Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
November 25, 2017
This third type of preaching—the grateful account of God’s saving deed in the midst of the assembly of the saints—is, from a New Testament perspective, especially important, inasmuch as the early Church from the very beginning identified with Jesus Christ and was partially defined by the cry of the dying Redeemer from the Cross, by the suffering just man of the psalms, who is called into life only by passing through death and in just this way testifies to the divine power.
not just the already existing ecclesia (which basically has always been presupposed) of the already constituted people Israel has to listen, but all mankind is to be called to that ecclesia,
The Word is constantly there in order to call people together to himself and thereby to make them into the Ecclesia.
On the one hand, there must be the interior self-fulfillment of the faith, in which it is perpetually received anew and at the same time becomes richer in a history of growth and life. On the other hand,
there must be a constant surpassing of the closed circle and a proclamation of the faith to a new world, in which it must make itself comprehensible once again, so as to bring in people who are still foreign to it.
For by its very nature, this faith is a process of gathering. To accept it means to allow oneself to be gathered in.
Faith means emerging from the isolation of one’s own existence and becoming “one body” with Christ, that is, an existential unity with him.
To construe Bible merely as something opposed to Church is ultimately a fiction:
Making what is diachronic synchronic, making what is perpetual and perpetually growing contemporary and, thus, at the same time opening the Now up critically to the Eternal, to the Truth—that would then be the real meaning of the ecclesial character of preaching.
It is the most decided protest against absolutizing the present moment.
