Vincent Kundukulam
Reflecting Christianness from the cultural perspective leads us to the realization that there is a universal nature for Christian philosophy. Its visions are applicable for people living in different nations and diverse cultures. Christianity acquired this ability because of its readiness to incorporate others’ cultural practices into its own to the extent that the latter do not destroy its essentials. By assimilating other cultures, Church keeps her visions as integral and concrete.
The composite nature of Christian identity is wrongly understood as syncretism by the traditionalists. Some think that Christian-ness will be subsumed if it borrows cultural components from elsewhere. In fact, this fear is baseless. Church adopts elements from the local cultures not with the meaning they have in their origins; rather she looks at them in and through Christian lens and modifies them in a way to get fit into Christian perspectives. Thus, the encultured cultural factors acquire specific and distinctive Christian meanings in Church.
The above-mentioned misunderstanding shall be cleared only when we understand that identity is more a matter of how than what. It is not so much what cultural materials you use that matters but how do you do with them. More than anything else, the objective and sense the doer has determine the real meaning and consequently the identity of an act. That means, identity is relational.
In the Christian tradition, the saying that ‘one must be born again by receiving baptism’ does not mean to totally discard one’s prior culture. The convert must live in a radically different way. The distinctiveness of Christian identity is not formed by drawing a definite boundary with the surrounding cultures but by using differently the cultural materials shared with them. In other words, the boundary line between what is Christian and what is not consists in the independent constitution of their respective identities by the given community.
Yet, one may ask, can the Church point out anything as decisive in determining the way the symbols, codes and beliefs are to be interpreted and practised in Christianity? What is that lens which gives Christian unicity to the enculturated elements? We can say in one word, it is gospel. What makes Christian thoughts, activities, and manners unique is nothing but the gospel-perspective.
Belongingness to gospel demands commitment to a world view that emerges from the belief that God is a communion of three persons. Man traces his origin back to the Triune God whose mutual love and charity are personified in Christ. Trinity and redemptive activity teach us that to be worthy of human existence one must love all as brothers and sisters. Charity is not an external decoration to Christianity but a way of living the mystery of the Godhead.
RaimundoPanikkar places Christ at the key point of Christian identity. A Christian is one for whom Christ the symbol discloses and touches the central mystery of his/her existence. As regards Christians, the Christ symbol reveals the very core of the Reality in general and their existence in particular. Here what matters is not a doctrine but life. More than the orthodoxy of doctrine what constitutes the identity is adhesion of individual or community to the life of Christ. This implies that even people who do not belong officially to the Church can be members of God’s Kingdom provided they practise evangelical deeds.
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