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Document Details : Title: De tekenen van de tijd lezen Subtitle: Christendom tussen seculariteit en post-seculariteit Author(s): HALÍK, Tomaš Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 56 Issue: 2 Date: 2016 Pages: 105-115 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.56.2.3194515 Abstract : This article proposes a way of reading the signs of the time in constructive dialogue with today’s mostly secular world. Its argumentation consists of three parts. The first addresses the paradoxical combination of three concepts characterizing the history of Christianity, viz. incarnation, kenosis and parousia. There are three paradoxes that characterize the essence of Christian faith: (1) world and humanity are both equal and unequal to God; (2) the New Testament teaches that defeat means triumph; (3) truth subsists in the doctrine of the church, but it only falls to Christ to say: ‘I am the truth’. The second part of the article proposes that these three paradoxes enable a reading of the signs of the times. After all, they allow us to interpret the present absence of God as a kairos, a decisive moment in the genesis of a new, kenotic Christianity against the backdrop of the process of secularization and the end of modernity. The third part of this article focusses on one of the more obvious signs of the times, the return and transformation of religion. It shows that this transformation currently takes three main forms: the transformation of religion into a political ideology; the transformation of religion into a philosophical hermeneutics and phenomenology; the transformation of religion into spirituality. |
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