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The aim of this commentary on the exhortation Sacramentum caritatis is based on the thinking of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Levinas. According to the author, in the post-synodical text there is an opening for an understanding of the Eucharist through the Other, a path that appears to be much more fertile than others that enter into this mystery. The key is to be found within the building, as François-Xavier Durrwell has noted. The “more” that is the Paschal mystery of Jesus is what explains the “less” that is the sacramental gesture of the Eucharist. This text seeks to show how this change of perspective turns out to be of great interest in order to call attention to the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the Church.

This study provides a brief presentation of the contribution of K. Rahner to a renewed understanding of the theological notion of mystery, a category fundamental in Christianity and in theology, which is, to an extent, the science of the mystery. The fundamental essence of his contribution – inspired, on the one hand, by St. Thomas Aquinas and, on the other, by a certain tendency in contemporary philosophy, with G. Marcel as one of its most significant representatives – consists in bringing about a methodological inversion, in other words instead of considering the mystery via the limits of reason, to do so via the beatific vision and the theme of the lumen gloriae. The mystery thus comes to refer directly to God, and less to propositions that outpass the limits of reason. The plurality of the mysteries may be summarised in just three: the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation and the hypostatic union, and the elevation of creatures to communion with God in grace. All of the rest amounts to a subdivision of these three fundamental mysteries. K. Rahner’s conclusion is one of an anthropological nature, showing that mankind is essentially the being of the mystery, of the infinite spiritual transcendency, open and susceptible to the excess of sense that the mystery, like the greatness of the Son, encloses within itself.

In 2006 Richard Dawkins, the well-known British biologist published The God Delusion, with the presumed intention of proving, on a scientific basis, that (it is almost certain) that God does not exist. A number of considerations arise here: in essence, the book, as well as proving nothing of what it seeks to prove, disqualifies the author both in terms of his moral attitude and in terms of the epistemological error within which he works. What is of concern about this case is that the book is a sign of a renewed atheistic militancy and of an exacerbated presence, in the world of culture, of a real scientific fundamentalism, at the service of a culture without God.

This essay was written within a broader research project on ‘new theories of religion’. Here the aim is to identify the context and specificity of mediological enquiry in the face of religious fact, testing the instruments it uses for posing questions in one of the research universes favoured by Régis Debray: the representations of ‘the One God’ and the Scriptures as a medium of their historicisation. Following discussion of this initial issue, Debray’s mediology is confronted with the hermeneutical problems resulting from the operation of reducing ‘sense’ to ‘function’.

This article analyses certain lines of thinking of St. Augustine and Spinoza, philosophers who, though their point of departure is the same desire to reach God, diverge profoundly in their interests, the themes treated and in the objectives they set themselves in their philosophical work. They do, however, come together in the value they attach to the inquietude that inhabits every man – the unquiet heart of Augustine and the conatus of Spinoza. The anthropological thinking of each of these philosophers has as a consequence a given conception of divinity. In confronting the divergences between the personal God of Augustine and the God/Nature of Spinoza, certain problems arise as to the religiosity of the latter, as well as the pertinence of his designation as an atheist philosopher.

Four thinkers have been chosen to guide us in this study: Jacques Monod, Max Weber, Marcel Gauchet and Peter Berger. Through them and the intersection of their respective ideas, we enter a scenario that is dense, confused, multiconceptual and ambiguous, which straight away defies any attempt at descriptive rigor and unanimous reading. From the outset we see a rough track that follows an unclear and uncertain line, through which we will try to enter into the movement of ideas and of representations of the world, with the objective of describing a point of view of this movement: “the disenchantment of the world” as a referential of modernity. This is an audacious endeavour but not an arrogant one. We will try to enter into the conjunction of multiple concepts, in the hope of reaching a point of intersection that gives us access to a renewed vision. The conceptual hotchpotch – animism, desenchantment with the world, theocracy, secularisation, democracy, modernity desecularisation – makes the dynamic of the miscigenation of the elements appear in incessant combinations and recompositions; it is not concerned with the algorithm of a laboratory experiment; it is concerned with the history of our life and with the history of the ideas that make us live. Ideas and ideas which, by coming into touch with one another, forge a new earth and a new heaven in the image of the Moderns, where it is possible to live and to believe.

The relationship between Christianity and culture is an integral part of a much greater issue between religions and culture(s). At a time when various religious fundamentalisms are appearing, at a moment in which Europe is questioning its Christian roots, the present relevance of the theme seems evident. This article seeks firstly to verify the kinds of relationship that have existed between Christianity and culture in the course of history; following this, certain conditions for a positive relationship between the two are put forward; finally, there is a statement of the presence of Christianity within culture, particularly in a West that has already undergone a profound process of secularisation and rationality.

