The Origins and Tendencies of Contemporary Religious Sensibility

Extract

The survey that follows is translated from the French. It appeared in the Supplément de La Vie Spirituelle, No. 48, for the first quarter of 1959, and has also appeared in our Dutch Dominican contemporary Tijdschrift voor Geestelijk Leven. Fr Schillebeeckx is a Flemish Dominican, a distinguished theologian, and we hope that his assessment of certain continental developments will be of interest to our English readers, though it may appear strange, and not perhaps be found wholly congenial, to those only familiar with our island scene.

TO understand the religious sensibility of our time, we have to return to the forms of Christian life which characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The modern way of living the faith is very largely a reaction against these older forms.