Posted on: April 22nd, 2018 Liturgy, Theology, & Economy

In his book Liturgy and Theology: Reality and Economy, Nathan Jennings argues for a connection between the liturgy of the Church and that culturally ineradicable activity of human civilization known as “economics.” The liturgy, in short, at every “level” of reality (God, cosmos, church, family, individual human body) is economy … an economy of not of transaction, but of gift exchange.

What I want to do, very briefly, in this little post is simply to point out that, in this claim, Nathan is following a venerable pattern in the history of Christian thought. In fact, this pairing, this sequence of “theology, then economy,” shows up in none other than the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. In his Aquinas’s Summa: Background, Structure, and Reception, Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P. writes:

This division [of the Summa] into two parts retrieves a distinction that is familiar to the Fathers of the Church between ‘theology’–the consideration of God in himself: Trinitarian theology–and “economy”–the work of God as it is accomplished in time, that is, salvation history. In fact, this is what the Prologue at the beginning of the Summa (Ia q. 2) announces: Thomas’ intention is to transmit doctrine concerning God, first as he is in himself (which is the object of questions 2 through 43 of the First Part); then as he is the principle and end of all things (this covers the rest of the word–not only the first, but also the Second and Third Parts).

 

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Posted on: April 14th, 2018 Secular Eschatology?

Other than Aristotle’s (and Nietzsche’s) “eternal recurrence of the same,” there is no such thing as a merely secular eschatology.

That is all.

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Posted on: April 14th, 2018 Truth, Justice, & Historicism

“The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.” — Dr. Cornel West.

Depending on how seriously one wants to take this claim, it could be taken as an example of the veracity of philosophical historicism, that truth (or being) gives itself in and through time.

How so?

From a Christian perspective suffering is the result of what theologians call “the fall of humanity.” Were it not for the fall, there would be no suffering. But the fall is a temporal development, some kind of event (regardless of how “literally” one wants to take it) which takes place in and through time.

To put it as tersely as possible: no fall, no suffering; no suffering, no truth.

The fall leads to suffering, and the acknowledgment of suffering is a necessary condition for truth (in our fallen world).

That such philosophical historicism presupposes a premise of theology (which itself relies on revelation, or that which exceeds what unaided natural reason can discover) should not worry us: such is the case for all legitimate philosophical historicism.

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