scholarly journals The Eucharistic Presence and Making Christ Present in the Word of God: A Study Inspired by the Views of Robert Sokolowski

2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
Sławomir Zatwardnicki

Robert Sokolowski wrote that biblical words activate the presence of God. But can we speak of the “sacramentality of the word” analogous to the sacrament itself? This paper collects reflections on the “making present” of the word of God intra mysteriorum celebrationem. This issue is related to the theme of the relationship between past and present in the Eucharist, which was dealt with by Sokolowski. The article summarizes this philosopher’s views on the Eucharistic presence, in dialogue with which it then reflects on the presence of Christ in the word of God. From the “Passover-centricity” of the Holy Scriptures stems a kind of making present the anticipatory self-giving of God in the events to which the inspired texts testify. The liturgy of the word must lead to the climactic event of Passover and its sacramental making present. There can be no question of “two presences” of the Lord at Mass. The words of institution from the Last Supper have a role in the actualization of the Passover, while the inspired words are not in the same way “instituting” words. It is only in their inner orientation that they lead to the mystery of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament.

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 376-398
Author(s):  
Nigel Smith

Abstract This article contrasts hostility toward visual and literary art in English radical Puritanism before the late seventeenth century with the central role of art for Dutch Mennonites, many involved in the commercial prosperity of Amsterdam. Both 1620s Mennonites and 1650s–1660s Quakers debated the relationship between literal truth of the Bible and claims for the power of a personally felt Holy Spirit. This was the intra-Mennonite “Two-Word Dispute,” and for Quakers an opportunity to attack Puritans who argued that the Bible was literally the Word of God, not the “light within.” Mennonites like Jan Theunisz and Quakers like Samuel Fisher made extensive use of learning, festive subversion and poetry. Texts from the earlier dispute were republished in order to traduce the Quakers when they came to Amsterdam in the 1650s and discovered openness to conversation but not conversion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
K Katarina ◽  
I Putu Ayub Darmawan

This article discusses spiritual formation and God's Word in reformation. The formulation of the problem is the relationship between spiritual formation and God's Word in reformation. The author uses literature studies to collect information about spiritual formation and God's Word in reformation. Spirit for sola scriptura has produced a change in the life of the church at that moment. All teachings, church traditions, and practical actions which is conducted by church member must be tested under the Word of God. In the present context, church who facing various challenges related to moral life, teaching, and practical actions must return to the principles of word of God. To build a spiritual life, we must start from the Bible that is interpreted correctly, which then becomes a theological development, which then influences the concept of believer's thinking and practical actions. Artikel ini membahas tentang formasi rohani dan Firman Tuhan dalam reformasi. Rumusan masalah penelitian ini adalah bagaimana kaitan antara formasi rohani dan firman Tuhan dalam reformasi? Penulis menggunakan studi pustaka untuk menggali informasi tentang formasi rohani dan Firman Tuhan dalam reformasi. Semangat untuk sola scriptura menghasilkan perubahan dalam kehidupan gereja pada masa itu. Segala pengajaran, tradisi gereja, dan tindakan praktis yang dilakukan oleh setiap anggota gereja harus diuji di bawah Firman Tuhan. Dalam konteks masa kini, menghadapi berbagai tantangan gereja baik yang terkait dengan kehidupan moral maupun pengajaran dan tindakan praktis, gereja harus kembali pada prinsip Firman Tuhan. Untuk membangun kehidupan rohani maka harus dimulai dari Alkitab yang ditafsirkan secara benar yang kemudian menjadi sebuah bangunan teologi yang kemudian mempengaruhi konsep berpikir orang percaya dan tindakan praktis.


2021 ◽  
pp. 217-234
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Pagacz

The aim of this article is to present selected aspects of the biblical spirituality according to writings of Saint Ursula Ledóchowska. The Word of God has the central position in the spirituality of the Founder of the Congregation of the Ursuline Sisters of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus. Mother Ledóchowska is the author of Meditations, that contain considerations based on specific fragments of the Gospel, intended for each day of the year. Her Testament is also full of biblical references and permeated with the evangelical logic. According to Saint Ursula Ledóchowska the meditation of the Word of God in the spirit of faith enables us to learn more and get to know better the person of Jesus Christ and to deepen the relationship with Him. Mother Ledóchowska, by her attitude to the Holy Bible, was ahead of the Second Vatican Council’s time. All her life was an active exegesis of the words of Christ.


Author(s):  
Graham Ward

Revelation cannot be approached directly. It is mediated all the way down. That is not just because of ‘sin’. Though sin is the manifestation of our alienation from God—an alienation overcome by God’s reconciling operations in salvation—a diastema between Creator and creation still pertains. There is no immediate encounter with the Word of God available to us as such. It is always mediated to us through human words and human acts, stories (biblical and autobiographical) and material practices, the Church and its liturgies, and the cultures we inhabit that shape us. The voice of the Lord comes to us in and through the darknesses and ambivalences of our various unredeemed and yet to be redeemed states. We are addressed, continually addressed, by God’s transformative grace, by his love and mercy, in and through our condition as created. The voice is accommodated to that condition, and can be accommodated because the Word of God is written into creation, coming finally, and intensively, in Jesus Christ. So the voice can be heard: makes itself available to be heard. But the eternal presence of God pro nobis (where the ‘we’ is not just humankind but all God’s creatures, pace Barth), the eternal presence of God-with-us that is the touchstone and content of revelation, bubbles up intrinsically through the obscurities of created and creative experience.


