Thursday, April 21, 2005

As Pope Benedict starts...

The crisis in the church today intersects the dilemma of contemporary theology in an intriguing fashion....Liberals, on the one hand, advocate a broad relativism of options, encouraging openness as the mark of tolerace. The result in practice, however, is often an eroding of commitment through theological indifference. The result is a Christianity that provides little more than supplemental activities and religious support for the values generally implicit in modern culture.

On the other hand, conversative sectors have been growing in number and appeal, in part because they exhibit faith as firm commitment and costly discipleship, providing a cultural alternative. Yet the result, in practice, is often allegiance to a historically conditioned dogmatism that fails to engage the majority of persons involved in the central sectors of contemporary life.

This convergence brings into crisis the function and nature of the church. We need the contributions of both factions, without their liabilities. The church of the future must be committed to a pluralism of alternatives, sufficiently viable to touch creatively the individual and social diversity operative in modern life. Yet these must be developed and offered not in an ethos of theological indifference, but as a call to profound commitment, leading to lively choice between alternative faith-styles.
Theological Worlds: Understanding the Alternative Rythms of Christian Belief, pp.11-12, emphasis mine

1 comment:

  1. Thanks sherezada. Feel free to come back again.

    I agree with your broader point that Christianity (esp. Catholicism) doesn't tend to bend when it needs to do so. Yet the main problem is the alternative is not appealing completely either.

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