacy is not a family dynasty. This task is given to the College of electing cardinals, i.e. cardinals who are under 80 years old and who gather in “conclave” (from the Latin cum clave, i.e. locked up with a key) in the Sistine Chapel to vote on the new Pope.

This is not to say that the reigning Pope does not influence the vote for the election of the next one. Actually, although he will not be present (!), he has a strategic role to play. As a matter of fact, the Pope has the authority to select the new cardinals. So in choosing the new “princes” of the RC Church, he shapes the College that will vote his successor. This gives him a real, albeit indirect influence on the selection process of the next Pope. By way of analyzing the chosen members of the College (i.e. their spiritual weight and ecclesiastical provenance) it is therefore possible to paint a somewhat accurate and likely picture of who the next pope will be.

2. The New “Northren” Cardinals

On February 18^th, Pope Ratzinger “created” (this is the technical verb) 22 new cardinals, although only 18 of them became part of the electing College because they are under 80. The College is then made up of 125 cardinals, a number that will decrease in a short time because some of its members will turn 80 soon and therefore will be excluded from it.

Let’s have a look at the geographical map of the College. What appears interesting is the proportion between the macro-regions. On the one hand, there are 67 Europeans (more than half of the College), and if we add the North-Americans and the only Oceanian, the number of the cardinals coming from the Northern part of the globe is 83 out of 125. On the other hand, the number of Latin American, African and Asian cardinals is only 41. Nearly two thirds of the College comes from the ancient, established, powerful churches of the West, although most of these churches are currently facing a long-term phase of decline. Only one third of the College comes from Southern churches which are younger, less traditional, perhaps poorer, but are growing in terms of practice and number of vocations to the priesthood.

Thus the College now reflects more the “older” face of the RC Church than its “new” profile. It is a College with a distinct Ratzingerian face. Does it mean that Pope Ratzinger wishes his successor to be a Northern Pope that will share his emphasis on calling the West back to the RC Church? Does it mean that the secular West will be the primary item on the next Pope’s agenda as it is in Benedict XVI’s one?

3. The Power of the Curia

The other interesting feature to consider is the role of the electing cardinals. After the creation of the 22 new ones, 44 of them now belong to the Roman Curia. In other words, they are high ranking ecclesiastical figures who live in Rome and lead various Vatican departments but do not have direct pastoral roles. They bring to the Church a more “Roman” perspective than a “catholic” (i.e. universal) one. Whereas bishops around the world have first-hand experience in leading a church even at the parish and grass-roots level, the Roman Curia has a more “political”, self-referential culture. Generally speaking, they are more able diplomats than preachers and pastors. Their expertise is more in canon law than in missiology.

Summing up these two indicators, here is a possible portrayal of the next Pope: a Northern cardinal with a distinct “Roman” soul. Perhaps the next Pope will be totally different, but at least this portrayal corresponds well to Benedict XVI’s own outlook.

Leonardo De Chirico

leonardo.dechirico@ifeditalia.org

Rome, 20^th February 2012

It is a familiar phrase: "God bless you." Simple, direct, and intensely personal, it is more than sentiment; it is a theological act with potential to convey hope, a gift that we share whenever we communicate gospel truth.

The subject is always God. He is the source of blessing and its primal speaker. Divine speech caused the original creation to teem with creatures; it animated the luminaries, and from time immemorial it has renewed hope and vitality to men and women, even among the redeemed.

God’s people, embodying and proclaiming his Word, are the appointed mediators of such life. Through Abraham, all the families of the world would be blessed (Gen. 12:3). Even Pharaoh, with his calloused heart, recognized his need for God’s blessing when he requested it from Moses (Ex. 12:32). Most memorably, perhaps, we observe this power mediated through Israel’s priests, as in the familiar blessing of Numbers 6:24-26:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Blessing is more than a polite wish. Redemptive history presents remarkable cases that testify to this, such as Isaac in Genesis 27 or Jacob in Genesis 48, where its articulation shaped the trajectories of lives and nations. As examples of extraordinary purposes in God’s covenant with Israel, they illustrate the effective movement of sovereign grace from heaven to earth. Without a faithful pronouncement of God’s blessing, we are surely doomed.

