The Gospel as birth and face

In this year of the 20th anniversary of the death of Pope St. John Paul II, it seems fitting to reflect anew on the missionary character of Christian faith. Against the backdrop of the crumbling structures of the age and a growing loss of confidence in faith, John Paul II repeatedly stressed that the Gospel must be proclaimed as something irrevocably “new” (e.g., the “new evangelization”). New, not as novelty or at the expense of what is timeless and venerable, but in the sense that the Gospel must be continually incarnated as the real encounter of each person with Christ; the essential content of Christianity is not an “ethical choice” or a “lofty idea,” as Pope Benedict XVI expressed it, but “the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus caritas est, 1).

Flawed concepts of Christian faith

But it is always easier, perhaps, to subtly conceive of Christian faith in a less personally implicative way, let us say as ethics, politics, or knowledge. Christianity reduced to ethics means that it can be more about extrinsic conformity to rules. In this case, as long as you meet the minimum legal requirement, avoiding mortal sin, you can count yourself as a Christian in good standing. Alternatively, we might pursue punctilious legal rectitude as a mark of membership in an elite club of the perfect.

Christianity reduced to politics means that it can be more about what we do “out there” by way of establishing temporally Christ’s kingdom on earth. In this case, being a Christian means being a good citizen. Or being a Christian means becoming an effective advocate of social justice.

Further, Christianity reduced to knowledge conceives of faith as something correlative to a philosophy of life or a body of doctrine, where the most important thing is orthodox belief. In this case, being a Christian means attaining metaphysical rectitude, knowing the “right things” about God. What is most important is possessing the secret “gnosis” (from gnosis, meaning knowledge) by which to attain salvation or enlightenment.

But when you get right down to it, none of the above expresses what is truly and uniquely Christian. After all, ethics, politics, and knowledge have always been regarded as paths to salvation and enlightenment. To be sure, there is a uniquely Christian way to do all these things; do them, and in this way we must. But that is precisely the point. Ethics, politics, and knowledge, without that uniquely Christian element, become what Joseph Ratzinger broadly called “moralism,” and thus not Christian at all. Moralism can be described as the reduction of Christianity to the “dimensions of an ethical framework, or to equate faith with obeying a law,” as Tracey Rowland puts it in Ratzinger’s Faith. Josef Pieper speaks in Faith—Hope—Love of Christianity reduced to a “pseudoreligious activism”. Antonio López refers to moralism simply as “action deprived of adequate reasons”.

What, then, is the unique Christian element that provides “adequate reasons” for anything we might do in the name of Christian faith? What is the perennial “newness” of the Gospel that must be constantly rediscovered in its unique singularity?

The first thing we can observe about the various species of moralism above is that none of them requires, in an absolute or essential way, our interior transformation or conversion. Each can easily be premised on a kind of practical divorce between doing certain things and becoming a certain kind of person. What is most important in the above is not becoming holy or attaining virtue on the inside, but rather displaying virtue on the outside. It is entirely possible, as Christ repeatedly suggested in relation to the Pharisees, to do good things without being good oneself or to know the truth without actually living according to it.

Ethics, politics, and knowledge might thus become ersatz surrogates that allow us to avoid what the message of the Gospel actually calls us to above all else: an encounter with Christ that prompts a genuine interior conversion of heart—“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (Psa 51:10)—that transforms us into radiant icons “in Christ,” filling us with his Spirit, thus “personalizing” us by union in love with the triune God.

With this, then, the truly unique and distinctive element of the Gospel comes into view. At its heart, being a Christian means becoming oneself through the other. It means being constituted in relation to the other. It means an interior softening of the heart that disposes us to freely open ourselves to the other.

Birth and face

With this in view, I would like to reflect on two perspectives to help shed light on the idea that becoming oneself through the other defines what it means to be Christian: birth and face.

At the heart of human existence is the fact of being born. Birth means coming from another. It thus means fundamental dependency. There is no person on the face of this earth who is self-generating, who by a sovereign act of freedom determined their own existence and identity, or even consented to being born. It is a condition of creatureliness, then, to only become oneself by receiving oneself from the other. Moreover, it is a condition of creatureliness to remain perennially indebted to the other. At every point in our existence, we need others.

The question is whether this condition of dependent or “subsistent” being is a perfection or a deficiency. Is my indebtedness to the other something to be overcome, or is it in fact a condition through which I can most be myself?

Human freedom has often regarded this condition of ontological dependency or helplessness as a limitation that needs to be overcome. Surely, if man is to attain what is truly infinite and eternal, it must be by way of eliminating what is limited in him, namely, the dependency implied by his finite and temporal nature. And so we have built towers, barns, and systems of all kinds to evade or overcome our ontological helplessness. Adam and Eve sought salvation in knowledge, the Pharisees in ethics, the Zealots in politics.

