In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

255 Chapter 12 The Lord’s Supper as a Gift of the Resurrected Crucified One The life lived with and in the great story that the Bible narrates is even today no longer self-understood in many Protestant congregations. This concerns not only familiarity with biblical stories and knowledge of ecclesial holy days. Even the knowledge of ritual already evinces considerable decline, because attendance at the celebration of the worship service on Sundays represents more the exception than the rule for the majority of church members. But even among many loyal churchgoers and among not a few pastors, an emotional and cognitive distance from the Christian tradition and even from the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is growing. The consolidation of congregations, the sale of church buildings, the closing of church-run kindergartens, the dismantling of sacred spaces are hardly experienced as an opportunity for new breakthroughs in the everyday life of congregations, but rather as obvious signs of the downfall of Christian churches. Not a few congregations and whole church circles are so very much engaged in the bureaucratic, organizational, and also human conflicts of these restructuring processes that they hardly ever engage in theological reflection upon their own experiences. The experience of the reality of congregational life hardly encourages anyone to confront such a shocking and complex issue as the theologia crucis. On the contrary: the frustration of many engaged church members and also many pastors leads not seldom to the judgment that the central contents of Christian faith itself are outmoded. The dark message of the cross, the obsolete understanding of sin, the depressing liturgy of Holy Communion—all this is supposedly at fault for the waning attractiveness of the Christian message 256—The Reality of the Resurrection in the midst of the hip events of the more attractive counterculture. One thus avoids the language of the cross, of sin, of the wrath of God, of the power of God, of the judgment of God, and speaks rather in contemporary platitudes about love, security, community, and the “loving God.”1 What, however, gets lost is a framework for understanding in which the themes and narrative connections adumbrated just now can develop their plausibility structures. This framework for understanding is the great story from creation to new creation, which is not merely an arbitrary sequence pulled out of the canonical collection of books. Rather, it opens up a great narrative framework in which not only the individual pericopes of the Sunday sermon but also the crucial Christian holy days and also the Lord’s Supper can unleash their salvific narrative power.2 The Great Narrative of the Bible and the Misunderstanding of Salvation-Historical Conceptions When the French philosopher and sociologist of knowledge Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the end of the “grand narratives” in his epoch-making work The Postmodern Condition at the end of the 1970s, he hardly had the mythical stories of antiquity and certainly not the grand narratives of Judaism and Christianity in mind. These were long ago by the time Lyotard conceived of the epistemology of modernity as the rationality of real knowledge in direct opposition to established fictional constructs: The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof. He classifies them as belonging to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives are fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children. At best, attempts are made to throw some rays of light into this obscurantism, to civilize, educate, develop.3 Not a few scientists of the present day indeed still share this estimation, without observing in Lyotard’s rhetoric that this “scientific” rejection of narrative knowledge breaks through again and again as a caricature, and permits narratives thus to enjoy their limited, local rights. Lyotard’s point consists much more in the observation that even the grand conceptions of knowledge in modernity attempt to generate their legitimacy with the help of grand narratives, for even enlightened knowledge cannot produce this legitimacy through itself. Lyotard introduces as proof “two major versions of the narrative of legitimation. One is more political, the other more philosophical.”4 Regarding the political, Lyotard writes, “The subject of the first of these versions is humanity as the hero of liberty. All peoples have a right to science. If the social subject is not [3.15.202.4] Project MUSE (2024...

Share