In a culture haunted by fragmentation, hi-tech distractedness, and the loneliness of individualism, where hearts—even Christian hearts—feel like empty theaters of longing, God’s life-giving power is needed more than ever. Along with food and clothing, divine blessing is a necessary commodity. Once again, the Exodus offers a useful example.

Pharaoh represented the worldly threat against God’s son, Israel: oppression, poverty, injustice, and various forms of indignity, forces that exist among God’s people today, to which we might also add anxiety, fear, and despair. While acknowledging these threats, Moses simultaneously recognized God’s saving power. On the Plains of Moab he reminded Israel of their blessed deliverance and of God’s promise to do so again in the future. This is where we live; Moses’ future is our present.

The recital of God’s blessing is essential, without which we are helpless against the threat of sin and death. The early morning cup of coffee, an open Bible, and an extemporaneous sermon preached at ourselves, filled with reminders of who we are in Christ, rejecting the lies of the evil one, this is where the rubber of our gospel-centered theology meets the road of life. Yes, to be sure, there will be occasions when the raw edge of circumstances makes us feel like crawling into a fetal position to suck our thumbs, but not for long. The blessing of redemptive grace, proceeding from the finished work of Christ, empowered by the Spirit, is new every morning, fortifying our souls with the requisite faith to stand and declare to angels and men, "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!"

Inductive Bible Study: A Comprehensive Guide to the Practice of Hermeneutics,

David R. Bauer and Robert A. Traina

Baker, 2011

Hardcover, $34.99

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Before anyone is prepared to work out his salvation with fear and trembling, he must understand how to study the Bible. Before one can preach, counsel, mentor, and articulate an answer for this faith, he must study the Bible. Christian faith assumes the Bible, without which we are rudderless ships.

Here is the irony: God’s word is the necessary means for growing in conformity to the image of Christ, and yet there are few comprehensive resources to help people engage this process. Over the years as a pastor, I have typically recommended Fee and Stuart’s How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth, which is especially helpful in explaining techniques required of different genres. However, despite its accessible style, some students circled back to me and admitted that there remained ambiguity concerning the initial steps of the interpretive process. This is the strength of Bauer and Traina’s book, Inductive Bible Study: it trains people to attend to the content of Scripture, to follow a text’s argument, map its narrative flow, and grasp its implications. I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone. It is too dense for new Christians and may assume too much for those who aren’t accustomed to studying Scripture. But if you are one who enjoys digging into the text, this is a helpful resource.

If you know anything about the legacy of Robert Traina (1921-2010), you will appreciate how readily accessible his approach is. Many years ago, Traina popularized the three-fold method for extracting meaning from the biblical text through “observation, interpretation, and application.” So axiomatic is this triad that it can be heard in most small group Bible studies across the land. On one level, the volume under review is that simple; but it is certainly not simplistic. It pushes forward to analyze the nuanced questions that this method naturally begs. Thanks to coauthor, David Bauer, Professor and Dean at Asbury Theological Seminary, the volume is rife with helpful discussions about the range of contemporary hermeneutical debates. Dots are connected from these technical considerations to the inductive method, resulting in an exegesis handbook that is both practical and substantive.

The book consists of five major sections.

Part 1. Theoretical Foundations

Part 2. Observing and Asking

Part 3. Answering and Interpreting

Part 4. Evaluating and Appropriating

Part 5. Correlation

There are also six appendices which include the role of presuppositions in contemporary hermeneutical discussion, original languages, and outlining (discourse analysis).

