No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2016
In light of the problem of the postmodern “de-centered” subject for Christianity, I address the loss of a common expectation horizon of the eschatological future. This loss is situated within the wider collapse of modern metanarratives and the dispersal of the primacy and critical power of the future, leading to an incomplete and even shattered process of identity formation for Christians. By recovering elements of Edward Schillebeeckx's eschatology, I suggest a way forward by drawing on the wider Christian tradition and hope for salvation as an essential element for the ongoing process of identity formation, while using his thought to critique the fractured postmodern “self” and contemporary trends in culture, religion, and economics.
1 See comments by his longtime assistant, Schoof, Ted, OP, “Masters in Israel VII: The Later Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx,” Clergy Review 55, no. 17 (1970): 949–52Google Scholar. This shift in Schillebeeckx's thinking was not a “sudden” break, but the result of several years of experience and study, while still remaining contiguous with his earlier sacramental theology.
2 I have argued elsewhere that Schillebeeckx's eucharistic theology from the mid- to late 1960s provides an early snapshot of his hermeneutical-theological method in action, a method that would later be put to use at length (with some modifications) in his Jesus books of the 1970s. See Daniel Minch, “Language, Structure, and Sacrament: Reconsidering the Eucharistic Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx,” in Approaching the Threshold of Mystery: Liturgical Worlds and Theological Spaces, ed. Joris Geldhof, Daniel Minch, and Trevor Maine, Theologie der Liturgie, vol. 10 (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2015), 98–119.
3 Schillebeeckx, Christus’ tegenwoordigheid in de eucharistie (Bilthoven: Nelissen, 1967); The Eucharist, trans. N. D. Smith (London and New York: Burns & Oates, 2005). This book is made up of the earlier articles “Christus' tegenwoordigheid in de Eucharistie,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 5 (1965): 136–72Google Scholar, and “De eucharistische wijze van Christus' werkelijke tegenwoordigheid,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 6 (1966): 359–94Google Scholar.
4 Valedictory lecture published as Theologisch geloofsverstaan anno 1983 (Baarn: Nelissen, 1983); Schillebeeckx, “Theological Interpretation of Faith,” in Essays: Ongoing Theological Quests, vol. 11 of The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 51–68. The timeline and “periods” that I ascribe to Schillebeeckx's work roughly correspond to his “turn” to hermeneutics around the end of the Council, and at which point he begins to work out ways of interpreting its results. This can be seen in the way that analyses of Trent and Vatican I begin to appear in his work, showing that Schillebeeckx is using historical examples and traditional patterns for his own reinterpretive work with church doctrine. This is very evident in his book on the Eucharist and in the courses on hermeneutics that he began to teach in Nijmegen in 1966. See Schoof, Ted, OP, “E. Schillebeeckx: 25 Years in Nijmegen,” Theology Digest 37, no. 4 (1990): 313–32Google Scholar. The work of his “middle” period more or less continues until the early 1980s, when his “later” focus turns more explicitly to politics and ministry. I would include his third Jesus volume, Mensen als verhaal van God (Baarn: Nelissen, 1989), within the scope of his “middle” theology, but methodologically and thematically, not chronologically. Translated as Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014). If there is a “late” period for Schillebeeckx, then it begins in the 1990s and concerns ritual studies and sacraments, forming something of an inclusio with his “early” work.
5 See Schillebeeckx, “Man's Expectation for the Future on Earth,” in The Mission of the Church, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 51–89, originally published in 1967 as “Christelijk geloof en aardse toekomstverwachtingen,” in De kerk in de wereld van deze tijd: Schema dertien; Tekst en commentaar, Vaticanum II, vol. 2 (Hilversum and Antwerp: Paul Brand, 1967), 78–109.
6 Schillebeeckx, “Man's Expectation for the Future on Earth,” The Mission of the Church, 63, 84. See Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), December 7, 1965, §3, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
7 Schillebeeckx, “Man's Expectation for the Future on Earth,” The Mission of the Church, 84.
8 Ibid., 63–64.
9 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, trans. N. D. Smith, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 40 [66]. Bloomsbury published the Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx, complete with updated translations, in 2014. However, a large amount of secondary scholarship refers to the older editions and translations of Schillebeeckx's work. When there exist both older translations of Schillebeeckx's works and newer updated translations in the recently published Collected Works, page numbers in the Collected Works volumes will be cited first, and page numbers of the older translations will follow in brackets (this standard citation format is also followed in Bloomsbury's upcoming series Studies in Edward Schillebeeckx).
