Thinking Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context

Article Sections

Contents

  1. Opening Address
  2. Thinking Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context: a Playground for Theological Renewal
  3. 1. Postmodernity and the Withdrawal of the Divine: a Challenge for Theology
  4. 2. Postmodernity and Sacramentality: Two Challenges to Speaking about God
  5. 3. Incarnation of Meaning and the Sense for Symbols: Phenomenological Remarks on a Theological Debate
  6. 4. The Language of Sacramental Memorial: Rupture, Excess and Abundance
  7. 5. The Church as the Erotic Community
  8. 6. Presence et Affection
  9. 7. The Broken Bread as Theological Figure of Eucharistic Presence
  10. 8. Thomas Aquinas: Postmodern
  11. 9. Incarnation and Imagination: Catholic Theology of God between Heidegger and Postmodernity
  12. 10. After Heidegger Transubstantiation
  13. 11. The Concept of "Sacramental Anxiety": a Kierkegaardian Locus of Transcendence
  14. 12. God Does Appear in Immanence after all: Jean-Luc Marion's Phenomenology as a new First Philosophy of Theology
  15. 13. A Genealogy of Presence: Elite Anxiety and the Excesses of the Popular Sacramental Imagination
  16. 14. ("untitled":) On Denoting Sacramental Presence

9. Incarnation and Imagination: Catholic Theology of God between Heidegger and Postmodernity

Godzieba (p279)

effects, receptions and hermeneutics (p279). Abstract (p280).

Heidegger: The search for the unifying ground of beings; metaphysics fails to distinguish between being and beings; there is: being; beings; and that which simultaneously connects them and holds them apart (p171). When being and beings are conflated they produce a framework of which God is part which leads to a dualism of experience; this god in the grip of the differentiating process ahead of the God who is distinct from beings cannot be worshipped. But his point is that using the idea of God to gain the highest metaphysical vantage point betrays the God beyond philosophy" (p282). His fire is aimed at a theoretical view of God within the primacy of theoretical reason. Kasper's emphasis on relation over "substance" (p283); revelation and freedom are in equilibrium.

Modern and postmodern: 'Postmodernity''s rendering of reality as interchangeable commodity paradoxically blunts difference (p284). Brian Turner: modernity based on Reformation values; post modernity stretches back to the Counter Reformation and baroque, an oppositional current within modernity (p285). The historical approach denies 'real' religions (p286); Ward, Milbank and Pickstock's rejection of modernity and reaching back to the Medieval is too extreme (p287); the Incarnation leads Catholics not to deny modernism (p288); Italian baroque painting and French spirituality (p289); Metz and the incarnational impulse (p290).

The Kingdom: Hemmerle: The arrival of the Kingdom in Jesus signalled no less than: "... a total revolution" in human thought and existence, a new understanding of temporality and of being in the light of a Trinitarian ontology "... God is no longer the horizon but the centre. This is a radical reversal" (p291); against Heidegger in overcoming metaphysics; in Trinitarian ontology being and time are linked (p292).

A Theology of God: Heidegger drives us away from the abstract, back to sources, to the events and experiences which give rise to faith (p293); the concept of God is narrative and commemorative (Metz) praxis in lived witness; praxis in the Spirit; Incarnation means we never have a pure, temporal,  context free experience of the divine (p294); the symbol of the Kingdom of God is Jesus' imaginative construal of the world as God sees the world, as the arena for the action of incarnate grace ... refigures our expectations in the direction of eschatological fulfilment. Kearney's poetic imagination (p295), the believing community's activation of its poetic imagination (p297).