The authors express the book’s purpose in the Preface:

Our intention is to present rather comprehensively our understanding of the approach to the study of the Bible known as inductive Bible study, and to direct this presentation primarily to seminary students and those engaged in Christian ministry. But we anticipate that this volume will be useful also to scholars who are engaged in advanced study of the Bible and who are conversant with contemporary hermeneutical discussions. (xiii)

In keeping with the authors’ intention, this book is not for the new or young Christian. For that person you might consult Howard Hendricks’ Living by the Book or, a step beyond that, Grasping God’s Word by Duvall and Hays. Because Inductive Bible Study is part hermeneutics, part exegesis, part philosophy, and part logic, it is for the motivated reader. It reads like a textbook, but, then again, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. The upside is its comprehensive scope, fastidious indexing, and bibliography.

Finally, as one whose ministry is often located at the Catholic/Protestant intersection, I see another reason why this book is so critical. The question that I most commonly hear from my Catholic friends concerns the evangelical position of sola sciptura, particularly how we can claim to have reached an authoritative interpretation of the Bible. In this regard, I think the work of Bauer and Traina is also helpful. Their treatment of the issue is too extensive to reproduce here (you’ll need to read the book), but, in this vein, their closing statement bears repeating, “[I]t is potentially helpful to come to the text with a faith perspective only if one is prepared to submit that faith perspective to the corrective judgment of the text” (384).

The following quote is one of my favorites. It seems appropriate to post today—Valentine’s Day—as a reminder of how we define affection. It is cruciform, it is redemptive, and it is the tangible illustration of why we declare that “God is love.”

“When we are united to Christ a mysterious exchange takes place: he took our curse, so that we may receive his blessing; he became sin with our sin, so that we may become righteous with his righteousness. . . . On the one hand, God declined to ‘impute’ our sins to us, or ‘count’ them against us, with the implication that he imputed them to Christ instead. On the other, God has imputed Christ’s righteousness to us. . . . We ourselves have done nothing of what is imputed to us, nor Christ anything of what is imputed to him. . . . He voluntarily accepted liability for our sins.”

Footnotes:

John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, 1986), 148-149.

Author and evangelist, Luis Palau, will deliver a lecture at 7 p.m. this evening titled "Increasing the Evangelism Temperature in the Local Church."

For more than 50 years, speaker, teacher, author, and spiritual leader Luis Palau has been a powerful spokesperson for the relevance, reality, and significance of spirituality for individuals around the world. His work has taken him to more than 73 nations and his campaigns have allowed him to present a clear case for Christianity with more than 1 billion people through television, radio, print, and live events.

Tonight’s lecture is sponsored by the Billy Graham Center Institute of Strategic Evangelism (of which the Ministry of Gospel Renewal is part). The event is free and open to the public, and it takes place in Barrows Auditorium, located in the east wing of the Billy Graham Center at 500 College Avenue in Wheaton.

I can’t get a video image out of my mind, and I don’t want to. I see Billy Graham being interviewed at the second great International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists (Amsterdam ’86). He was off stage at the convention center and several thousand leaders were sitting behind him. The camera captured the energy of the crowd anticipating the next session. A journalist and cameraman found Dr. Graham milling about greeting the leaders and asked him, “Mr. Graham, when you are gone, who will take your place?” Without missing a beat, Dr. Graham looked into the camera and with a sweep of his arm referring to the crowd he said, “They will.”

Dr. Graham envisioned the Billy Graham Center because of “them.” The story goes like this: Once upon a time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, two parents had a child. The first parent was one of the world’s finest Christian academic communities. The other was one of the world’s leading evangelistic organizations. Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association birthed the Billy Graham Center. The size of the structure was matched only by the vast scope of its vision: to create a people and a place that would continue to accelerate global evangelism by identifying and equipping the next generations of evangelism leaders—“them.”

Fast forward thirty years. The need has not changed. Every second of every day five people are born and two die. Will the five find Christ and with him, life now and forever? Will the two live in eternal bliss, or sorrow? This is the most serious issue of human existence. C.S. Lewis rightly said that the “glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying him, the salvation of the human soul, is the real business of life.”

