Postmoderniteit, theologie en sacramentologie. Een onderzoeksproject toegelicht

Abstract

This article represents a two-part outline of a research project on ‘postmodern sacramento-theology’ at the Louvain faculty of theology. The first part, written by Jeff Bloechl, presents the philosophical challenge which postmodernity presents to theology. The two pillars of radical postmodernity (i.e. the line from Heidegger and Nietzsche to Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, as distinct from the Whiteheadian, less radical, process-postmodernism where creative plurality rather preceeds universal wholeness) are the death of God and radical historicism. The critique of this radical postmodernity to faith is indeed more radical than the modern separation between rationality and faith; it unmasks every pretense to an absolute foundation or reference point. Theology thus faces the challenge to speak about the God of faith without falling into the trap of (self-)idolatry. The second part, by Stijn Van den Bossche, takes up this theological challenge. Starting from the problematization of sacramental pastoral, it juxtaposes the premodern, modern and postmodern paradigm for dealing with God’s relation to reality. The premodern paradigm uses a neoplatonic, causal scheme, protecting itself from the ontotheological trap with the doctrine of analogy. The modern paradigm discovers the autonomy of historical man with respect to God, and replaces the supranatural by the eschatological completion of nature. Sacramentality becomes anticipatory salvation in history. This paradigm runs the risk of losing God’s presence in the present, of loosing the experience of sacramentality. In the postmodern era sacramentality, or the longing for it, returns as a longing for more than
history and its self-perverting grand narratives. But the absolute can only be filled in at the price of violating the law of historicism. In a postmodern paradigm for dealing with God’s relation to reality, a task only just begun, theology faces the challenge to think God’s presence-in-absence, to take seriously his radical transcendence without omitting his immanence in reality. Important authors in this matter appear to be Louis-Marie Chauvet (symbolicity), Jean-Luc Marion (donation) and Eberhard Jüngel (analogia adventus). Their thoughts seem to be promising for a postmodern pastoral of ‘weak sacraments’.