Anti-Church and Church as Savior in Juxtaposition

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that juxtaposing contrary things helps us to understand what one thing is in contrast to another, as we see is the case with the juxtaposition between darkness and the stars in the sky. If we are to juxtapose the identity of the Church which is Christ to the Anti-Christ, then we can better understand what the “anti-Church” would be.

The Anti-Church itself is none other than the anti-Christ, inasmuch as the Church is Christ. This language is often associated with grand conspiracy theories, and sometimes people are so frustrated with the state of the Church that they too gleefully consign themselves to these terms, applying them without discernment as a vexatious form of scapegoating. I find that most unhelpful, and is inserting a wrathful disposition, which in the end only divides the Church and forgets that our enemies are powers and principalities, not perceived corrupt leaders. Nonetheless, we must mention the Anti-Christ because it pertains to the Church’s identity, and is written in Scripture and the Catechism.

According to the Catechism of the Church, the Anti-Christ is one who offers a false messiah, offering a false type of freedom that directs our attention away from the true Messiah. Thus, if this ideology asserts itself into the Church, the Church would therefore assert a false identity, but one that nonetheless stresses salvation. The question therefore pertains to defining clearly what salvation is, and what it isn’t.

Soteriology (the study of salvation), therefore, is important to examine carefully in this regard, and we get very clear teachings from Christ as to what it pertains to and what it doesn’t pertain to. Christ’s title as “Savior” is also part of His identity and mission.  It is within His nature to save, and in His action, so he does.

St. Peter illustrates for us the vivid temptation even from the Papacy to illustrate a false-messianic proposition when he reproves Christ to Save the Church by the way of the cross.  In this particular exemplification, what we discover is that the Church is easily tempted, even in the saints, to lose perspective of its saving-mission.

Jesus directly reproves St. Peter and commands Satan to get behind Him.  As such, that same reprove exists for the Church that chooses to ask others to not Carry their Cross, including within ourselves.  That Cross, as St. Thomas eloquently teaches us involves a detachment from Power, Honour, Pleasure and Wealth.  These idols cannot therefore be what the Church idolizes.

But for St. Peter it went deeper than that; we must remember that the Jews were glued to the idea of the Messiah being some sort of a political king who would politically liberate them from their enslavement and oppression that at this time was particularly expressed through the Roman Empire. It was difficult for the Jews to envision salvation as expressed in the Old Testament by King David to be anything other than a Kingdom being built as an eutopia on earth.

The challenge would be to interpret the Old Testament as prefiguring the deeper type of salvation and Kingdom as one of liberty to the soul from its addiction to sin, and a relationship by the Spirit being extended to the whole Human Race.  This we see implicit within St. Peter’s reprove of Christ the demotion of Christ to a mere human-king , thereby denying the spiritual reality to which Christ came to assert.

A further example is illustrated when Christ has His feet anointed, and Judas asserts an external show of displeasure in this act, citing the poor. His interest wasn’t really for the poor, but either way Christ responds to that objection reminding Judas and His own apostles that the priority is Christ, and through repentance, seeking reconciliation with Christ.

Here we need to pause for a moment and carefully navigate this distinction. It can easily be used to support an indifference to the poor that was not intended by sacred scripture or Christ. Christ teaches us that the poor will always be among us. In one sense, this is prophetic of Christ to say, but it is not an advocacy for the existence of an oppressive type of poverty. Christ knows that sin will always be among us, and the poverty that results from oppression, and injustice is not something God is seeking to validate or approve of.

Rather, Christ is reminding us that one must have the priority of serving God and only to serve one’s neighbor in the context of this command.  He teaches us later, offering us an integration of this principle: that whatsoever we do to the least of our brothers, we do unto Him. This, therefore, informs us by what spirit we are called to serve the poor and what spirit we are not to.

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Photo: Mateus Campos Felipe, Unsplash / PD-US