Catholic Social Teaching: Salvation of the Whole Person

Not only is Christ the savior of all men, he is the savior of every single part of man.

It would be a mistake of huge proportions to limit Christ, as Thomas Jefferson did, to a mere moral teacher.  Christ is more than a moral teacher, more than a moral model.  Christ is man's savior, a unique, irreplaceable, and necessary office, of which man is in great need.  "The salvation offered in its fullness to men in Jesus Christ . . . is salvation for all people and of the whole person: it is universal and integral salvation." (Compendium, No. 38)

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - In our prior article, we explored the apocalyptical and kenotic aspects of Christ and what they mean to the Church's social doctrine.  In this article, we will reflect on two other aspects of Christ's relationship with man and the world: the soteriological and the paradigmatic.  In the final installment of this series, we will address the transformational, eleutherian, and transcendent aspects of Christ and how they affect the Church's social doctrine.

The soteriological Christ and the soteriology of man.

Christ's message is more than just reformist or prophetic; at its heart it is soteriological.  The word soteriological comes from the Greek soteria, which means salvation.

It would be a mistake of huge proportions to limit Christ, as Thomas Jefferson did, to a mere moral teacher.  Christ is more than a moral teacher, more than a moral model.  Christ is man's savior, a unique, irreplaceable, and necessary office, of which man is in great need.  "The salvation offered in its fullness to men in Jesus Christ . . . is salvation for all people and of the whole person: it is universal and integral salvation." (Compendium, No. 38)

Not only is Christ the savior of all men, he is the savior of every single part of man.  We are not to parcel, bracket, or remove any part of human life from the salvation offered to us in Christ.  Salvation, "concerns the human person in all his dimensions: personal and social, spiritual and corporeal, historical and transcendent." (Compendium, No. 38). Nothing human is outside the salvific pale of Christ.

This was the big mistake of the Gnostics, who considered matter, including the body, evil, and only the spirit good.  God came to save the spirit, but not the body or matter.  With good reason, the Church vehemently rejected such a limited notion of salvation.

In the Heautontimorumenos 1.1.25, the Roman playwright Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto," which translated says, "I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."  Jesus Christ can say the same thing with an entirely different meaning. Nothing human is alien to Christ and his salvation.  Christ and his salvation is alien to nothing human.

Now, as St. Augustine so felicitously phrased it in one of his sermons, "God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us."  The salvation universal and integral offered to all men in Christ is not forced upon man, as it "requires [man's] free response and acceptance."  (Compendium, No. 39)  Salvation is not compelled, but the offer of salvation beckons, courts, even woos a response, an act of faith, an act in which a person freely commits his entire self to God. 

The divine bridegroom asks us to marry him as if we were to be his bride; he does not ravish us as if we were the booty of war and in fear of violence.

The other part of this message--that Christ is man's only salvation, man's only spouse, as it were--is this: that man can do nothing to save himself.  There is nothing but "error and deception" in any of the "purely immanentistic visions of the meaning of history and in humanity's claims to self-salvation."  The ideologies that are built by man as means for self-salvation-for example, Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, even Islam--calculated to exclude the salvific Christ who is the one and only God, are nothing less than social, economic, political, or religious towers of Babel.  "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it. Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain." (Psalm 127:1)

Christ the paradigm of man. 

Christ's life is paradigmatic, exemplary.  This, of course, is at the center of almost all spiritual writers of the Christian life, perhaps best encapsulated in the title of that classic of Catholic spirituality by Thomas ŕ Kempis (ca. 1380-1471), The Imitation of Christ.  The Christian life is imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ.

Christ gives us an example of what it means to love our neighbor.  He is the incarnation, the paradigm, the epitome, the model of the Divine law in action, in all its concreteness: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Mk 12:29-31)  It is Jesus who teaches us that we must love our fellow man, that he "must be treated as another self," that is to say, a friend, whether he thinks and acts "differently from us in social, political, and religious matters" such as the Samaritan woman at the well, and indeed, "even if he is an enemy," such as Judas whom Christ loved and with whom Christ broke bread. (Compendium, Nos. 40, 43)

Even if he is an enemy, our neighbor must be treated as another self.  Banned, then, is any form of dualistic ethic, of tribalistic moralism, an "us-them" mentality, where there is one moral law for "us," and another for "them."  This is the radical kernel of the Gospel which is its glory, and which sprouts forth so heroically in the Saints:  "Love your enemies," Jesus the Lord tells us, "do good to those who hate you.  Bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.  To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do no withhold even your tunic."  Luke 6:27-31.  And in case we have failed to get the message, Jesus says elsewhere that if we are unjustly pressed for service for one mile, we ought to go two miles.  Matt. 5:38-42.

This seems like an impossible burden.  Even the best of us are beset by sin, riddled with selfishness, and suffer from the weakness of the flesh, where even if the spirit is willing, the flesh fails us.  Christ's paradigm seems impossible for man.  And it is, unless we keep in mind the transformational Christ, whose grace lifts our nature into true freedom-the glorious liberty of the sons of God (Rom. 8:21)-and from there to the hope of eternal life.

-----

Andrew M. Greenwell is an attorney licensed to practice law in Texas, practicing in Corpus Christi, Texas.  He is married with three children.  He maintains a blog entirely devoted to the natural law, called Lex Christianorum.  You can contact Andrew at agreenwell@harris-greenwell.com.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'

Copyright 2021 - Distributed by Catholic Online