Going public with the means of Grace: a Homiletical theology of promise for Word and Sacrament in a post-secular age
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2018-10
Authors
Jacobsen, David Schnasa
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
David Schnasa Jacobsen. 2018. "Going Public with the Means of Grace." Theology Today, Volume 75, Issue 3, pp. 371 - 382. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573618791739
Abstract
This article articulates a revisionist homiletical theology of Word and Sacrament for a disestablished church in a disenchanted, post-secular world. Its understanding of the post-secular context, an age of religious resurgence nonetheless impacted by the secular, is grounded in Charles Taylor’s analysis of the Reformation as an engine of cultural change even today: disenchantment, shared vocation, and the “affirmation of the ordinary.” In this context, it seeks to revise Protestant notions of the gospel as promise in the direction of Richard Kearney’s onto-eschatological vision in The God Who May Be. Such a notion of promise, connected to Kearney’s “traversing presence” yet embracing its possibilizing force, pushes against attempts to re-trench and reenchant, as in some postliberal and radical orthodox theologies, in favor of a more apologetic public theology of Word and Sacrament.