10 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, 38–41 [64–67].
11 Schillebeeckx, “The New Image of God, Secularization, and Man's Future on Earth,” God the Future of Man, 106 [177]. The Dutch text was published later that year as “Het nieuwe Godsbeeld, secularisatie en politiek,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 8 (1968): 44–65Google Scholar. He repeats this analysis twenty years later, but as an observed fact rather than a theory or a hypothesis, in Church, 232–34 [235–36].
12 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
13 Ibid., 37.
14 Lieven Boeve, Lyotard and Theology: Beyond the Christian Master Narrative of Love (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 25–26; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 48–53.
15 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 87–91, nos. 152–54. Cf. Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 144–45 n. 32.
16 Ibid., 26. Cf. Theodor Adorno, “Why Philosophy?,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O'Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 46. Adorno identifies an intrinsic relationship between the “equivocal superiority implied in [Heidegger's] notion of being” (partially in his refusal to attribute any moral agency or value to the Good, and partially from his inability to think of a God who is both beyond being and with being) and “Heidegger's absorption into Hitler's Führerstaat.”
17 Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs 30 (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2003), 41.
18 Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 21.
19 Ibid., 22.
20 Ibid., 22–23; Lyotard, The Differend, 160–73, nos. 235–39.
21 Lyotard, The Differend, 38–42, 155–58, nos. 54–63, 221–27; Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 16–17.
22 Ex causa finali; cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis and New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 57, §IX.
23 We can recognize the link here to historicism, which as a “science” wished to produce a universal history to explain and rationally order a universal history of cause and effect.
24 David Tracy, “On Naming the Present,” On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 3–24, at 7.
25 Lyotard calls this moment of heterogeneity “the differend.” Cf. Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 17–19; Lyotard, The Differend, 12–14, nos. 21–24.
26 Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World, trans. John Bowden, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 654–55 [664]. This is not to be confused with the positive, critical function played by utopia in human striving that he describes earlier in “Church, Magisterium and Politics,” God the Future of Man, 85–99 [143–66].
27 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 655 [664] (my emphasis).
28 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, 31–37 [54–61]. Cf. Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder and Herder/Crossroad, 1998), 105–15, 127–39.
29 Schillebeeckx, “The New Critical Theory,” The Understanding of Faith: Interpretation and Criticism, trans. N. D. Smith, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 90–91 [104].
30 Cf. Ernst Bloch, “Incipit vita nova,” Man on His Own, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 84: “As watchwords, both ‘It is accomplished’ and the much less smug and banal ‘It was accomplished’ signify a betrayal of this faith [in utopia]. The world is developing in history, and continuously coming forth; yet as it does so, it leaves its history behind.”
31 Schillebeeckx, “The New Critical Theory and Theological Hermeneutics,” The Understanding of Faith, 117 [133].
32 Schillebeeckx, “The New Image of God,” God the Future of Man, 105–6 [175–76]; Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York and London: Continuum, 2007), 22–23. Each of these terms is intended as a corrected and more nuanced name for what is commonly known as “secularism.” Both authors seek to refute the “secularization thesis” in the way that it is commonly understood—namely, the more rational people become, the less religious they will become over time.
33 Boeve, God Interrupts History, 24–26.
34 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 37.
35 Ibid., 9, 36.
36 Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 73–74.
37 Ibid., 73.
38 Ibid., 75.
39 Cf. Masamune Shirow, Appleseed: Prometheus Unbound, vol. 2 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 1995), esp. 177–80.
40 Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 75. Attention and adoration gained on social media is a kind of currency for instant gratification. We see this especially in the “meme culture” of many websites where particular images combined with text designed to provoke a response (in the form of “likes,” comments, or “points”) are prevalent. Making “confessions” or culturally and racially insensitive statements through memes serves the purpose of generating attention and focusing on conflict generated as an end in itself. These memes do not further debate or bring about self-reflection, as with Augustine's confession. In contrast, they are a point of self-affirmation. They are the very opposite of the Delphic maxim, since they proclaim a predecided answer rather than asking a serious and reflexive question.
41 Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 85–87.
