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In an essay on Barth\u2019s sacramental theology (in the Cambridge Companion to Barth <\/i> ), James J. Buckley summarizes Barth\u2019s early views on ecclesiology in the modern age as follows: \u201cModern man \u201c\u2018nationalizes\u2019 the Church and the Church allows this nationalization,\u2019 elevating \u2018the idea of the relativity of all confessions to the status of a universally valid truth with the full weight of political power\u2019 long before theologians thought to do so. Modernity, from this point of view, is the birth of the question of what the normative human community and its rituals are ?Eor (in other words) of \u2018ecclesiology\u2019 as the study of normative HUMAN community, of \u2018Church sacramentology\u2019 as the study of normative HUMAN rituals and symbols.\u201d Buckley later elaborates the point: \u201cthe topic of \u2018Church and sacraments\u2019 became a separate topic in modernity precisely as the world turned from this church and its sacraments; church and sacraments acquired, we might say, a new visibility for some precisely when they became invisible to most . . . . at least early in his life, Barth read modern theology as a futile effort to conceive church and sacraments as primarily HUMAN community and rituals. On a practical leve, this meant that the nation-state (THE modern visible community) subsumed the church, while spirituality became the central outward sign signalling and, for all practical purposes, causing grace. On a theoretical level, ecclesiology and sacramentology, we might say, become subdivisions of sociology and ritual studies.\u201d Precisely so. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In an essay on Barth\u2019s sacramental theology (in the Cambridge Companion to Barth ), James J. Buckley summarizes Barth\u2019s early views on ecclesiology in the modern age as follows: \u201cModern man \u201c\u2018nationalizes\u2019 the Church and the Church allows this nationalization,\u2019 elevating \u2018the idea of the relativity of all confessions to the status of a universally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology-ecclesiology"],"yoast_head":"\n