Author(s):  
Gloria Maité Hernández

This book compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentaries: for the Cántico, the Comentarios written by John of the Cross on his own poem; for Rāsa Līlā, the foundational commentary by Srīdhara Swāmi along with commentaries by the sixteenth-century theologian Jīva Goswāmī, from the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and other Gauḍīya theologians. The phrase “savoring God” in the title conveys the Spanish gustar a Dios (to savor God) and the Sanskrit madhura bhakti rasa (the sweet savor of divine love). While “savoring” does not mean exactly the same thing for these theologians, they use the term to define a theopoetics at work in their respective traditions. The book’s methodology transposes their notions of “savoring” to advance a comparative theopoetics grounded in the interaction of poetry and theology. The first chapter explains in detail how theopoetics is regarded considering each text and how they are compared. The comparison is then laid out across Chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which examines one of the three central moments of the theopoetic experience of savoring that is represented in the Cántico and Rāsa Līlā: the absence and presence of God, the relationship between embodiment and savoring, and the fulfillment of the encounter between the divine and the lovers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 159-222
Author(s):  
Braxton D. Shelley

This chapter argues that the gospel tradition is animated by an incarnational approach to text: a pervasive belief that sacred words hold together visible and invisible realms, occasioning traffic between the two. The chapter begins with analyses of Smallwood’s “Hebrews 11” (2014) and “His Mercy Endureth Forever” (1992), two songs whose striking relationship with their scriptural source reveals the agency that believers attribute to hallowed verse. These songs epitomize gospel’s conviction about the transformative power of holy words, read, spoken, and sung, a transcendent principle that motivates the practice of tuning up. As it incarnates time, tuning up activates the otherworldly intensity of these interworldly texts. As they are iterated and intensified the gospel song’s lyrics become something more—the living word of God. The second section of this develops a fuller picture of the textual sources that gospel regards as sacred, formulations that mediate between worlds, offering believers specific windows through which to experience the eternal. The chapter demonstrates that gospel’s views about the efficacy of words ultimately derive from a preoccupation with the name of Jesus—an enduring belief that spiritual power is unleashed when that name is spoken. Gospel vamps use this pivotal utterance to re-incarnate Jesus, proclaiming—again and again—that Jesus is the living word of God. But this incarnation has two trajectories: as gospel texts commingle live performances and a host of other scriptural scenes, they also draw believers into the presence of God, through the spiritual realm—the spatial dimension of kairos.


2016 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-507
Author(s):  
Stefan Trinks

Abstract Gold and ivory were considered to be among the most valuable materials in the Middle Ages. Whereas ivory would represent skin or bone tissue, gold could simultaneously signify and disguise the presence of God. Their iconology is tied to the objects they are attached with, heightening their value. What has not been studied in great depth so far, however, is the range of combinations and the nature of the relationship of both combined as “chryselephantine” in the antique manner. In examples of mostly Carolingian and Ottonian front covers and reliquaries made from gold and ivory between the ninth and eleventh centuries, it is evident that both were treated as equally valuable and that their combination results not in a paragone but a synagon, or aesthetic comradeship.


Author(s):  
Frances Young

This chapter focuses on the relationship of the Word of God inscribed in Scripture and Word of God incarnate in Christ, both being expressions of God’s revelation and constitutive of the divine oikonomia, and both involving God’s self-accommodation to creaturely limitations. The development of the Christological meaning of Scripture as a whole is traced from second-century debates about the continuing validity of the Jewish Scriptures to the holistic reading of Scripture in the light of the Rule of Faith, and from allegorical reading to the search for Scripture’s dianoia. Thus it becomes clear that God’s entire purpose and strategy is revealed in Scripture’s testimony to Christ.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Henk van den Belt

Protestant spirituality is characterized by the mutual relationship between Word and Spirit. The doctrinal formulations of this relationship in the confessions of the Reformation period show that this specific feature of Protestant spirituality originated from the opposition to Rome and the Radical Reformation. The objections by Protestants against the mediaeval view that grace was infused through the sacraments led them to emphasize that faith was worked by the Spirit, in the heart. On the other hand, their objections against spiritualizing tendencies in the Radical Reformation led them to emphasize that faith was a matter of trust, based on the external Word. This two-sided tension led to a nuanced view of the relationship between the external Word of God and the internal work of the Spirit. In Lutheran and Reformed theologies this led to different spiritualities. The author traces these developments by analysing several Protestant confessions of the Reformation period.


1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Brümmer

Religious believers understand the meaning of their lives in the light of the way in which they are related to God. Life is significant because it is lived in the presence of God, and ultimate bliss consists in being in the right relation with God. Through sin, however, our relationship with God has been drastically disrupted. The fundamental religious issue which we all have to face, therefore, is how this relationship can be restored. How can we attain ultimate bliss by being reconciled with God? Basically, this is the issue with which the doctrine of atonement has to deal:The English word ‘atonement’ is derived from the words ‘at-one-ment’, to make two parties at one, to reconcile two parties one to another. It means essentially reconciliation… In current usage, the phrase ‘to atone for’ means the undertaking of a course of action designed to undo the consequences of a wrong act with a view to the restoration of the relationship broken by the wrong act.


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