42 The popular essayist and satirist David Sedaris inadvertently captures this sentiment perfectly in speaking about his practice of journaling: “It's not lost on me that I'm so busy recording life, I don't have time to really live it. I've become one of those people I hate, the sort who go to a museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not ‘Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece’ but ‘Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!’” David Sedaris, “Day In, Day Out,” Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (London: Abacus, 2013), 233.
43 As of this writing, a search for “haul” and “unboxing haul” on YouTube yielded about 8,180,000 and about 1,010,000 results, respectively. The “haul” videos depict people showing off what they have just bought, while the “unboxing” variant consists of videos of a product slowly being taken out of its packaging. Many of these videos have tens, and even (more than) hundreds, of thousands of views.
44 See “Overview and FAQ,” Snapchat, https://www.snapchat.com/ads.
45 To that point, John Caputo is simply wrong when he describes contemporary philosophers as seeing history “in terms of innumerable little narratives, competing stories that throw the big picture into question (which is why I distrust my own story about pre-modern, modern, and post-modern as too clear, too neat, too ‘totalizing’).” The “little narratives” may throw others into question, but they function as part of the larger, more sinister reign of the market narrative. They are not interruptive others, but functionalized others. See John D. Caputo, On Religion, Thinking in Action (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 65–66.
46 B. H. McClean, Biblical Interpretation and Philosophical Hermeneutics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 55–79, esp. 55–57. McClean uses the Caspar David Friedrich painting Wanderer above a Sea of Mists (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 1818) as a vivid illustration of the modern subject: “an isolated, solitary figure, a single point of consciousness, who observes the world around him from afar.”
47 William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 91.
48 Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 12, 42–46. Boeve remarks: “In the postmodern condition, according to Lyotard, these modern metanarratives have lost their plausibility. Knowledge is currently legitimated by its performativity. Knowledge is first and foremost characterized by the fact that it works, that it makes things possible. The optimization of its performativity is realized through a constant revolutionizing of the existing scientific discourse, breaking it open with newness” (12). Cf. Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 74–77. I depart from Boeve's reading of the situation here. He uses the criterion of “performativity,” which may have been true of the situation in the past but no longer functions as an explanation. The legitimation of the market narrative is “shifty” at best, and precisely when it cannot be demonstrated as “performative,” we often see its advocates cast the failures of the system in the light of unfulfilled potential, shifting the burden to a purer (utopian) future.
49 I am somewhat convinced that “Is it working?” is also a question of being convincing and persuasive, as though the actions undertaken were constantly under suspicion or in a fog of insecurity. There is a distinct need for affirmation that the illusion is being kept up.
50 See, e.g., the case of Linda Almonte, who is currently suing JP Morgan Chase as a whistle-blower, alleging that the company sold $200–250 million in inflated or nonexistent credit card debt to a debt collection agency: Robert Evans and Linda Almonte, “5 Terrible Things I Learned as a Corporate Whistleblower,” Cracked, April 7, 2014, http://www.cracked.com/article_21043_5-terrible-things-i-learned-as-corporate-whistleblower.html; Jeff Horwitz, “OCC Probing JPMorgan Chase Credit Card Collections,” The Banker, March 12, 2012, http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/177_49/chase-credit-cards-collections-occ-probe-linda-almonte-1047437-1.html?pg=1; Jeff Horwitz, “How a Whistleblower Halted JPMorgan Chase's Card Collections,” The Banker, March 15, 2012, http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/177_52/jpmorgan-chase-credit-card-collections-1047573-1.html?pg=1; Matt Taibbi, “J.P. Morgan Chase's Ugly Family Secrets Revealed,” Taibblog, Rolling Stone, March 13, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/j-p-morgan-chases-ugly-family-secrets-revealed-20120313.
51 I do not assert that humanity is the universal subject of history, but for nonreligious narratives of emancipation it is. For the Christian narrative, the universal subject is God experienced in God's self-revelation.
52 Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 62–62; Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB, vol. 1 of The Works of Saint Augustine (New York: New City Press: 1997), 82–83 (Bk. III.11).
53 Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 68.
54 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 788 [792].
55 Ibid., 730–32 [736–38]. The second and third constants are especially mindful of this point.
56 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and the Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, 47–51 [78–82].
