The New Theology and the Life of Prayer

Extract

What effect have the new theological insights on our understanding of the life of prayer? It is a question of impact on the spirit of man. Theology deals with God, but it concerns man, and therefore, if a theology is to have any impact on the age it lives in, it must answer the questions which men of that age ask. Otherwise, however wide its research and valid its conclusions, it will remain outside the current of life. The best way. therefore, to examine the spirituality of the new theology is to begin by by examining the needs of modern man. From our understanding of the latter will grow our appreciation of the former.

Man's understanding of himself has developed in the modern age. A hundred years ago, if you said ‘person’ you conjured up the image of separateness. Words like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘inalienable’ rose to the lips. Man was thought of primarily as an individual with rights of his own, an island in a sea of other islands. But now we understand things differently. Without denying the inalienability and essential separateness of a person, we think it equally necessary to stress that he is only a person because he can enter into relations with other persons; that, as well as existing in himself, he also exists for other people; that ‘the most vital core of man does not consist in the solitary and hardened affirmation of his individual autonomy, but in availability, welcome, receptivity'. (Charles Moeller). In fact that man is not an island, but part of the main.