Challenge and opportunity are everywhere. In the U.S., tremendous shifts are occurring. Generations have come who carry but a light touch of Christian memory. Many claim some allegiance to forms of Christianity, but not to Christ. We call these 100,000,000 Americans the partially evangelized. Who will reach them and how?

An even more challenging shift is the changing face of America. We are the most ethnically diverse country (again, over 100,000,000 what/who??) in the history of the world. Everyone is coming from everywhere. Some bring Jesus. Most do not. Who will reach them, and how?

Now look at our world. We’ve crossed the seven billion-person marker. We are connected as never before, yet the growth of the Church is one of the world’s greatest unknown stories. The Kingdom of God is forcefully advancing, but the underside of our global family of believers cries out for resource help.

The biggest need is for godly, committed, and equipped leaders. The Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College is a part of the answer to these cries. We are committed to accelerating global evangelism, helping global leaders and Christian agencies realize their evangelism destinies.

Our commitment to accelerating global evangelism can be summarized in three pictures.

• Equipping Center. Our directors are proven leaders in the field of evangelism. They speak, teach, train, mentor, and write. They travel both nationally and internationally. Further, the core resources of the museum, library, archives, and the faculty of the Wheaton Graduate School make our location a leading center of learning. Many thousands are served each year in the field and at home. This is how we work on the micro level with individuals.
• Nerve Center. The BGC is a strategic crossroads where global coalitions for evangelism and missions are launched and advanced. We understand the power and impact of the Church in unity. We know that often we can do more together than any one organization can do alone. This is how we work on the macro level with agencies and organizations.
• Inspiration Center. The building has the ability to inspire and give credibility to the evangelical Christian movement in the world. Christian statesmen and women often come to the BGC to hold strategic meetings. The museum has welcomed more than one million visitors. Its story of evangelism in America, the life of Billy Graham, and the powerful artistic journey to the cross and empty tomb of Christ give hope to God’s people. We are looked at as a “nexus” point where inspiration and hope flourish.

Stay tuned for our next era of evangelism mission.

How essential are “good works”—virtuous behavior growing out of one’s character, manifested in tangible form—in the course of justification? For many evangelicals, the idea of placing these terms in the same sentence (“good works” and “justification”) is problematic enough. Adjoining them in our preaching and discipleship would be dicey at best, if not patently provocative. Such a bold act might result in a late night invasion of one’s office in which elders and informed laymen examine your bookshelves to see whether their dark corners contain titles by authors such as Wright, Hafemann, or Ratzinger. You don’t want that.

In the following extract from Professor Tony Lane’s chapter in Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates?,¹ we learn why it is not only faithful to the Reformed tradition to insist on good works (even in the same sentence as “justification”), but it is the only pastorally responsible thing to do (yes, the pencil drawing is of Professor Lane, pleading with you to read Calvin’s Institutes and see these truths for yourself. Notice the dramatic position of his hands, which is how Englishmen express passion).

* * * * * * *

There is the good news of free grace but there is also the call to discipleship – not as an optional extra for the zealous but as part of the basic package. As someone once put it, the entrance fee for the Christian faith is nothing, but the annual subscription is everything. When we are in Christ we receive the free gift of justification but we also need to press on with the arduous task of sanctification.² At different times one or other side of this tension has been lost. At times the church has lapsed into preaching cheap grace, as Bonhoeffer put it, and Christians have been shamefully indistinct from the ungodly. At other times the stress has been on the moral demands of Christian faith and the radical message of forgiveness has faded into the background.

Present-day evangelicalism is not very good at maintaining this tension. Some actually deny it. There are some who deny that repentance is a necessary part of the gospel message. There are some who say that it is possible to have Christ as Savior without accepting him as Lord. The overwhelming majority of evangelicals would have no problem with rejecting these two positions, but in practice and by implication teach something similar. Having worked intensively on the doctrine of justification for some three years, my ears have become very sensitive to these issues. Listening to sermons from a wide range of sources³ I hear a never-ending flood of references to the freeness of God’s mercy, to the fact that God forgives, to the grace and favor that God is eager to lavish on all who come to him. At the same time I have heard a tiny trickle of references to the fact that repentance is needed as well as faith, to the fact that discipleship is not an optional extra. The leading Catholic scholar Etienne Gilson fundamentally misunderstood the Reformers’ doctrine of justification: “For the first time, with the Reformation, there appeared this conception of a grace that saves a man without changing him, of a justice that redeems corrupted nature without restoring it, of a Christ who pardons the sinner for self-inflicted wounds but does not heal them.”⁴ On the other hand, if he had been attempting to describe modern evangelical preaching would he have been so far wide of the truth?

