Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ.
Now and then one comes across a book which though unexpected seems familiar at the same time. That’s how I feel about Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ.
It’s fashionable to talk about inclusivity, about plurality, and about multicultural societies. Who doesn’t want to be welcoming towards others? Who isn’t enriched, it would seem, in some way, by difference and the copious variety of life on this planet?
Why not therefore be fully open, all-encompassing, and flexible in our beliefs and attitudes about God and religion as we are about food and cinema? Von Hildebrand rightly says that this type of simplicity misses “the mysterious majesty in which God resides concealed.”
As finite creatures possessing boundaries, we achieve identity through exclusion. We are not limitless and infinite. We find positioning and stability through specificity. It is by being physically, psychologically, and emotionally composed that I am in-formed, and therefore can be open to being trans-formed.
A puddle is of little use other than for getting wet or for children to stomp in. They may have shape, but their borders are fluid, shifting with their environment.
We all share a common nature, but we are determined by the orientation of personality and character, insofar as the mind and will are grasped by good or evil. In an age of “alternative facts,” truth perhaps is a concept outdated for some, who choose to live in an eclecticism of their own making.
A basic element of Christianity however, as a revealed religious tradition, is that it makes exclusivist claims, statements about fact and truth that bring personal identity into sharp focus. For all of their historicity, apostolic Christian beliefs, passed down by the Christian church for centuries, remain powerfully clarifying and sanctifying for personal character across generations.
If God became a human being, then He certainly knew what He was doing. God knows how to be present in a historically specific way that nonetheless transcends the boundaries of time and place. History is not a problem for the Christian tradition. Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity, that is, continuity through the conversion of the baptized is the issue. Flattening out the testimony of the Church fathers and Saints for something more commercially digestible is at best blindness, at worst, apostasy.
Transformation in Christ requires that we allow the discreteness of the creeds, symbols, and doctrines of the faith, along with the moral truths they contain, to confront us with our destiny and vocation. They dare us to receive a new identity and form from God, the Master potter, rather than melt into the crowd. The work to be done is particular; the call is direct and provocative. Repentance. This is dying to ourselves so that we become the seed scattered for a new harvest and the salt which purifies the earth.
“But we have this treasure in clay vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Cor. 4:7)
