This article and its sequel illustrate the thesis that oblivion of the doctrine of justification and liturgical-eucharistic decadence went together in the middle ages. The ensuing contradictions led directly to the Reformation. Luther recovered the doctrine of justification as he tried to answer the question, how do sinners become just in God’s eyes? But his liturgical reforms were inspired by a medieval theology which made it impossible for him to restore the patristic insight into liturgy and the eucharistic mystery. The (...) council of Trent went a long way toward meeting Luther on justification, but did not attempt to do so in its liturgical reforms, which established the framework for the Counter-Reformation. Thus Catholic and Lutheran differences are based on misunderstandings no less than on different doctrinal stresses. (shrink)

Developments among Lutherans and Catholics since the Reformation have had positive as well as negative effects, as secularism has offered the same challenge to both. In their answers to this challenge, both have renovated their reading of the Scriptures and they have taken a new look at their specific traditions. But Catholic spirituality has accented aspects of anthropology and of ecclesiology which Lutherans find particularly hazardous. The ecumenical agreements arrived at over the last twenty years, on baptism, eucharist, ministry, and (...) the Petrine office, have led to a recent agreement on justification. This has overcome in principle the dilemma of the 16th century. It remains to draw its implications for the piety of the faithful as well as for the Church’s life and theology in general. This is the second in a two-part study of justification, the earlier part of which was published in Vol. 1#3. (shrink)

This article and its sequel illustrate the thesis that oblivion of the doctrine of justification and liturgical-eucharistic decadence went together in the middle ages. The ensuing contradictions led directly to the Reformation. Luther recovered the doctrine of justification as he tried to answer the question, how do sinners become just in God’s eyes? But his liturgical reforms were inspired by a medieval theology which made it impossible for him to restore the patristic insight into liturgy and the eucharistic mystery. The (...) council of Trent went a long way toward meeting Luther on justification, but did not attempt to do so in its liturgical reforms, which established the framework for the Counter-Reformation. Thus Catholic and Lutheran differences are based on misunderstandings no less than on different doctrinal stresses. (shrink)

Developments among Lutherans and Catholics since the Reformation have had positive as well as negative effects, as secularism has offered the same challenge to both. In their answers to this challenge, both have renovated their reading of the Scriptures and they have taken a new look at their specific traditions. But Catholic spirituality has accented aspects of anthropology and of ecclesiology which Lutherans find particularly hazardous. The ecumenical agreements arrived at over the last twenty years, on baptism, eucharist, ministry, and (...) the Petrine office, have led to a recent agreement on justification. This has overcome in principle the dilemma of the 16th century. It remains to draw its implications for the piety of the faithful as well as for the Church’s life and theology in general. This is the second in a two-part study of justification, the earlier part of which was published in Vol. 1#3. (shrink)

This article elaborates the continuing significance of Ricoeur’s development of utopia. Ricoeur develops two not necessarily exclusive aspects of the utopia in its positive sense. First, it acts as an imaginative variation on existing reality, and second, it can act to ‘shatter’ and hence recast existing reality. While Ricoeur himself did not tend to distinguish rigorously between these two senses of the utopia, the article seeks to provide that delineation. Imaginative variation opens the sphere of human possibility but remains hypothetical, (...) while the utopia as that which shatters can introduce a new reality into social existence. In the utopia that shatters, the social imagination can be constitutive of social life. The article situates Ricoeur’s discussion of utopia in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia in relation to other relevant texts in his corpus, principally The Rule of Metaphor and the forthcoming Lectures on Imagination. The argument locates Ricoeur’s treatment of utopia within the broader field of his work on the symbolic structure of action and social imagination. (shrink)

In the approximation that every inertial observer experiences a homogeneous, uniform flow of time and sees a space that is Euclidean, the arena of physics is Minkowskian and one speed is the same in all intertial frames. If a given intertial observer finds an infinitesimal source or particle traveling faster than this fundamental speed near a given event, the source must appear in some inertial frame spread over neighboring positions at a given time as a spacelike structure. If this structure (...) persists over a period of proper time, it can be interpreted as a wave group. If it is conserved, it can be interpreted as a line or tube of force. (shrink)