Article Title, Author, and Abstract for Theology Today April 2010 (67.1)
Missional Church, Missional Liturgy
RUTH A. MEYERS
Abstract: For the past half century, missiologists and theologians have given new attention to mission as a matter of Christian identity, grounded in the missio Dei, the “mission of God.” The term “missional” is used increasingly to express this notion of the church’s participation in God’s mission. This essay explores this approach to mission and considers how liturgy can be a locus of the missio Dei. Missional liturgy is not a matter of particular techniques but an approach to liturgy in which the worshiping assembly enacts and signifies God’s love for the world. The root meaning of “liturgy” as “public service” supports this understanding of liturgy as the church’s offering on behalf of the world.
Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart and the “Sunday-Monday Gap”
TRAVIS TUCKER
Abstract: This article describes Søren Kierkegaard’s early attempts to address the “Sunday-Monday gap.” Kierkegaard takes a bifurcated approach. First, through the voice of a pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard describes the problem and its causes. In Purity of Heart, Kierkegaard uses his own voice to offer a solution to the gap—the adoption of a confessional perspective. Through a daily envisioning of oneself confessing before God, Kierkegaard believes that not only will the Sunday-Monday gap be overcome but also that several beneficial personality traits will grow.
The Lord’s Supper and the Church’s Public Witness
J. TODD BILLINGS
Abstract: The Lord’s Supper, as a God-given means of grace, has implications for the church’s public witness. Rather than separate bodies from souls, and the secular from the sacred, the Supper holds together union with the heavenly Christ and communion with earthly bodies. Moreover, while union with Christ at the Supper is God’s gift, this gift exposes the sinful inadequacy of the church’s witness. In the eschatological tension between present gift and future promise, the Supper enacts the church’s identity as a people empowered to live into God’s promise in its public life, while avoiding both triumphalism and mere capitulation to social-political trends.
Kierkegaard’s Eucharistic Spirituality
OLLI-PEKKA VAINIO
Abstract: Some years before his death Søren Kierkegaard wrote a number of theological treatises on Holy Communion. In these texts he presented a view of the Eucharist that joins his existentialist emphasis with classical Christian doctrines in a way that provides fresh insight into this Christian sacrament. In Communion, the paradox of eternity-in-time is embodied in bread and wine through which communicants are made one with God-in-time. Kierkegaard seemed to understand Communion as a cure for the existential angst of the individual communicant, but this cure always remains an absurdity to outside observers.