Ecumenical Theology: Manifestation and Proclamation

David Tracy

Professor of Theology

Divinity School

University of Chicago

My hypothesis in this lecture can be briefly stated: one task of contemporary ecumenical Christian theology is to allow a serious recognition of the intrinsic, irreversible religious complexity of the Christian envisionment of reality and the Christian mode of being-in-the-world. One way of expressing that complexity is to recognize Christianity as both manifestation and proclamation. Many theologians now admit that each systematic theologian needs to remain faithful to two realities: First, each theologian needs a grounding in, a rootedness in one classical church tradition both to focus one's perspective, and to allow for a realized experience of a truly classical heritage upon which all good systematic theology depends. Each theologian also needs a clear recognition that any particular tradition - of a church, a school, a spirituality - seems unable to articulate the full existential and intellectual reality disclosed by the Christian symbol-system. Each form of theology that genuinely lives ecumenically posits itself by implying its opposite; each lives by implying a recognition not only of its own strengths, but its very real limitations; not only of the weaknesses of alternative foundations, but of their strengths - strengths needed to challenge, correct, criticize, and sometimes even negate the temptations to idolatry masked as claims to wholeness in any particular Christian tradition.

Yet how are we to move in that direction? As theologians, we must, of course, continue the central ecumenical work represented by the various official and semi-official, the grass-roots and professional dialogues which remain one of the singular signs of hope in our disturbing age. As theologians, we must also continue to try to articulate a systematic theological language which may prove more faithful to the intrinsic complexity of Christian religious language and experience than earlier classical alternatives.

Yet despite this continuing and urgent need for more work on specific doctrinal differences within Christianity and proposals for a more adaquate second-order, conceptual language for Christian systematics, there also remains an earlier and relatively unresearched area of needed ecumenical reflection: the character not so much of Christian theological language but of those prior religious expressions - both linguistic and non-linguistic - by which all systematic theologies live. If we put all our efforts into the analysis of second-order, conceptual, theological language, we are likely to find ourselves with a real apprehension of the religious experience and expressions of our own particular tradition, but only a notional apprehension of alternative traditions. For these reasons, I want this evening to direct your attention away for the moment from strictly theological languages to two major forms of originating religious expression and experience present in the full reality of Christianity: each expression - manifestation and proclamation is necessary; each posits itself by implying its contrary. Yet only both together prove sufficient to express Christianity's actual religious reality. The first is named manifestation: a pre-linguistic power erupting from the reality of nature in time and space and disclosing the reality of the sacred and of nature. The second is named proclamation: a linguistic reality, a word of address from God to us; which word discloses the reality of ordinary time and history as religiously charged. In theology the same distinction is ordinarily formulated under the rubrics sacrament-word: of the emphasis upon 'sacrament' distinctive of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity and the emphasis upon 'word' distinctive of Protestant Christianity. In the wider context of the history of religions, the alternatives are variously formulated: most usually by the contrast between religions with a mystical - priestly - metaphysical - aesthetic emphasis and those religions with a prophetic - ethical - historical emphasis. In the Hebrew scriptures alone, for example, one finds genres expressive of each strain: the narrative discourse upon the founding events of Israel unites easily with prophetic and prescriptive discourse (both of which are ethically and historically oriented); the philosophical discourse of the wisdom literature unites easily with the aesthetic and mystical hymnic discourse of the Psalms. In terms of classical religious persons, the same kind of distinction holds: prophets, heroes and heroines on one side of the emphasis; priests, mystics, and sages on the other.

In any particular religion (here the major Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the clearest examples), interpreters still debate the dominant strain in the religion. Can anyone doubt that a major issue between Gershom Scholem and Manfred Vogel is the interpretation of the relative weight to be accorded the ethical-historical and the mystical trajectories in Judaism? Is not that same conflict of interpretation present in Christian self-understanding when one considers the ethical-political emphasis of a Reinhold Niebuhr in contrast to the metaphysical-mystical emphasis of a Paul Tillich; or the conflict between the ethical-political emphasis of John Baptist Metz and the metaphysical-mystical emphasis of Karl Rahner; the lived conflict in the Christian community between the styles of Christian living proposed by 'charismatic' Christians and those for whom social justice is the paradigmatic religious expression of Christianity? In Islam, the continuing debate over the relative importance of Sufism is striking for its revelation of the same conflict.

