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Chapter 5. The Christian in the Church
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Chapter 5 The Christian in the Church With these pages, a final chapter, we move from a consideration of Erich Przywara’s contemporaries to his theological ideas. If his theology frequently touched people he knew and arranged philosophers and theologians of the past,it nevertheless explores three Christian realities, three contacts between the searching human being and theTriune God: Christian life and spirituality,liturgy,and church.Each of the three is related to the others: a particular spirituality personalizes Christian life; the liturgy is the public worship of the Christian; the church is the collectivity of Christian lives.A thematic expression of Erich Przywara’s is “God in Christ in the church.” In the s Przywara saw new directions in Catholic life, directions running parallel to those of the Protestant dialectical theologians, themes born of Aquinas and Newman and developed by Karl Adam and Romano Guardini, movements of symbol and community. Clearly the future lay beyond neoscholasticism , beyond the medieval and Baroque theological schools of religious orders and universities.The challenge was to escape the old subjectivism and the new existentialism, and to find a unity of the objective and the subjective, of salvation and faith;in short,to describe and employ the“Catholic primal principle” of analogia entis¹ culminating in Incarnation. Przywara’s theology wanted to help both the modern seeker and the Christian believer.There could be no dabbling in a science for which only mathematics existed,in a modern philosophy in which anxious existence had pushed away God, or in a Protestantism where God did all. Polarity, that dynamic swing between the divine and the human, was a way for men and * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * women to understand the depth and richness of God,to exist between the revelation of theTriune God and the phenomenologies of the present .Analogy, participation, and commerce joined the Infinite and the finite as theologies of grace active in humanity, making the Catholic tradition an equilibrium of polarities. Life in the church is a path to be walked, a path of transformation described by theologians and mystics, a path leading away from a sinful attempt to be like God. Life is the journey of the Christian paradox, losing life to save it. Christian Existence After Przywara sought a contemporary and personal expression of the presence of God in the life of a man or a woman. As we mentioned , he was among the Catholic theologians who unfolded a theology of grace beyond the Baroque mechanics of actual graces and mortal sins pushing and pulling a neutral human person from day to day.² He explored how the transcendental personality called for,moved toward, received, was vivified by divine life.That active receptivity— he sought a synthesis of Molinist and Bañezian inspirations—freely received from a free God a higher life as a gift. Human transcendentality and history can be natural and supernatural, humanist andTrinitarian . How was Przywara’s theology exemplified in the graced life of an individual, in the liturgical and ecclesial life of the community? The life of grace leads at times to dramatic concretizations in what today are called“spiritualities.”What is a spirituality? Spirituality is a theology made vivid in lives. Spirituality is the life of grace made personal.The word is only a century or so old, although the reality is ancient in the Catholic church. A spirituality is a group’s particular arrangement of and emphasis upon aspects of Christianity, a way of life and a way of seeing life. Spirituality is doctrine in praxis, a tradition and a school, a cluster of beliefs about God and self.Where does a spirituality come from? A person living in a cultural era selects and emphasizes out of his or her faith ways of encountering the realms of the holy and of the revealed.That cluster of Gospel truths is the spirituality .Christianity is too rich to be fully presented by one monastery or school,by one age or culture,and so history and genius create spiritualities . A spirituality appears in a moment of history to present a vision or a path to grace. A spirituality comes into existence not to dismantle or criticize the content of the Gospel but to apply dynami- [54.160.243.44] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:51 GMT) cally some facets of revelation which appear powerful and useful for this world or this movement, charisms of God embodied in a person first and next in schools and traditions. Many articles and books...