57 Ibid., 38 [64]; cf. Schillebeeckx, Church, 233–34 [236].
58 Schillebeeckx, “I Believe in Jesus of Nazareth: The Christ, The Son of God, The Lord,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 17 (1980): 20Google Scholar (emphasis in the original).
59 Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 54.
60 Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” Theological Investigations, vol. 4: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (London and New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 337. Cf. Schillebeeckx, “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 9 [10].
61 Schillebeeckx, “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 9 [10]. Schillebeeckx's eschatology was influenced by others, especially Ernst Bloch and the “theology of hope” generated by the reception of Bloch's work by Metz, Moltmann, and others. Even so, Schillebeeckx was writing about “Christian hope in contemporary Catholic theology” already in 1956, well before the “hope” trend of the 1960s. See Schillebeeckx, “De hoop kernprobleem der christelijke confessies,” Kultuurleven 23 (1956): 110–25Google Scholar. Erik Borgman points out this anticipatory move in Edward Schillebeeckx: A Theologian in His History, trans. John Bowden (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 189. To this point, Schillebeeckx is a more thoroughly original and critically attuned thinker than he is sometimes given credit for.
62 Rahner, “Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” 337. I follow this terminology rather than that of Boeve, who reads “apocalypticism” (along with Johann Baptist Metz) as establishing an intrinsic relation between God and temporality—something closer to what we mean here by “eschatology.” See Boeve, God Interrupts History, 194–202.
63 Boeve, Lyotard and Theology, 12.
64 Perhaps what we truly mean by the “contemporary situation” is something other than “postmodernity,” either in terms of being beyond it, a progression from it, or simply some new state of affairs.
65 This point of view is not without its Catholic adherents. Speaker of the House and failed 2012 vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan has claimed publicly that his Catholic faith is the source of his economic proposals, but his actual policy-making attempts are directly linked to the purely capitalistic logic of the inherent goodness of the market and its outcomes.
66 Despite the fact that Roberts and others are by no means a “new” phenomenon within contemporary Christianity, we can safely say that the current crisis of apocalypticism is both relatively “old” and “new.” It is something that endures as a problem for Christians. Similarly, the assessments of both Rahner and Schillebeeckx remain relevant today, despite being written some decades ago.
67 See Danove, Paul L., “The Narrative Rhetoric of Mark's Ambiguous Characterization of the Disciples,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 70 (1998): 27–28, 33Google Scholar. Cf. Schillebeeckx, “I Believe in Jesus of Nazareth,” 31: “To take the part of the oppressed is to follow God himself, God who has shown his profoundest compassion for humanity in Jesus.” Cf. Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. John Bowden, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 267–79 [298–312]; Christ, 818–21 [823–25].
68 Cf. Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 74–76.
69 In the late 1990s, ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews and certain American evangelical Christians even attempted to breed a “red heifer” to fulfill the requirements of Numbers 19:1–10 (a good example of market forces and “functionalized otherness” if there ever was one). The goal would be to restart Temple sacrifices by using the cleansing ritual from Numbers 19 once the Temple is rebuilt on the original Temple Mount. See Ira Glass, “Apocalypse,” Episode 125, This American Life, podcast audio, April 2, 1999, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/125/apocalypse.
70 Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” 343.
71 Schillebeeckx, Church, 228 [230].
72 Ibid., 228 [230].
73 Schillebeeckx, “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 7 [8]. This is why the Old Testament uses familiar imagery from a known past to describe the idealized future, albeit in a new way.
74 Schillebeeckx recovers this understanding of the “God of the promise” from the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly in light of the experience of the Exodus and its interpretation. See Schillebeeckx, “The New Image of God,” God the Future of Man, 111–12 [184]; “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 4–7 [5–7]. Cf. Marsden, John, “Bloch's Messianic Marxism,” New Blackfriars 70, no. 823 (1989): 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Schillebeeckx, “Towards a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics,” God the Future of Man, 25 [37] (emphasis in the original).
76 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 810 [814] (emphasis in the original).
77 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and the Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, 50 [81].
78 Schillebeeckx, “The New Image of God,” God the Future of Man, 104 [173].
79 Ibid., 108–9 [180]; “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 3–4 [4].
80 This does not invalidate the insights of an older theology, or the meaning of transcendence in light of the past, but opens up “transcendence” to an authentic plurality of meanings and applications.
