Repositório RCAAP

The notion of St. Paul «to live by the Spirit», expressed in Gal 5, 25, motivates a reflection on the singularity of the Christian experience. It invites to understand the errors to which this one is subject in our time of spiritual thirst. Such experience confers the primacy to God, who addresses himself to the human being acting according to his sovereign freedom. It is important to have this point settled, before becoming aware of the confusion in which the notion of ‘spiritual’ is immersed today. It designates realities sometimes contradicting one another. In fact, we witness a new wave of searches of meaning usually named as ‘spiritual’, with a considerable social and cultural expression. They claim to be of religious character, even though they contain aspects that contradict such a pretension. They go so far as to mingle with the Christian faith and possibly pervert it with the logic of ‘knowing’ proper to them.

“The first scene that Siza devised was the fall of St. Paul from the horse: because he likes drawing horses and because the episode has almost everything that an artist seeks: movement, light, drama, mystery, rupture. The most famous fall from a horse in history. The bodies of horse and rider are fused, in the design, into a single body; a spontaneous and frugal distribution of lines that show the horse somersaulting and hide the face of the rider.” This text thus conserves and whispers the recollection of a conversation with the architect Álvaro Siza Vieira with regard to the ceramic tiles placed in the new Basilica at the Fátima Sanctuary, containing scenes from the life of St. Paul.

The question of God’s omnipotence and determination (or predestination) of natural and voluntary events (qadar) occupies a central role in medieval debates in Islamic theology. It revolves around a basic conflict between two core concepts in Islam: God’s omnipotence and human responsibility, a necessary presupposition for affirming God’s justice, another divine attribute alongside His omnipotence. This paper looks at the development of the different theological schools concerning discussions of God’s qadar and the way in which the tendency to a predestinarian outlook influenced also such Islamic philosophers as Avicenna and Averroes.

Speaking of creation takes us back to the limits of time and space, at which nobody was present and which can only be imagined. Experience and reason let us down. Only intuition and the symbolic discourse of myth may dare to go back to the beginnings of time. The most obvious thing to do is to transport experience of the production of new things to origins. New living beings appear through generation; new artefacts through work; new works and situations by order of whoever commands. Before the Old Testament, the Egyptians had already turned to the two most obvious forms of creation – through generation and through work. In both cultures, the divine action of creation is expressed through a pallet of verbs (generate, create, make, form, etc.) and of literary genres – simple forms, the hymn and the report. It is that, contrary to what St. Thomas Aquinas thought, no term is appropriate and none even as a set is sufficient. Every conceptual and verbal cannot go beyond approximations.

This study is centered on a semantic analysis of John’s account of the unction of Bethany (Jo 12, 1-11). Amid the various existing studies, the present one has the particularity of regarding this episode as a corollary of Jesus’ activity and, at the same time, as the beginning of His passion, death and resurrection. With this in mind, the study seeks to present the identity of Jesus and of the mission he entrusted to the disciples in accordance with the view put forward by the fourth evangelist. The study is rooted in the canonical text– based on the text of the Novum Testamentum graece edited by E. Nestle – K. Aland and others (Stuttgart 27 1993) – and the principle that John’s Gospel is a literary work situated in its historical context, with the objective of leading to faith and confession in Jesus Christ, Son of God. Thus, starting from the text, its framework and structure, this study analyzes its meaning.

Nicolau Cabasilas, an eastern lay theologian of the 14th century, left one of the most profound reflections on liturgy and spiritual life. In his book Life in Christ he described the experience of his deep friendship with Christ through the liturgical celebration of the sacraments. The present text underlines the importance of Cabasilas in the liturgical spirituality of the Church, with the purpose of knowing and deepening the life of Christ that is communicated to us through the sacraments and to which we remain attached with the collaboration of our will. The liturgy is an expression of authentic spirituality. Life in Christ in its various phases is founded on a listening to the Word, on the experience of the Mystery and on the vision of Glory, and will be perfect in the next life when we shall hear the Voice of the Silence of God.

The horizon of happening of other people marks a fundamental constituent of the THERE of BEING THERE, DASEIN, that which we have always been whenever we think of ourselves as being our because of our being. Hence it is not a separate horizon interpreted through an existential temporal analytical process of Dasein. Rather, it is a structuring factor in our being as an ACCESS to the THERE in which in existing we are ever present. The aim is, thus, to understand the manifold ways in which others may be with us, and therefore to open up the various ways of speaking of the other. To this effect we begin by concentrating on Being and Time, where the other as an horizon is analysed and interpreted almost with the sole purpose of putting it as a problem, so that the issue can be raised. What follows is an attempt to radicalise this horizon through its explicit emergence as tendencies towards atmosphere, cadence, vibration and wave, parting from later positions along the lines of Martin Heidegger. Here too we search for the other in the specificity of his happening in flooding (and in spreading through) our entire existence, but now questioned in the peculiarity of our access to the dimension in which he may truly be.

