Sentences with phrase «given theological language»

Whatever one may think of Girard (and I think highly of him), one can only be grateful for the new confidence he has given theological language to do descriptive work for shaping the Church's witness to the world.

Not exact matches

The revelation consists first and foremost in the person of Jesus Christ himself, but this can become material for theological use only as it is given in human language.

The one thing which the New Testament language on these matters gives us no ground for is the notion that the theological task could be exercised in isolation from the bearers of other gifts or from the surveillance of the total community.

An Emergent definition of relevance, modulated by resistance, might run something like this; relevance means listening before speaking; relevance means interpreting the culture to itself by noting the ways in which certain cultural productions gesture toward a transcendent grace and beauty; relevance means being ready to give an account for the hope that we have and being in places where someone might actually ask; relevance means believing that we might learn something from those who are most unlike us; relevance means not so much translating the churches language to the culture as translating the culture's language back to the church; relevance means making theological sense of the depth that people discover in the oddest places of ordinary living and then using that experience to draw them to the source of that depth (Augustine seems to imply such a move in his reflections on beauty and transience in his Confessions).

In its extreme form this ethos can tend to alienate the common life and familiar language of a theological school from the ordinary language and patterns of common life of the churches, giving rise to complaints that theological schooling is «irrelevant» to the «real life» of actual congregations.