Silence at the same time contemplative and affective cultivated in Western monastic circles seems to have been born among the Cluniacs (specifically with Abbot Odo, 927-942), and to have followed a tradition that was transmitted through William of St. Thierry and of Aelred of Rievaulx (both connected with Cistercian spirituality), through the second or third generation of Carthusians, and finally through Meister Eckhart and his disciple Johann Tauler. In the origins of Eastern and Western monasticism it was particularly its ascetic form that was highly regarded. The mystical tradition derived from apophatic theology inspired in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite led to a great many mystical works, particularly from the authors of St. Victor of Paris and their successors, but it was considered too speculative by more accessible monastic authors such as that of The Cloud of Unknowing and Tauler himself.

This article discusses reactions from primarily German New Testament scholars to Pope Benedict XVI’s book “Jesus of Nazareth,” focusing less on controversial exegetical details but more so on the ‘great questions’ which too often lurk unaddressed in the background. It defends the Pope’s book as an important, necessary attempt to reconcile faith and history under the proposition of the biblical God actually acting in history. The reality of Jesus of Nazareth as God’s incarnate son is therefore missed and misrepresented not only theologically, but also historically if he is understood solely within the parameters allowed by ‘secular positivism’. Against Benedict’s project, the majority of reviews of “Jesus of Nazareth” by New Testament scholars defend an approach to the historical Jesus based on a secular methodology as the only one that is academically viable. The transempirical realities in the life of the earthly Jesus are therein not denied but relegated to the realm of personal beliefs.

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A translation of the Hebrew expression in 1 K 19,12, “still small voice of calm” (qôl demãmãh daqqãh), and the application to the text of 1 K 19,11-13 of the rhetorical formula “three things I say, four I declare” (cf. Pr 30,15ss.; Am 1-2) enable us to gather the inner and spiritual dimension of Elijah’s experience on Mount Horeb, through a rereading from a symbolic point of view of the “theophanic” atmospheric phenomena: wind, earthquake and fire. This spiritual interpretation, which we can find in hesicast monastical contexts, reveals silence as the voice through which God makes himself present to the prophet by speaking to the depths of his body. Thus emerges the spiritual value that the body has in the Bible and the certainty that listening to God is not done without listening through the body, the true place of the Spirit.

“The ways of getting around things are infinite”, said Pascal. Thus are the forms of silence that appear to us as faces to decipher within enunciative practices so varied as prayer, meditation, literature and music. This text examines the form that silence takes in literature (M.G. Llansol, E. de Andrade, E. de Jesus, Celan) and in the biblical text Mark 14,3, parting from a semiotic viewpoint.

The question concerning the decline of language and the silence of God cannot avoid the complex issues in contemporary philosophy concerning the possibility that language offers to speak of the divine. Analytical philosophers, reflecting the Linguistic Turn of thought in the 20th Century, have delved into the problematic. But it is hermeneutical philosophy and its concern to overcome the forgetting of the ontological that the problem of the decline of language is directly conjugated with the poetics reflecting the emergence of beings and its potential religious meaning. However, the greatest obstacle in breaking through to a fuller sense of the divine resides in the nominalism that implicitly dominates modern and contemporary philosophy. Relearning to think analogically will imply the discerning of the more original theological expression of Being and the rehabilitation of a realist metaphysics based on participation and the contiguous relation between the real and the Logos.

With the creation of the moving image at the end of the 19th Century a new way of representing and expressing the Religious was born. The cinema industry rapidly understood that film has a powerful way to attract new audiences and transformed the explicit religious message into an implicit theological discourse of the fictional film. Today, the concept of “cinema” needs to be rethought and expanded, as well as the notion of “Transcendental” since the strong reality effect of the film image can allow a true religious experience for the spectator.

This text addresses the question of how throughout History mankind has kept alive the quest for ultimate meaning for our existence upon earth. Cultures and religions give different answers to this search. All of them, yet, remain provisional answers, in spite of all religious revelation. Therefore, the question has always kept being asked in many times and places, enacted by multiple voices, inside and outside the actual spiritual or religious frames. This all pervasive interrogative dimension seems thus to emerge in multiple forms from inside all cultural contexts. Literature, for example, as well as other forms of art, is one of the spaces, where signs of this search for the Invisible are present: both by means of affirmation and negation, of refusal or doubt, metaphysical concerns and modes of unquietness about the Divine are present in many literary texts. Focusing on some of the poetry and fictional narrative from the last and the current centuries in Portugal, this paper provides a few examples of how this path for further meaning and for a nameless Divine is dealt with and textually inscribed.