The ethical dimension is revealed in living our lives with others: I recognise myself as a person before the personal ‘you’ of others. From this interpersonal encounter, we may seek to understand the regular appeal to ‘human dignity’. More than an argument, it is a matter of exhortation. Recalling the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10, 29-37) the opening question is inverted – it is not a question of knowing who has a right to our help or our love; it is one of understanding ‘how’ and ‘for whom’ we are in a position to do some good – we discover that it is love that makes us creators of proximity.

The theme of reform entered discussion of the sanctity of the Church as the vision of the Church became enriched and attempts were made to resolve the hypothetical incompatibility between Church sanctity and Church reform. The fermentation of these ideas reached the 2nd Vatican Council and continued afterwards. In this study we examine the presence of the idea of reform in relation to the sanctity of the Church in the texts of the 2nd Vatican Council. The Council documents allow for various readings on the relationship between sanctity and reform in the Church, but do not take on board all of the possibilities to be found in earlier theological debate. After the Council we find three different ways of including reform in discussions of the sanctity of the Church: the first sees reform as a consequence of the dynamism of sanctity within the Church, the second affirms that it is not possible to speak of form without admitting the presence of sin in the Church, and, lastly, the third relates reform to the historical condition of the Church, which follows a path on earth towards its plenitude. The majority of theologians use one or, more rarely a number of these solutions. We cannot yet state that a consensus has been reached.

The God invoked with the proper noun Yahweh is the same personal Being as that which the patriarchs invoked as ‘God the Father’. But the name in itself was only attributed to the God of Israel during the passing of the Hebrew nation through the human and religious experience of the exodus, led by Moses. It is with the memory of the exodus that the name of God of the Yahwist faith is inextricably associated. It was only centuries after this founding historical event that the faith of the people of the Bible gave an explanation to the holy tetragram, placing it in the context of the theophany that set off the exodus and making a hermeneutic of it. It did so by means of the assonance closest to it, with a verbal form hayah. Thus the name of God was understood in terms of ‘Being, Existing’, as ‘the truly Existing’ for the people, liberating it from slavery to be reconnected to Him by means of an alliance of friendship.

Na obra de Joseph Ratzinger as dimensões existencial e sacramental da fé e teologia estão indissoluvelmente ligadas. A teologia dá precedência à fé e, por conseguinte, à conversão: caminhada catecumenal dos seguidores e auto-doação a Jesus Cristo. Ser baptizado significa ser acolhido no sujeito da transmissão da fé, isto é, o Corpo de Cristo, a Igreja. A eucaristia oferece um toque do amor de Deus, que transforma o homem, bem como uma possibilidade de união que pode ganhar uma profundidade mística. Numa vida marcada pela eucaristia, a fé torna-se «evidência interior» e dinâmica missionária, segundo a razão da fé. Aos santos é oferecida uma real experiência de Deus, eles participam na visão de Cristo. Assim, a exegese do evangelho, que eles elaboram com a sua vida, precede a teologia.

When we examine the history of the theology of the sacraments in Western Christianity, we discover the importance of the Donatist crisis and of the controversy concerning the reiterability of baptism for a definition of sacramental action and of its effects in Christocentric terms. The figure of Optatus of Milevis, prior to Augustine of Hippo, is fundamental for an understanding of the conceptual shift made by Western Christianity, in particular by the affirmation of the Christological centrality of baptism.

This article seeks to show how the problem of the divine Name constitutes a primordial nucleus of language and theological gnoseology. In actual fact, classical theologia brought to maturity the common conviction that any name or concept accommodates itself to the essentially anonymous divine nature. Taking this presupposition as its starting point, Helenic theism (medioplatonic, gnostic and hermetic) emerged in the dogma of the ontological impossibility of knowing God (agnostos Theos). Though not immune to the influence of this gnoseological rigorousness, the Fathers of the Church substantially reworked the semantics of the mystery of God, opening two avenues of theological enquiry, through the ‘revelation of the Name’: the affirmative (oikonomica), and the negative (apofática) which safegards transcendence and enables a personal relationship with a God who reveals himself (Nomen).

This article seeks to compare the Christ of Peter with the Jesus of Simon through the actual historical personage of Simon Peter. These constitute four important concepts throughout the text to demonstrate the theological evolution between the period of Jesus’ public ministry and that of the post-Easter faith of the primitive community. With this anti-Bultmannian distinction, the classic critique that opposed Paul and Peter, as if the first were a theologian and the other not because he never had been, is taken into account. Without avoiding a Biblical analysis (especially of the passage of the entry into Jerusalem in Mark’s Gospel), the author tries to show how the question of God in Peter, or in Simon, is posed.