Closer to our own time, the same patterns hold. Immanuel Kant premised salvation on attaining “pure” knowledge beyond all forms of “tutelage” that indebt us to others. Karl Marx premised salvation on a political “struggle” against injustice that is conceived of in our day as the overcoming of all forms of natural and religious belonging and relationship. Friedrich Nietzsche premised salvation upon going “beyond good and evil” or “creating one’s own values.” In each case, salvation is predicated on a Pelagian overcoming of ontological helplessness and its limits, eradicating the fundamental conditions of creatureliness by something we do.

But is it not the case that the most meaningful things in human life are the particular relationships that surround us? If we strip away the subsistent tapestry of our existence, do we not eliminate the very reasons why we might want something eternal and infinite in the first place? For example, if Heaven is conceived of simply as “pure act,” as the eradication of all “neediness” and as the erasure of the capacity to be “moved” by another, is this really somewhere anyone would want to go?

The answer is no, at least if we perceive things like dependency and vulnerability as precisely the conditions for what gives us the most joy in life: being moved by and delighting in the beloved, sharing the intimacy of friendship with others. Must we really treat salvation or enlightenment as the gnostic transcending of these relationships? Or is not meaning to be found precisely within the condition of being dependent on the other?

Abiding in love

Here is where the face of the other becomes important. Think of it this way. The child who is born and who experiences the warmth of its mother’s love (i.e., the radiant loving smile of her face) does not regard the “neediness” of this very particular relation to the other as an imperfection and thus something to be overcome. Rather, it is only through an embrace of the loving face of the other that the child comes to consciousness at all: comes to perceive life as true, good, beautiful, and thus worth living, as Hans Urs von Balthasar argued. It is the face of the other that lights up ontological helplessness as an ingredient to the discovery of love and joy.

It is the face of the other that prevents me from locking myself in the prison of my own egoism, narcissism, delusion, anxiety, and paranoia. The more we separate ourselves from others, trying to live as “rugged individuals,” the more we turn salvation and transcendence into something cold, impersonal, abstract, Pelagian, activist, gnostic.

The problem, of course, is that no human face can smile with an infinite and eternal power over and on us. More often than not, perhaps, the face of the other is a violation and a threat to the self. In any case, no merely human face can resolve the inevitable problem of my existence: that, as a consequence of my ontological helplessness, I will eventually die. And here is why human thought has historically never taken ontological helplessness—birth and face—seriously as clues to where meaning and salvation might be found.

But what if God himself was born for us? What if God himself addressed us through a human face? What if God revealed himself within and according to the human condition of ontological helplessness? What if on this basis we could be “born again” as sons of God, and so really encounter a face that invites us into an infinite and eternal form of love and dependency in the communion of God’s own Triune life?

As it turns out, the Gospel is not about overcoming relationships. It is not about eradicating the fundamental condition of ontological helplessness, but is precisely its infinite and eternal revaluation. The most real and important thing, says Christian faith, is abiding in love with the other.

The Face of Christ

The gospel, then, is synonymous with being born and encountering the face of the other. It is about the ability, by grace, to “let be” in the face of the other, who in their otherness can never be controlled or pinned down by what I wish to impose on them.

This is frightening because human beings crave order and control. We are fearful of what we cannot fit into our preconceived frameworks, and so we want systems and processes to impose order on the face that eludes our control. And so defining reality in terms of moralism is always tempting, insofar as it absolves us from the much harder work of subordinating ourselves to the divine other as other, for letting Christ and his Spirit transform, redeem, sanctify, and convert our hearts so as to fit us for union.

But the one important thing—the one unique and singular thing—is love, the mystery that only birth and face give us access to. What matters is that we allow the Face of Christ to work in us the mystery of divine rebirth. What matters is that we embrace the Face of the Crucified who, in an unnerving and unsettling movement of kenosis, did not scorn experiencing the most radical form of helplessness for our sake. None of this makes ethics, politics, and knowledge unimportant. But it places them in the supernatural service of birth and face, in the mystery of love which only personal transformation in Christ can call forth.

And finally, it is precisely this uniquely Christian element that makes the Gospel attractive, that is capable of drawing persons into the joy and beauty of eternal love. With the great pope of evangelization, John Paul II, then, we can conclude: “Christianity is born,” he said, “and continually draws new life from … contemplation of the glory of God shining on the Face of Christ…”

(Note: This essay was originally published, in slightly different form, in Instaurare: The Magazine of Christendom College, Spring 2025.)