（5）ポストモダンと教会

「難易度ランキング」導入後3番目の記事です。もう最高難度が出てきちゃいました。 

ポストモダンって何?

というところからスタートしなければならない方は余り深入りしない方がいいかもしれません。
大変ややこしい（モダンとそれ以後の）線引き問題が絡んできます。

筆者としては「ポストモダン」とはそもそもなんぞや・・・みたいな「ポストモダン入門」は余りお勧めできません。かなりおつむをこき使うことになると思うからです。

それよりも身の回りの状況がどうなっているか、一応「近代（モダン）の指標」で反省してみることが有効ではないかと思います。

近代の指標:啓蒙主義の理念（自由・平等・博愛）、理性主義、合理主義、資本主義、民主主義、などなど。

今日紹介するのは、「教会にとって『ポストモダン』とはどのようなチャレンジなのか」を一神学者がどのように把握し、どのように解決の糸口を模索し、その一つ解決案を提案しているか、という論文（ブログ記事）です。

結構長い文章なので、ある程度英語を読み慣れている人でも、そして神学的蓄積がある人でも、一気に読み通すには少し忍耐が必要かと思います。

と言うことで先ずリンクをば。

Robert W. Jenson, "How The World Lost Its Story"

後は筆者がアンダーラインした場所を引用していきます。
引用だけです。

また余裕が出た時、コメントを残したいと思います。あしからず。

The story the Bible tells is asserted to be the story of God with His creatures; that is, it is both assumed and explicitly asserted that there is a true story about the universe because there is a universal novelist/historian. Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.

The obvious answer is that if the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.

[t]he church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence.

[t]he first step: it must recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this the one exclusive center of its life.

If the church is not herself a real, substantial, living world to which the gospel can be true, faith is quite simply impossible.
Protestantism has been modernity’s specific form of Christianity. Protestantism supposed that addressees of the gospel already inhabited the narratable world in which stories like the gospel could be believed, and that we therefore could dismantle the gospel’s own liturgical world, which earlier times of the church had created.

What is said and enacted in the church must be with the greatest exactitude and faithfulness and exclusivity the story of creation and redemption by the God of Israel and Father of the risen Christ.

Therefore, when hope in progress has been discredited, modernity has no resource either for renewing it or for acquiring any other sort of hope. The mere negation of faith in progress is sheer lack of hope; and hopelessness is the very definition of postmodernism.

The assembly of believers must therefore itself be the event in which we may behold what is to come.
 
[i]t is precisely a promised chief mark of the Eschaton that accurate hearing will then be accompanied by glorious sight. And in this age, the church must be the place where beatific vision is anticipated and trained.
 
If we are in our time rightly to apprehend the eschatological reality of the gospel promise, we have to hear it with Christ the risen Lord visibly looming over our heads and with His living and dead saints visibly gathered around us. Above all, the church must celebrate the Eucharist as the dramatic depiction, and as the succession of tableaux, that it intrinsically is.

と言ったところです。

お暇があったら、そしてこのトピックに関心があったら味わってみてください。