RSS

Return to Sources:

de Lubac, H. (1998), Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (Vol. 1 and 2). Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. These two volumes are almost 1,000 pages of text and notes. I have read them carefully three times to get a sense of this masterful resource for someone like me.

This contemporary Church Father compiled in a compelling way the whole development of how the senses of Scripture are to be understood and taken seriously as a contemplative support for lectio divina.

Another book I'd like to read, but it is too expensive to buy:
Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology : A Return to Mystery

Price: $144.00
Format:
Hardback 336 pp.
156 mm x 234 mm
ISBN-10:
0199229643
ISBN-13:
9780199229642
Publication date:
August 2009
Imprint: OUP UK

Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology
A Return to Mystery
Hans Boersma

In the decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council, the movement of nouvelle théologie caused great controversy in the Catholic Church and remains a subject of vigorous scholarly debate today.

In Nouvelle théologie and Sacramental Ontology Hans Boersma argues that a return to mystery was the movement's deepest motivation. 

Countering the modern intellectualism of the neo-Thomist establishment, the nouvelle theologians were convinced that a ressourcement of the Church Fathers and of medieval theology would point the way to a sacramental reintegration of nature and the supernatural.

In the context of the loss suffered by both Catholics and Protestants in the de-sacramentalizing of modernity, Boersma shows how the sacramental ontology of nouvelle théologie offers a solid entry-point into ecumenical dialogue.



The volume begins by setting the historical context for nouvelle théologie with discussions of the influence of significant theologians and philosophers like Möhler, Blondel, Maréchal, and Rousselot.

The exposition then moves to the writings of key thinkers of the ressourcement movement including de Lubac, Bouillard, Balthasar, Chenu, Daniélou, Charlier, and Congar. Boersma analyses the most characteristic elements of the movement: its reintegration of nature and the supernatural, its reintroduction of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture, its approach to Tradition as organically developing in history, and its communion ecclesiology that regarded the Church as sacrament of Christ.

In each of these areas, Boersma demonstrates how the nouvelle theologians advocated a return to mystery by means of a sacramental ontology.

Readership : Scholars and students of nouvelle théologie and the ressourcement movement, of contemporary Catholicism, and of Ecumenism.

These two sources point to the return of the sources of Vatican II that went back to the sources in late antiquity give us a sense of Christ's presence and both human and divine. By the 10th C. the western Catholic Church lost its contact with the mystery and replaced it with rational theological speculation. Vatican II returned to these sources and gave such hope to the Church.

Today there is much strain to negate Vatican II and to return to narrow thinking about God rather than the experience of God. A Church consciousness has replaced a God Consciousness that is so alive in the Resourcement Movement.