The Christian faith of the Trinity of God is not in any sense an addition to a conception of the universal God achieved through philosophical speculation or through religious.mystic experience. Rather, in the faith in the Trinity there is an expression of the original experience of God manifested to mankind in the happening of Christ. This also has direct consequences for mankind’s understanding of his origins and quest for God. All of the discussion about the mystery of the Trinity is therefore a debate about the true essence of the Christian faith.

The theology of the ‘Creation – new Creation’ is one of the richest fields in all of Biblical theology. It concerns a debate that permeates the whole of Biblical history, both ad-intra, in other words Biblical thought in dialogue with itself, as well as that which unfurls itself ad-extra, in comparison with the cultures and mythologies of the surrounding peoples. The implications of this debate are not limited to the Pentateuch nor are they restricted to cult literature (for example, Psalm 8). They move out, to a striking extent, to the groups and movements that represent intertestamentary Judaism, where the question, in the face of Greek culture, assumes a new relevance. The source that inspires and feeds the theology of the (new) creation is in the prophetic thinking, namely of Deutero-Isaiah, in the post-exile period and in the theology of the ‘New Alliance’ of Jeremiah and of Ezequiel and also in the real-political ideology that was developed in the exaltation of the Temple at Jerusalem as the dwelling of Yahweh, through the mediation of the Davidian dynasty, whose mission was to establish a new social order. There is a wealth of texts on this theme, namely in the apocaliptic literature and that of Qumran. I allude to just a few of these: 1 Enoch 91, 15-16; 1 Enoch 45, 5-6; Jubilees 1, 23-25; 23, 26-32; 1 Qumran Hebrew 3, 28-35; 13,1.11-12; 15, 13-17; Joseph and Asenath 8,11; 15,3-4.

The exercise of yearning marks the rhythm of the Christian life, which we can call a life of prayer, that is to say a life in relation to God, who, having brought Himself close to mankind in the liberality of Trinitarian love, is always an infinite liberty of love inviting the finite human liberty to participate freely in the divine life. Reflecting on the yearning of God brings us to touch humbly upon the Trinitarian mystery and to seek to delineate its relationship with history. A relationship that inolves the Incarnation of the Word of God, but which comes before it and is lost in the eternal design of the Trinity, just as it comes later in the action of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the world in the community of holiness.

The author follows a path divided into three moments. In the first moment, and starting from a more anthropological thinking, he seeks to show how the opening to the Transcendence (to Christians the opening to the Personal Mystery of God) makes integrant part of the human condition, in such a way that the concreteness of that opening allows to live the existence assuming all its possibilities. In the second moment, he seeks to reflect how the opening to human makes part of God’s own project. In this context, he looks to Jesus Christ to show how in Him both previous movements are simultaneously formed. In the third and last moment, and from the answers to four questions (What can I know? What can I expect? What do I have to do? What can I celebrate?) he seeks to take out consequences to the living in faith, searching in that living for evidence of the ‘sign’ of Jesus’ resurrection in the history of mankind.

This article presents the manner in which some of the principal contemporary theologians have regarded the possibility and the consequences of a presence of God in the midst of human history (history of salvation) and, in particular, the consequences for history of the proclamation of the end of time in Christ. Beginning with R. Bultmann (the human decision in the faith as an eschatological decision), the article then refers to the theologies of history of O. Cullmann (the truth of contemporary history lived in the light of the definitive victory of Christ but waiting for the final victory), W. Pannenberg (in Christ, the end of history is given to us in anticipation), K. Rahner (Christ is the absolute bearer of salvation which, in spite of the fragility of the historical event, demands absolute commitment) and H. U. von Balthasar (Jesus opens a path to redemption accessible to all, transforming the time of sin into a time of the redeemed and giving a definitive sense to human existence).

This article seeks to consider the meaning of the (Christian) concept of God for Fundamental Theology. If it is usual for the (Trinitarian) concept of God to be stud ied in the context of Dogmatics, the perspective presented here is a different one. At the same time, this results in a slight broadening of and indeed alteration to certain perspectives of Fundamental Theology. In fact, the latter cannot be reduced to the study of the (rational) conditions of understanding and even of validity of a concept of God given in an absolutely dogmatic and positive form. Even if this approach, in the style of the traditional praeambula fidei, continues to be essential, it is best not to lose sight of the fact that Fundamental Theology, in being fully theological, parts straight away from the impact that is brought to bear by a (determined) concept of God revealed and transmitted through the ecclesial tradition, and hence not deducible a priori through categories that pretend to be rational. This article considers this impact from the perspective of the possibility of thinking God, of the truth of the concept of Him, of the historical origin of His constitution-revelation and of His Trinitarian content.