And his kingdom shall have no end

A research program for the new year

There is only one God, and only one mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is a man, like them, and gave himself as a ransom for them all.

— 1 Timothy 2:5-6

The end of the modern age has left the world hungry for God. With the collapse of the ideal of unlimited progress, we find ourselves in need of a new direction. But the road ahead remains obscure. Modernity has left us atomized and isolated, with little confidence in the value of formal social structures. We are comfortable with a personal quest for God, perhaps in the company of some like-minded friends, but joining an ancient institution — committing to all its doctrinal and historical baggage — seems like too big of a step. Why should we need specific historical events or hierarchical organizations to mediate God’s presence? If God is everywhere, as the Creator and sustainer of all that is, why can’t I just relate to him directly? As one of modernity’s founders put it, “How many people stand between God and me!” ... “Is it really so simple and natural that God would have sought out Moses in order to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?”¹

On closer analysis, this challenge to institutional Christianity actually reveals its continuing influence in Western culture. In pre-Christian traditions that think of humans as distinct from the highest Divinity, the latter seems obviously beyond our reach, with no interest in individual people and their puny affairs. Any interaction with this divinity needs to be mediated by inferior gods or spirits who respond to human prayer and sacrifice. In traditions that deny this distinction, there is still no interaction or relationship: there is really just one Entity, and no one to relate to. It is Christianity (building on the prior tradition of Israel) that proclaimed the radical idea that the One God cares about each and every individual human being, giving each of us a quasi-divine dignity.

Rousseau’s question thus arises naturally from within Christianity itself. In fact, posing the question within the context of Catholic dogma helps us feel the weight of the question more fully. While dogma is one of the elements of Catholicism most foreign to our contemporary sensibilities, it has historically proven to be a valuable tool for maintaining the essential “polarities” that define human existence, and for preventing the mind from closing in on itself in a self-contained system of its own devising.

On the one hand, the Church has always taught that the relationship of man with God in the afterlife is maximally immediate. St. Paul (1 Cor. 13:12) compares the intimacy of divine union in the afterlife with a “face to face” encounter, in contrast with our current reliance on the mediation of a dark “mirror.” St. John (1 John 3:2) underlines the immediacy of this union as the cause of our divinization after death: “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” St. Thomas Aquinas affirms the same point in terms of philosophical psychology, teaching that God’s essence can be seen only through direct union with the intellect, such that God himself takes the role that is ordinarily played by concepts in our cognition of material things.²

At the same time, the Church insists on the unique role of Jesus Christ as the mediator between God and man. His life on earth, culminating in his execution under a mediocre Roman bureaucrat on the outskirts of Jerusalem, is somehow responsible for the possibility of man’s union with God. Salvation depends on physical contact with these historical deeds, as mediated by physical rituals involving water, wine, bread and oil and performed by authorized representatives in a definite institutional succession. When some early theologians tried to soften the paradox by suggesting that all this mediation is just a temporary remedy for dealing with man’s state of sin, the Church responded by adding a new line to the Creed: “His kingdom will have no end.”³ Even in the afterlife, those who are immediately united to God are not simply an aggregate of blessed individuals – they form an ordered community, a kingdom, which is unified under the kingship of the risen Jesus.

This refusal of the Church to accept any facile resolution of the tension has provided the impetus for centuries of ensuing theological reflection. Careful study of this tradition is not only of interest for informing the post-modern search for God, but also impinges directly on the deepest conflicts and division in contemporary society. The resistance of ancient theologians to the messiness of mediation has translated into the modern rebellion against all forms of dependence on contingent physical and social structures. The evident path of destruction left behind by this struggle for liberation now fuels a reaction in the opposite direction: to renounce human transcendence, and strive instead to adapt ourselves to the rhythms of nature and of traditional ways of life.

A healthy synthesis of these two poles demands a cosmovision radically different from the one we are all used to, one that includes a deep appreciation for the transcendence already present in the messiest historical realities. I do not claim to have such a cosmovision fully worked out (since the desire for a fully explicit “working out” is already on the wrong track). But in this new year, I hope to spend a good deal of time reading and reflecting on how this synthesis is achieved in the great classics of my own tradition — and sharing some of the results on this platform.

1. Quoted in Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei, n. 14.

2. Summa Theologiae I q. 12 a. 2.

3. Citation from Luke 1:33, added to the Nicene Creed by the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, against the theology of Marcellus of Ankyra.