One symptom of the problem can be seen in the way that good works are commended. I have heard a number of sermons in which Christians are taught that they ought to love and do good works. The Reformers would have regarded this as grossly inadequate. It is not enough to state that Christians ought to do good works – the truth is that Christians will do good works and those who do not simply demonstrate that they are not Christians. (This is so often stated in the teaching of Jesus that there is no need to give references.) The Reformers were often challenged by their Catholic opponents to state whether or not love and good works are necessary for salvation. Their answer was that love and good works are necessary for salvation in that without them one cannot be a Christian. But they do not cause our justification. You cannot be justified without love and good works, but it is not they that bring about justification. They are necessary as consequences or symptoms of justification, not as causes of it.⁵ It is necessary to have spots in order to have chicken pox. It is not that the spots cause chicken pox, but that where this is chicken pox so there will be (not ought to be) spots. It is necessary to cough in order to have SARS (Severe Adult Respiratory [Distress] Syndrome), but coughing does not cause it – at least not your own coughing! As Calvin put it, justification is not by works, but nor is it without works (Institutes 3:15:1).

________________________________

Footnotes:

¹ Anthony N. S. Lane, “Twofold Righteousness: A Key to the Doctrine of Justification?” in Husbands and Treier, eds., Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates? (Downers Grove, IVP, 2004), 205-224.

² Justification and sanctification are held together in that we receive both in Christ. They are, as Calvin put it, like the heat and light of the sun: distinct but inseparable (Institutes 3.2.6). That does not in itself prevent us from falling into the trap of stressing one to the exclusion of the other.

³ I would exempt from this criticism my own pastor, Roger Pearce.

⁴ Etienne Gilson. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), p. 421.

⁵ E.g. Luther in the 1536 Disputation on Justification (WA 30/I:96, 102); Bucer, De vera ecclesarum in doctrina, ceremoniis, et disciplina reconcilatione et compositione (Strassburg: W. Rihel, 1542), fols, 179b-180b.

Over the years I have written several articles on The New Evangelization of the Catholic Church, particularly as it takes shape in the US. Our friend, Leonardo De Chirico, professor and pastor in Rome, Italy, has recently addressed the subject from a European point of view. His analysis reveals a point that may also be applied to evangelical Protestants: it is easy for the church to blame secularism for the evils of society without seeing our failure in catechesis as at least partly responsible.

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The New Evangelization is the buzzword for much of what happens at the Vatican. It could well become the catchword of Ratzinger’s entire pontificate given the attention that is receiving. Benedict XVI instituted a new Pontifical Council in 2010 entirely dedicated to the New Evangelization. The latter is mentioned in nearly all his speeches and is slowly but steadily becoming the overarching theme of many projects sponsored by the Vatican.

The President of the newly created Vatican department, Msgr. Rino Fisichella, has just published a book (La nuova evangelizzazione, Milano: Mondadori, 2011) where he spells out the significance of the New Evangelization and offers an interesting perspective on the direction that this initiative is going to take. Fisichella was professor of Fundamental Theology (i.e. the RC way of defining a discipline between Apologetics and Systematic Theology) for many years and then Rector of the Lateran Pontifical University, one of the major and most prestigious academic institutions in Rome. After spending much of his life reflecting on the often turbulent relationship between faith and the modern world, Benedict XVI called him to lead the Vatican efforts towards mobilizing the RC Church towards the New Evangelization. From the chair to the square, so to speak.

