Eucharist: Actualizing the sacramentality of the world. Reassessing sanctification in the Second Vatican Council, the writings of John Henry Newman and Karl Rahner.

摘要

This study examines the positive evaluation of the relationships between the Church, Eucharist, and world in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and the writings of John Henry Newman and Karl Rahner, while also noting the ambiguity of human freedom that each acknowledges. The laying out of these positive relationships enables a constructive theological synthesis of the process of sanctification that each of the preceding perspectives suggests and affirms. To that end, the present study draws upon Vatican 11, Newman, and Rahner's understandings of sanctification to construct a theology of "sanctification as actualization," which presupposes the fundamental gracedness of the world. This theology of sanctification, first, suggests that the Eucharistic celebration is efficacious to the extent that it is able to continually actualize an embodied experience of loving communion with God among persons, and, second, understands places of human weakness as the most effective vehicles of God's self-giving in Christ, which provide the means for actualizing, within individuals, the Christian assembly, and the world, a more explicit desire for and realization of communion with God and all persons.