Embodied Words Spoken Signs

The twentieth century witnessed a renewed interest in a Roman Catholic theology of the word. The beginning of this renewal is marked by the work of Karl Rahner who, before the Second Vatican Council, decried the fact that Roman Catholicism, in contrast to the Protestant theological tradition, lacked an adequate theology of the word. Rahner's contributions, as well as those of sacramental theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet, demonstrate the Roman Catholic conviction that the word is fundamentally sacramental: it has the capacity to bear God's presence to humanity. Rooted in patristic and medieval sacramental tradition, and engaged in dialogue with Reformation theologies. Rhodora Beaton examines the further advances in Rahner and Chauvet to articulate the relationship between word and sacrament within the context of language, culture, and an already graced world as the place of divine self-expression, as well as analyzes the implications for Trinitarian theology, sacramentality, liturgy, and action.

Drawing on performance studies and sacramental and liturgical theology, Ruthanna B. Hooke develops a theology of proclamation grounded in the body’s experience of preaching. The author explores the claim that preaching is a sacramental event of communion with the triune God by comparing the steps involved in voice production with the fourfold shape of the Eucharist. This comparison yields a description of preaching as an event of self-offering that allows space for the humanity of the preacher and as an encounter with the Holy Spirit that is communal and prophetic. Preaching draws participants into Christ’s dying and rising, and hence into a mode of power known in vulnerability. Calling hearers into the eschatological event of the resurrection, preaching inherently moves toward proclamation on political and ethical issues. Hooke uses this theological framework to offer ways of preaching on environmental crisis and on racism. The author calls preachers to embodied engagement with preaching and describes a way for preachers to bear witness to Jesus Christ not only in the content of their proclamation, but in their way of being in the preaching event.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the Eucharist is meant to build up the unity of the church. This desired ecclesial unity is, however, not often given adequate treatment. In Speaking with Aquinas, David Farina Turnbloom seeks to describe the relationship between the celebration of the Eucharist and the unity of the church. By examining Aquinas's treatment of grace and virtues, this book allows the reader to understand Aquinas's eucharistic theology within the context of the spiritual life of the church. In the end, Turnbloom retrieves a Thomistic theology of the Eucharist that arises from Aquinas's concern for the virtuous life of the church, rather than a eucharistic theology that too narrowly focuses on theories of transubstantiation.

Karl Rahner’s theory of how Jesus saves has garnered criticism. Rahner’s portrayal of Jesus has been described by Hans Urs von Balthasar as merely notifying the world of God’s salvific will. Others have doubted whether Rahner thinks Jesus “causes” salvation at all. Even Rahner’s advocates style his Jesus as a kind of sign, albeit an effective one, the primal Sacrament. But another major and yet underappreciated dimension to Rahner’s christology is his identification of Jesus as Representative—both our representative before God and God’s before us. As such a Representative, Jesus is not a redemptive agent who accomplishes human salvation simply through an act, and even less is he a mere exemplar or notification. This Jesus does not only “do” our salvation—rather, he is the locus of salvation itself. He not only “opens” heaven’s gates, but he creates heaven with his own resurrection. Being Salvation uncovers this dimension within Rahner’s theology, relating it to other historical examples of representative soteriology (e.g. Irenaeus’s theory of recapitulation) and to Rahner’s more familiar sacramental soteriological categories. It gives special attention to Rahner’s intense attention to the church fathers early in his career, including Rahner’s untranslated theology dissertation, E latere Christi (“From the Side of Christ”).

Fifty years ago, Dei Verbum called Catholics to reflect on the inherent unity of the "one table of the word of God and the body of Christ." Drawing from a variety of ancient and modern insights, the author proposes a fresh view of word and sacrament as interrelated facets of God's one enduring revelation. Like a table with four sides, the unity of the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist can be seen from the viewpoints of prophecy, pneumatology, language, and sacramentality. Grounded in Catholic systematic theology, the author extends the conversation to ecumenical reflection and implications for communities of faith.

This volume argues that in the twentieth century, Catholic theology increasingly recognized the centrality of Christologyparticularly the person of Christas the locus of revelation and drew out the crucial implications for that which occurs within the space of liturgy and the sacraments. Examining the specific contributions of Ren Latourelle, Avery Dulles, Salvatore Marsilli, and Gustave Martelet against a background of pre-conciliar ressourcement theology, this volume provides a comprehensive account of why a Trinitarian and Christological construal of liturgy and sacraments as revelation is key to the vision that informed Vatican II and offers constructive theological and ecclesial possibilities for the future.

This book presents a series of ontological investigations into an adequate theory of embodiment for the social sciences. Informed by a new realist philosophy of causal powers, it seeks to articulate a concept of dynamic embodiment, one that positions human body movement, and not just ‘the body’ at the heart of theories of social action. It draws together several lines of thinking in contemporary social science: about the human body and its movements; adequate meta-theoretical explanations of agency and causality in human action; relations between moving and talking; skill and the formation of knowledge; metaphor, perception and the senses; movement literacy; the constitution of space and place, and narrative performance. This is an ontological inquiry that is richly grounded in, and supported by anthropological ethnographic evidence. Using the work of Rom Harré, Roy Bhaskar, Charles Varela and Drid Williams this book applies causal powers theory to a revised ontology of personhood, and discusses why the adequate location of human agency is crucial for the social sciences. The breakthrough lies in fact that new realism affords us an account of embodied human agency as a generative causal power that is grounded in our corporeal materiality, thereby connecting natural/physical and cultural worlds. Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory is compelling reading for students and academics of the social sciences, especially anthropologists and sociologists of ‘the body’, and those interested in new developments in critical realism.

The first two volumes of Baptist Sacramentalism helped give momentum to a renewal of sacramental theology among Baptists. In the years since, this conversation has come to include a more diverse range of voices and explore a broader range of topics. Baptist Sacramentalism 3 both reveals and shares in these trends, contributing to the continued expansion of Baptist sacramental theology. Essays from Scandinavian and Eastern European scholars reveal the ways in which sacramental thought is taking shape in non-English speaking contexts. Other essays demonstrate the ways in which sacramental thought informs questions ranging from disability to virtual reality. And in keeping with the first volumes, there is continued exploration of the sacramental witness of the Baptist past.