I have found that knowing a bit of Church history helps to give me perspective and keep me humble!
History shows us that as a community of faith, the Church, we often need to relearn or rediscover some truth that got forgotten or was denied because it was too uncomfortable, inconvenient or clashed too strongly with the prevailing culture.
Richard Rohr, OFM, writes of one such area of the Gospel that was ignored and got explained away for centuries
'I’m told that the word “nonviolence” did not exist (at least in the
English and German languages) until the 1950s. There’s a reason for
that: the notion didn’t exist in our consciousness. We didn’t create a
word for it because we didn’t get it yet! When Gandhi came along, he
pointed out that every religion in the world knows that Jesus of
Nazareth taught and lived nonviolence except one religion - Christianity.
In very short order, after Gandhi, this became obvious to many wise
people throughout the world.
Martin
Luther King, Jr. was the one who most influenced western culture
regarding nonviolence. That’s why I speak of it as a recovery
of nonviolence. We had it, but we couldn’t hear it, especially after
Christianity became the imperial religion. When you’re imperial, you
can’t hear any talk of nonviolence. You have to be violent to be an
empire. So after 313 AD, we pretty much lost the nonviolent teaching of
Jesus and it was not recovered until the twentieth century. It’s sort
of unbelievable, but in between, nonviolence was almost universally
forgotten, denied, or ignored as Christianity needed to justify its own
violence.'
In fact, God did raise up prophets within the Church over the centuries who lived and proclaimed the Gospel of non-violence, foremost among them was St Francis. But the Church, at all levels, did not listen.
Francis was honoured as a great saint, but his commitment to actually live the Sermon on the Mount was considered unrealistic and undoable - which of course it is - without deep conversion of heart and mind and the grace of Christ's Spirit to empower us.
This is but one area of Christian discipleship that has to 'rediscovered' and accepted generally within the Church.
It is humbling to recognise that the tendency to water down the Gospel is so constant in the life of the Church, and, if we are honest, in our own Christian living.
May the Lord give us ears to hear and hearts to respond to his full Word!
