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Handout #259 |
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The Church one and pluriform |
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My stay of twelve years in India, my contact with Hindu
friends, has only intensified in me this vision of total salvation by the
Christ who is as universal as he is unique.
There are Christians who more of less identify the destiny of the world with the destiny of Christianity as it has been formulated in the first ten or fifteen centuries of history, seeing the accession of new people to Christianity as a numerical increase in the church and its wider diffusion in space. After St Thomas, after Trent, what further modifications does it have to learn? It has already achieved adult status, and anyone who enters it penetrates a temple in which no stone is missing. On the level of revelation, the church has everything from the beginning, but on the level of the developments by which it enters the human sphere - or rather the human sphere is assumed and transformed - no century makes a definite boundary ... The church will never say only, as it said in the time of St Augustine, 'My tongue is Latin, Greek and also Syriac'; it is will add Sanskrit, Tamil and Chinese along with all the ideas and sentiments which these languages convey and which have not penetrated the Mediterranean, Germanic and Slavonic world... Spiritualities which have not yet burst forth, contemplative modes, new formulations of the mystery, types of adoration and consecrated life doubtless still await, and perhaps will await for centuries, the advent of civilizations like those of India and China into a church which is one and multiform. Yesterday's Christianity, which is that of today, will never be 'that which is to come In creation the eternal Spirit will always be that which is coming to pass. J. Monchanin, Theologie et Spiritualite missionaires, 1985 (this passage was written in 1951). |