One of the best avenues towards a fruitful fundamental-theological investigation lies in aesthetics, namely, in art and literature, with particular emphasis put on poetry and fiction, because these are means of expressing deep meaning in the sickness and anguish, as well as in the joys and the wonders of humankind. The literature of the Japanese writer Shusaku Endõ (1923-1996) expresses such anguish and wonders in the characters of his novels, raising theological themes that are «burning-points» in our society. In the present paper we introduce the novel Chinmoku [Silence], which is an extract from Chapter III of a doctoral dissertation in theology with the title Transcultural Theodicy in the Fiction of Shusaku Endõ, defended at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, in December 2008.

The present article seeks to revisit the question of theological methods. It begins with a general consideration, of a phenomenological and hermeneutical order, concerning the relationship between method and knowledge of the truth, in order to explore subsequently the typical elements of theological method, concentrating on the concepts/dimension of auditus fidei, actio fidei, intellectus fidei and ontologia fidei. To terminate, there is a discussion of the characteristics of theological discourse, as analogical discourse, which raises the question of the pertinence and limits of the very method, as an endless path, which leads us to a ‘place’ different from itself. Taken as a whole, there is an exploration above all of the relationship between tradition, pragmatics, criticism and metaphysics.

Fundamental theology should always be prepared to ‘provide the reason for our hope’ (1 P 3,15) in the face of each new situation that presents itself to the Christian faith. In accordance with its double function, it aims to reinterpret the faith in new historical contexts and, at the same time, found its discourse on the continuous revelation of the Scriptures. The author raises the question of the point of departure in theology, in the face of the present-day context of post-Christian societies, though marked by religious revival. It continues by dealing with the Christian conception of religious experience, from the perspective of the ‘end’ of religion. Finally, in its search for the ‘theological place’ of the Scriptures, if follows two paths: the methodological proposal of the theology of culture (Paul Tillich), the third way in the confrontation ‘secularism’ and ‘biblicism’; and the method of the Latin-American liberation theologies, with the problem of the use of socio-analytical mediations (Clodovis Boff ). Inherent to the problems of method, arises the fundamental question of the interpretative status of theology and of the Christian faith itself.

In six points the author presents the fundamental elements of Origen’s exegetic method. The idea of continuous inspiration between the Old and New Testaments necessarily leads us to accept the existence of two levels of meaning: the literal and the spiritual. The first of these is reached through recourse to exegetic technique in the true sense and the second through the gift of an identical experience to that of the Biblical hagiographer: eodem spiritu. Having been given “to us men and for our salvation”, Scripture in itself contains a utilitas (opheleia) which should reach the whole man and every man. Thus is established both a vertical comprehension of the text, formulated as an opening to the mysterium salutis, and a horizontal comprehension, linked to the progress of the historia salutis. As well as these, a determining factor is the christological principle: quid non est absumptum non est redemptum, which permits a connection between Scripture and the other two presences of the Word of God in history, identified with the actual person of Jesus of Nazareth and with the sacramentum of the Church. The author considers the exegetic journey of Origen to be fundamentally directed towards mystery. We are drawn towards him with a pedagogic attention to the capacities of each of us, in that essential commitment to the sequela Christi.

The present text seeks to go into the ecumenical dimension of theology, which ought to be present in all theological work, but which also centres very particularly on certain theological questions. ‘Ecumenical theology’ is thus presented as a means of reflecting theologically containing specific elements of a hermeneutic, methodological and spiritual order, though basically within a framework of systematic theology. The article begins with a brief analysis of forms of relating and of confessional discussion which preceded what we now know as ‘ecumenical theology’ – a diachronic, historical perspective, not forgetting its current relevance. It goes on to draw attention, secondly, to some of the principal features that, in terms of spiritual attitude, methodological choices and a hermeneutical perspective, characterise an ecumenical theology. There follows, as a third point, a specific reflection on ecumenical theology as a hermeneutic of unity in diversity. This hermeneutical task, which takes in not only texts, but a whole set of experiential elements of transmission and witness of faith, is characterised by two fundamental orientations: a hermeneutic of unity in search of the truth and a hermeneutic capable of comprehending and integrating difference. As a singular case of the concretisation of an ecumenical theology and, at the same time, as a place for the verification of its difficulties in methodological and hermeneutical terms, a fourth section tackles the task of the reception of the results of the theological dialogue. In this context, on the one hand, the importance of reception is underlined, alongside its conditions and demands, and, on the other, attention is drawn to certain priority tasks for theological reflection, with a view to the future. From this follows, by way of conclusion, an analysis of the core question of the objective of the unity to be created. Here emerges the urgency of clarifying in ecumenical dialogue the indeclinable demands of the unity to be created, which cannot occur without a deeper and more open consideration of the question of the presence of Christ’s Church in history.