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This chapter explores changes in sacramental penance. It is shown that the form of confession prevalent today is a product of the High Middle Ages and the religious reforms of the Council of Trent. Modern devotion to the sacrament signaled by frequent reception is a relatively recent phenomenon that has varied greatly since the Council of Trent.

This chapter uses the rubric of ecological spiritualities to gather together proposals united by their appropriation of deification themes, where communion with creation becomes part of union with God. It argues that theological variety proliferates within a so-called “strategy of ecological spirituality”, but its approaches share a common practical rationale: each makes environmental issues matter for Christian experience by appealing to the ecological dimensions of fully Christian personhood. Underlying creation's integrity and faithful stewardship (the other two strategies), say theorists, there is a radical relation of personhood and environment. Environmental lament and redress begin from a primary spiritual communion of humanity and earth, assumed into personal experience with God. As they describe how grace can heal that communion, restoring ecological dimensions to personhood as humans become closer to God, approaches within this strategy draw on a background pattern of grace as deification. The strategy illuminates the way of the world into divine participation, as it describes the cosmic significance of personal communion. Used more and less intensively, the deification pattern shapes multiple theologies that deploy cosmology and anthropology to diagnose and practically address environmental issues.

In addition to laying out a general groundwork for the Catholic imagination as a critical lens—and suggesting a variety of ways that the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar aids critics in articulating such a theological vision—the chapter also attempts to locate the particular phenomena of postmodernism and deconstruction within the intersection of theology and narrative art. Balthasar anticipates the tendency of current critical theory to privilege and emphasize the amorphous breadth of both linguistic and cultural expression; and he anticipates the critical tension between those who read Catholicism as theological truth and those that might read Catholicism as a “fluctuating signifier,” as a cultural and/or literary text. Under this general theme, a dialog is opened with such diverse critics as William Lynch, Paul Giles, Michel De Certeau, and Jacques Derrida. Like them, Balthasar's theology plots a route for appreciating the aesthetic complexity and theological possibility of a broadly canvassed intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. However, Balthasar's program also defends the critical uniqueness of certain theological commitments (e.g., the transcendentals, the Incarnation, and the trinitarian structure of being) and looks to the arts to demonstrate the formal expression and aesthetic span of these phenomena. The chapter concludes with the proposition that it is the recognition of these essential questions that both challenge and aid the articulation of a Catholic imagination and that a turn to representative work in literature, poetry, and film will aid in such an articulation.

The chapter serves both as a brief biography of Balthasar and a protracted bibliography of his work. The consideration of Balthasar's monumental opus (The Glory of the Lord, Theo‐drama, and Theo‐logic) provides a critical “system” in which to read texts and begins to illustrate Balthasar's unique contribution to current discussions about the intersection between theology, history, philosophy, and narrative art. The chapter demonstrates that not only is Balthasar one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, but also his work has practical contributions to make to discourses in critical theory. Like critical theory, Balthasar's work is theological, literary, anthropological, philosophical, psychological, political, and historical, which are critical theory's main components. In the spirit of the ressourcement theology that shaped him, Balthasar is primarily interested in renewing attention to older sources in order to critique the idealistic excesses of modernity. In this sense, Balthasar reveals a postmodern temperament: he too is concerned with issues of language and difference, with aporia, with plurality, with surplus, and with horizons of meaning, to name a few. The difference between Balthasar and the majority of critical theorists resides in ontological and theological orientation: it is therefore a difference of imagination and of grammar. The chapter elaborates on these and other dynamic relationships.

If Jesus Christ has accomplished the good in our place and summons us to confirm it in our own conduct, it is clear that there is a place for human action in Barth's moral theology. But if the good is already accomplished, what significance can human action possibly have? This chapter examines the meaning, reality, and limitations of human action in Barth's moral theology in light of the central notion of Christ's accomplishment of the good in our place. His fundamental claim is that God's grace does not nullify human action or deprive it of significance but rather establishes it by empowering it to be, in its very creaturely nature, an analogy of grace.

The theology of holiness in the priestly literature is described in order to interpret the ordination to sacramental ritual as modeled by Moses. The research of J. Milgrom on holiness as a ritual resource will guide the study of Moses. The chapter includes an interpretation of the literary structure, the view of divine transcendence, and the way in which holiness invades the profane world through the sacramental fire of the glory of Yahweh in the priestly literature, as well as the influence of the priestly view of Moses in the New Testament literature.

This chapter analyses the sermon delivered by Gérard de Mailly. The underlying structure of the sermon can be expressed schematically as follows: heretics disapprove of marriage, but the Lord instituted it and strongly endorsed its goodness. There are four kinds of marriage: carnal, sacramental, spiritual, and eternal. This manuscript is a good illustration of the argument that mass production of sermons was possible thanks not only to professional scribes, but also to clerics writing to a professional standard but not for money. There are some small deviations from the standardized text which suggest that the scribe was engaging with the content rather than copying mechanically.