81 Schillebeeckx, “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 3–4 [4–5]; “The New Image of God,” God the Future of Man, 181.
82 Schillebeeckx, “The New Critical Theory and Theological Hermeneutics,” The Understanding of Faith, 133 [152].
83 Schillebeeckx, “The New Image of God,” God the Future of Man, 109 [181].
84 This is seen above all in the life of the church, the sacraments, and the liturgy. Cf. Schillebeeckx, “Church, Magisterium and Politics,” God the Future of Man, 97–99 [161–64]; Christ, 796–97 [800–801], 806–7 [811], 831–34 [836–39]; “God, the Living One,” New Blackfriars 62, no. 735 (1981): 366–68Google Scholar.
85 Cf. Boeve, God Interrupts History, 176.
86 Schillebeeckx, Church, 99 [101]: “The human face of Jesus not only reveals the face of God in very clear contours, but at the same time veils the face (because it is a revelation of the inexpressible God through Jesus’ real-human, historical, and thus contingent and limited expression).”
87 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, 50 [82].
88 For a full analysis of the term “recontextualization,” see Lieven Boeve, “Orthodoxy, History, and Theology: Recontextualisation and Its Descriptive and Programmatic Features,” in Orthodoxy, Liberalism, and Adaptation: Essays on Ways of Worldmaking in Times of Change from Biblical, Historical and Systematic Perspectives, ed. Bob Becking, Studies in Theology and Religion 15 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 185–204.
89 Schillebeeckx, “I Believe in Jesus of Nazareth,” 24.
90 Schillebeeckx, “The Interpretation of the Future,” The Understanding of Faith, 3 [3].
91 Ibid., 3–4 [3–4].
92 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 803 [807].
93 Schillebeeckx, “Theological Criteria,” The Understanding of Faith, 59 [66].
94 I am somewhat convinced that the practice of “tagging” (identifying a person in an image shared on social media) and specifically untagging people in photos online leads to selective remembering of the events in question.
95 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 809–11 [814–15].
96 Ibid., 811 [815] (emphasis in the original).
97 Schillebeeckx, “God, the Living One,” 366. Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 38–39, 54–60.
98 Although in God we should not propose a separation, but perhaps only a distinction.
99 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 811 [815].
100 Schillebeeckx, “Towards a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics,” God the Future of Man, 24 [36]. Furthermore: “Historical objectivity is the truth of the past in the light of the present and not a reconstruction of the past in its unrepeatable factuality” (17 [24]).
101 Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 143.
102 Ibid., 145. This involves Boeve's theological category of “interruption.” Cf. Lieven Boeve, “Theology and the Interruption of Experience,” in Religious Experience and Contemporary Theological Epistemology, ed. L. Boeve, Y. De Maeseneer, and S. Van Den Bossche, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 188 (Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 2005), 11–40.
103 It is the same with the Gospel portrayals of Jesus: “The evangelists go so far as to present Jesus as God's interrupter, interrupting closed narratives on behalf of God” (Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 119; emphasis in the original). Cf. Schillebeeckx, Church, 21–33 [22–33].
104 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 804 [808] (emphasis in the original).
105 Quoted in Bloch, “Incipit vita nova,” Man on His Own, 85.
106 Schillebeeckx, Church, 94 [97].
107 Ibid.; Christ, 824–25 [829].
108 Schillebeeckx, “I Believe in Jesus of Nazareth,” 28. Cf. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. and ed. J. Matthew Ashley, new ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 119–27.
109 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 828–29 [833].
110 Schillebeeckx, “Towards a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics,” God the Future of Man, 16–17 [24–25]. In forthcoming works, I hope to elaborate on this point and offer a reoriented understanding of time in light of these eschatological considerations. Steven M. Rodenborn's Hope in Action: Subversive Eschatologies in the Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx and Johann Baptist Metz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014) brings up a perceived opposition between Metz's “apocalyptic” and Schillebeeckx's “evolutionary” understanding of time and history, but specific points of contrast between the two views are not explored extensively. This topic deserves to be investigated further.
111 Schillebeeckx, “Church, Magisterium and Politics,” God the Future of Man, 94 [157].
112 Schillebeeckx, “Man's Expectation for the Future on Earth,” The Mission of the Church, 87.
113 Schillebeeckx, “Secularization and Christian Belief in God,” God the Future of Man, 46–47 [76].