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Document Details :

Title: Sacramentality and Public Theology
Subtitle: Pursuing Stephan van Erp's Vision
Author(s): BROWN, David
Journal: Louvain Studies
Volume: 39    Issue: 2   Date: 2015-2016   
Pages: 155-173
DOI: 10.2143/LS.39.2.3159734

Abstract :
In this essay, the author uses questions of sacramentality to develop a more Balthasarian, aesthetic type of argument for Stephan van Erp’s basic position in fundamental theology. First, the author indicates three areas where the concept of sacramentality could provide an effective response to problematic changes in human self-understanding that modern philosophy and culture more generally has brought: the collapse of dualism, the collapse of theistic arguments, and social conditioning and incarnation. In his view, so far from such changes being worrying for Christianity’s own self-understanding, they can in fact be regarded as liberating. However, that still leaves the question of how those changes should be seen as impacting on the Church’s most appropriate form of communication with the world. So, secondly, and more briefly, the author turns to the question of public theology, and how he sees those three key features serving the agenda for a more effective public theology of the kind that Van Erp’s inaugural lecture advocated.

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