This chapter analyses the sermon delivered by Guibert de Tournai. One of the main points of the sermon is that ‘marriage is good, as the Lord demonstrated’. It talks about sacramental marriage, eternal marriage, bodily marriage, and spiritual marriage. The starting point is the invitation to the marriage feast of Cana. Guibert launches into a forceful summary of how the Lord honoured human marriage, instituting it at the beginning of the world in paradise and, in the New Testament, gracing a marriage by a miracle as well as his bodily presence. Guibert goes on to repeat the topos that the Lord knew that heretics would condemn marriage, and refuted them by attending the wedding at Cana.

Before turning to dogmatics in Göttingen, Barth delivered a number of academic lecture courses on Reformed theology, during which he sought to position himself as a Reformed theologian in relation to the three magisterial Protestant reformers: Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. This chapter shows how Barth's account of the Reformation is distinguished by its attempt to refer well-known differences between the Lutherans and Reformed, on issues concerning the Christian life, back to the Protestant controversies over sacramental theology. The early Protestant tradition is thus conceived by Barth as a long-standing and unresolved dialectical dispute over revelation itself, a focus which prevented its discussions of the other issues from becoming subjectivist.

The accession of James II gave Catholics a short-lived ascendancy, until the Glorious Revolution and the defeat of James's Irish supporters by William III. Immediately afterwards the Irish parliament, taking advantage of the war time crisis in government finances, staked its claim to a share in the liberties associated with the Revolution. It also used its new bargaining power to demand penal laws against Irish Catholics. Protestant dissenters had played their part in the Protestant victory, but their rising numbers, due to continued Scottish immigration, created fear within the Anglican ruling class, leading to the imposition of the sacramental test.

The Introduction opens with two vignettes about recent tornadoes that struck Indiana and Illinois. For some Christians, the doctrine predestination resembles the capricious wrath of a twister: God elects certain persons for salvation while visiting destruction upon others. for other Christians, predestination is the rock of certainty—a doctrine of assurance in an unpredictable world. while most Catholic and Protestant thinkers have equated outright denial of predestination with atheism, they have disagreed mightily over whether God elects persons arbitrarily or based on some foreseen condition of merit or faith. This debate is the main focus of the book, which argues that predestination is the unacknowledged source of much American denominational division. The book further argues that predestinarianism has tended to work against sacramental understandings of Christianity in which grace is conveyed continually through ritual. The Introduction presents these arguments and previews the content of the six main chapters and Epilogue.

Despite their longstanding mutual hostility, Catholics and Lutherans shared a history of internal strife over predestination and a robust sacramentalism that set them apart from other American Christians. In different ways, both of these immigrant groups domesticated the werewolf of predestination—Catholics by entrusting the fate of dead individuals partly to living family members, who sought the masses of the church and the intercession of local saints; Lutherans by reinterpreting their confessions to temper Luther's harshest predestinarian conclusions. This chapter examines the Catholic debate between Molinists and strict Thomists, and shows how purgatory and the sacramental system remained vital to Catholic predestinarianism. The chapter then turns to the Lutheran predestinarian controversy of the 1880s, which divided the “back‐to‐Luther” conservatives of the Missouri Synod from more liberal synods committed to a doctrine of election “in view of” faith. Finally, the chapter considers predestination's role in the 1999 Catholic‐Lutheran “Joint Declaration.”

The Epilogue explores the new frontier of American religion: the Protestant megachurch, pioneered by figures like California pastor Rick Warren. Because megachurches downplay doctrinal distinctions in order to reach the widest audience, they would seem to spell the demise of a dogma as technical as predestination. Yet though precisely delineated doctrines may be treated as outworn artifacts, a vaguer language of foreordination thrives in evangelicalism today. The bible of this perspective is Warren's Purpose‐Driven Life, which dances around predestination without actually using the word and which adopts as its premise that nothing in life (or death) is arbitrary. The Epilogue concludes with reflections on the loss of holy mysteries, whether sacramental or dogmatic, in the cultural progression from the Puritans to Warren. Many post‐denominational evangelicals, buoyed by the presumption that a simple resort to biblical “fact” dispels all ambiguities, purvey pat answers to predestinarian questions that once defined denominations.

This introductory chapter characterizes the nouvelle théologie leading up to Vatican II as a movement of ressourcement of the Tradition, interested in recovering a sacramental ontology that maintained the co-inherence of sign and reality. In connection with a number of different theological topics, the nouvelle theologians were interested in reaffirming historical realities of the created order as divinely ordained sacramental means leading to eternal mysteries. Thus, the movement's protest against the scholasticism of neo-Thomism did not signal a desire to replay the Modernist Crisis, but rather a desire to return to mystery. With Catholics and Protestants being common heirs to problems arising from the separation between nature and the supernatural, nouvelle théologie offers great potential for ecumenism. The chapter provides a historical overview of the various controversies surrounding nouvelle théologie and concludes with an outline of the remainder of the book.