Kerk en Theologie - Current Issue

This response to the statement ‘Tot heil van heel de werkelijkheid’ questions the use of ‘sacramentality’ as key and criterium for the ecclesiology. It presents Healy's analysis of modern ecclesiology as an alternative approach, raising three questions: Firstly, can the sacramental concept really function as a heuristic model to better understand the theological meaning of the church, or is the concept too slippery for that? Secondly, to what extent are the contextual considerations of ‘Tot heil van heel de werkelijkheid’ explicit enough? What kind of ‘diagnosis’ is being made of today's church, and does this contribution provide a resolution to that? Thirdly, wouldn’t theology today do well to distinguish more explicitly the church here on earth and the triumphant church in heaven? The church on earth has not yet reached her goal: She is a pilgrim here on earth, in via, and needs to get her feet dirty. For an ecclesiology to be helpful in that journey, it must not start too abstractly but, above all, think through the concrete reality.

In response to ‘Tot heil van heel de werkelijkheid’, this article argues that the concepts of church and sacrament need to be considered more pneumatologically and eschatologically. Not only the concept of church ought to be understood in the sense that church is always ‘in the process of becoming’; the sacrament must also be understood in non-static event-like terms. The biblical concept from which the word ‘sacrament’ is derived, μυστήριον, is also a concept that underlines the dynamic (pneumatological, eschatological) character of the concept of church. With a reference to the ecclesiology of the young Bonhoeffer, this article also argues that a more dynamic concept of church creates space to fully appreciate the not so sacred elements in the existence of the church. In this dynamic existence, the church needs to receive the sacraments to strengthen faith; it is not itself a sacrament.