2. Postmodernity and Sacramentality: Two Challenges to Speaking about God
Maria Clara Luchetti Bingemer (p65)
Abstract (p65-66). Modernity defined, salience of "progress" (p67) which leads people to define themselves as the highest point of reference for establishing what is positive and negative, real or imaginary, good or bad (p68); thus the human being ends up possessing only its own loneliness (p69); the decline of religion (p70); instrumental reasoning threatens humanity (p71); the challenge of the post modern and the new age (p72). Problems of definition in the breakdown of modernity and "return" of religion (p73-6). The confused return of religion as: "... the enigma of our backward march in history" (p77); new Christian movements criticised (p78).
Contrasts between new sects and historical Christianity; new religions question modernity (p79); the priority of experience over metaphysics; they address the key question: " "... what is it that one can ... call God? Religion is the human expression that seeks to put a face on the transcendent initiative which 'seizes' and 'possesses' humankind in the course of the meanderings of history and reality" (p80).
Christianity's moment of difficulty and richness; writing about incarnation is difficult (trite - KC); Christianity "is the only religion" that can make a deal with modernity and survive it (opinion - KC) (81); so, paradoxically, Christianity must criticise the modernity it espoused (p82); Christianity faces the same questioning as modernism (p82).
As well as existential-theological issues, anthropocentric Christianity is questioned by ecological movements (p83); Feminism and ethnicity (p84.)
The importance of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue; the moral superiority of some new religions (p85(; but they deny the divinity of Jesus; many sects are communitarian, some charismatic, most seductively anti traditional; is this genuine questioning (p86)? Are we not cold and bureaucratic? The lure of the East (yoga) and the danger of doctrinal laxity (p87); but the USP of Christianity is the "scandal" of Christ; inter religious dialogue forces us to consider the balance between Christology and Pneumatology (p88).
Instead of all religion being centred on Christianity, it is centred, including Christianity, on God (89); the "death of God" was required in modernity for human flourishing (p90). In rejecting modernist universalism the postmodern offers Christianity the old strategies of mystery and plurality (p91); and the inadequacy of God speech is fortified (p92).
Rahner: the Christian of the future will be a mystic, Christianity starting from experience (p93). If Christianity has lost the power to proclaim, it is because of the divorce between faith and life experience (p94); The Judeo-Christian tradition pre-supposes desire for the divine, the other, the mystery (p95); silence is more appropriate than speech to the experience of God (p96). The great Christian problem is its indifference to the experience of God; the suspicion and exclusivity of mysticism (p97). Praxis is vital in post modernity (p98); the "option for the poor" confronts postmodern evasionaism (p99); the connection between incarnation and compassion (p100).
Theology must return to talking about God (p101); reason is vulnerable (p102); the vulnerability of theology relates to Jesus (p103); kenotic theology (p104); the importance of mystical theology (p105).
Merrigan: response to Bingemer (p106): The primacy of religious experience which points to the pluralist theology of Hick (p106), a movement away from self to otherness, a basis for dialogue, the "insatiable longing for the mystery which draws us ever onwards towards itself, and outwards towards others"; Hick and Bingemer on religious experience (p107); Hick: religious experience cannot be equated with experience of God; but how far does religious experience bring us to the Christian God (p108)? Incarnation as a bar to dialogue (Hick) (p109); Jesus is an exemplar of the response to the divine (Hick. So is a literal doctrine of incarnation necessary either to establish Christianity as a religion of love or Jesus as a unique salvific mediator?