Barron: The Christ Event

The title of Fr. Robert Barron's book 

                                                     b r i d g i n g 

                                             THE GREAT DIVIDE 

graphically states his aim.  The blurb on the cover explains what the book is meant to be: 

    MUSINGS OF A POST-LIBERAL, POST CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL CATHOLIC

The divide is the abyss that today's Catholics experience, an abyss that separates them from others in their own Church,  from Christians of other denominations, from modernity, and the world in general. Central to bridging the divide is Christ himself, and  Fr. Barron uses St. Thomas Aquinas to help us bring Christ's importance into proper focus. 

Here are two quotations that grabbed my mind and won't let go:

".....It is in light of the event of the Incarnation that Thomas interprets both God and the human, seeing the former as an uncanny, surprising, ever greater act of love, at the latter as, at its best, an act of sheer openness to the inrushing of God. To put it succinctly, he sees in Christ, the meeting of two ecstasies, and this coming-together is the lens through which he reads everything else...."p.88

"....the radically unworldly character of God's being is paradoxically enough revealed precisely in the act by which God enters the world. Were God a being in or alongside of the universe, one of the natures in the world, God could not become a creature without ceasing to be God or compromising the ontological integrity of the creature he becomes. In short, that God is totaliter aliter (totally other), and semper maior (always greater), that he is alluring yet totally ungraspable mystery, is given to us in the event of Christ....."p. 92

I don't know if Fr. Barron had read Giussani before writing this book, but the two men are on the same page, and speak the same language. Neither one reduces Christ to an abstraction, a theological or philosophical system, a rightest or leftist movement, a political stance, an ideology, or a sectarian doctrine. What makes me love them both is the awe they stand in before the Christ Event and the reverence with which they contemplate its implications.