1. What the New Evangelization is About

Fisichella makes clear that the New Evangelization applies to those countries where the RC Church was established in ancient times and where the first proclamation of the Gospel resounded many centuries ago. He acknowledges the fact that the word “evangelization” and the vocabulary around it has been treated with suspicion in RC circles due to its “protestant” usage and overtones. Mission and catechesis were more traditional and preferred terms for a long time. It is only after Vatican II that the language of evangelization began to be used.

The expression “New Evangelization” was coined by John Paul II in 1979 and subsequently achieved a technical theological meaning. Its specificity has to do with its recipients, i.e. the masses that have been baptized in the RC Church but have “lost a living sense of their faith”. The goal of the New Evangelization is to call them back to the mother church.

2. Why the New Evangelization is Needed

Fisichella embarks on the attempt of analyzing what has caused such a transition to practical unbelief. The root of the Western crisis is the transformation of the process of secularization in a strong movement towards secularism. The former is a sociological process which reflects pluralism, the latter is a new dogmatic religion which is anti-Christian. This new stance forgets the rich “synthesis between Greek-Roman thought and Christianity” and replaces it with an ideology of religious indifference and relativism. In a telling comment, Fisichella argues that “the pathology that afflicts the world today is cultural” and is to be entirely attributed to secularism.

This is a standard reading of Western cultural trends from a traditional point of view. What is striking in Fisichella’s otherwise nuanced reconstruction is the lack of self-criticism as far as the RC Church is concerned. It seems that the charge of the present-day crisis lies in secularism only, whereas churches seem to bear no responsibility. Even when he deplores the profound ignorance that most people show as far as the tenets of the Christian faith is concerned, he skips over the rather obvious point about who is to blame (at least partially but truly) for it. Are we sure that European churches do not bear any responsibility in today’s spiritual and cultural crisis, especially when they claim to have 70%, 80%, 90% of baptized in most countries? Isn’t there something wrong in their theology of Christian initiation? Isn’t there a problem in their catechetical impact? Isn’t there something awkward in their witness to the Gospel? In the end, are churches blameless in the Western spiritual turmoil? For Fisichella, the issue is not even mentioned.

3. New Evangelization … New Humanism

The New Evangelization is needed because the West has turned away from its Christian roots and it is time to reverse the tide. According to Fisichella, the battle ground is cultural, the issue at stake is anthropological, the task before the Church is to promote a New Humanism, i.e. a more advanced synthesis between Christian values and the Greek-Roman heritage through the rediscovery of the virtue of coherence on the part of Christians. The New Evangelization will be a means to achieve this ambitious goal, a goal that Benedict XVI wholly embraces and proactively spearheads.

So far, the narrative of the New Evangelization does not contain crucial biblical words like repentance from past and present mistakes, confession of sin, conversion to Jesus Christ. If the New Evangelization is to bear its fruit there is no other way than the biblical one.

Leonardo De Chirico

leonardo.dechirico@ifeditalia.org

Rome, 7^th February 2012

***SPECIAL EVENT***

If you happen to live in the Chicago area, we will have Leonardo with us from Italy in another few weeks. You are welcome to join us for his talk in the Rotunda of the Billy Graham Center Museum, The Coming Gospel Challenge: A Portrait of Modern Day Italy.

Rome is called “The Eternal City” and “Capital of the World.” A cosmopolitan center with more than 2.7 million residents, it is famous for its history, style, art, and cuisine; but have you ever thought of it as an object lesson?
On March 1, at 7:00pm we are privileged to have Leonardo Di Chirico, Ph.D., pastor of a center-city congregation in Rome (associated with Redeemer in New York) speaking about challenges and opportunities for gospel renewal in modern day Italy. You are invited to hear Leo explain how God’s people can exert a transformative influence on our community, in the face of political, media, and cultural opposition, with the resources of Christ’s kingdom.

Since the Billy Graham Center Museum’s Rotunda has limited seating, Please RSVP to MGR@wheaton.edu.