Easter in the "Meantime" - Faith in the Crossfire
No amount of political, economic or moral analysis will reveal the depth of the cultural crisis now engulfing us.
Our situation can only be understood anthropologically, and for real anthropological analysis we must turn to the mother lode of anthropological intelligence: the Bible, and especially the Christian New Testament.
Only by recognizing the decisive effect of the Christian revelation on history and culture can we begin to assess our current predicament and awaken hope in the midst of it.
Christianity declares that on a certain day two thousand years ago, when a Galilean Jew was publicly executed by Roman authorities everything changed, that the human situation in this world was decisively and irrevocably altered, and that nothing subsequent to that event can be fully comprehended without reference to it.
Now that is a very large claim, and the world has every right to be dubious about its validity. No defense of Christianity that sidesteps or relativizes that claim will slow or reverse the ongoing de-Christianization of our culture.
But the truth is that without the Trinity and the Cross we simply cannot understand the greatness of the human vocation and the tragedy of the human predicament. Christianity is about what it means to be human.