To Eastern religious eyes, it seems, the entire Western religious tradition seems so involved in the trajectory of ethics and history (with their emphasis upon 'the individual' and time) that its authentic 'religious' sense (i.e. its mystical or metaphysical meaning) is muted, even broken. Yet a study of any actual Western religion shows that this non-dialectical understanding of Western religion proves short-sighted. To many Western religious eyes, I suspect, the Eastern tradition seems so mystically and metaphysically oriented that one wonders, and, if tempted by Western arrogance, actually asserts that Eastern religion fails in ethical and political-historical and thereby religious responsibility. Yet a closer look at any Eastern religion soon dispels that non-dialectical understanding of their equally complex reality. That there remain major differences of content and emphasis (even of focal meaning) in the distinct religions is clear. That any major religion is really only mystical-metaphysical or only ethical-political seems an illusion of a partial vision of the complexity of the whole. One way of unraveling some of that complexity is to shift the analysis away momentarily from the Christian theological language of word - sacrament, or the history of religion's language of prophetic-mystical, or the philosophical language of ethical-aesthetic. Instead, let us analyze the pre-verbal and verbal expressions of both manifestation and proclamation in a particular religion. This new distinction does not claim to provide a radically new way of viewing the reality of a particular religious expression. Rather my choice of manifestation and proclamation among the various candidates is based on two factors: first, its very generality includes as the core of its proposal a distinction between pre-linguistic and linguistic expressions of religion and thereby frees us from our theological temptation with words alone; second, the distinction is a central one for understanding the complexity - even the conflicts - in that Christian self-understanding which is at the center of this lecture's attention. Such, at least, will be the main hypothesis for the present thought-experiment.

To test these proposals, let us first examine religious expression as manifestation. In the extraordinary and original work of Mircea Eliade one may see this understanding of religious expression as manifestation in its clearest and its most radical contemporary form. Indeed, in many ways, the very radicality of Eliade's understanding of religion is the result of the neglected (by Western interpreters) power of religion as manifestation articulated in Eliade's remarkable oeuvre of scholarship, philosophy, art, and religious passion. The first fact which strikes a Western Christian theologian about Eliade's proposal for understanding how religious expression occurs through hierophanies, theophanies, rituals, myths, symbols, is that here the linguistic, the word, does not play the dominant role. Rather the 'archaic' ontology at the core of Eliade's proposals becomes the focal meaning for understanding religion as an eruption of the sheer power of a real manifestation from the whole. The manifestation occurs, first, pre-verbally: in a space and a time separated from ordinary space and from historical time; the ordinary is now seen as the profane; the extraordinary - because of the power saturating the manifestation of this rock, this tree, this ritual, this cosmogomic myth - becomes the sacred time of origins, the sacred space of manifestation.

By entering the ritual, by retelling the myth, even by creatively interpreting the symbol, we escape from the 'nightmare' of history and even the 'terror' of ordinary time; we finally enter the true time of the repetition of the actions of the whole at origins of the cosmos. In illo tempore the power from the whole was first disclosed as a sacred manifestation: That power still discloses itself to those who will really participate in its real manifestations. Only by entering the separated and saturated realm of the sacred, can we impoverished and parochial Western moderns finally be freed from all the illusions of the profane from ordinary time and space, indeed from history itself. Only by entering into the originally non-linguistic manifestations of the power of the sacred can we really participate in, actually belong to, a realm on the other side of the ordinary; a realm which has manifested itself as sacred; which exposes the ordinary as profane we can experience this reality only by a willingness to enter into that purely given, that sheer event of manifestation. Here is a radical negation via religious manifestation with a vengeance; a real separation from the ordinary - the ethical and the historical - become the profane. Yet if that separation occurs, we can and we will - in the ritual, myth, symbol, the true time of the repetition of the archetypes, really find a new orientation in, a radical participation in and real belonging to what we have lost by our irreligious, even mad immersion in history and time. For the cosmos, the whole, is now really experienced in its full power as sacred. We find ourselves saturated with a power that is sheerly given - but only given in the manifestations, the hierophanies of the sacred. We become empowered beyond the good and evil of ethics; we realize that both history and time are 'terrors' that yield no final meaning; we desire no more ‘souvenirs’ from the ordinary. We recognize the truth of all truths that ‘only the paradigmatic is the real.’

We find the paradigmatic not in the nonsense of ordinary time, not even in the recovered time of Proust, but in the a-historical, a-temporal time of the great cosmic myths, rituals, symbols, and hierophanies of archaic humanity. In the true time of the sacred, we finally find ourselves with a language of all-inclusive correspondences between our now real because repetitive, actions in the rituals, myths, and symbols as they repeat the reality and power of the cosmos itself. The whole has manifested itself in the great hierophanies of all religions. We have lost their power through our betrayal of the sacred into the banalities become the terror of history. We find manifestation alive in the West, if at all, only in rural cultures; in urban settings, only in the vague remnants of the cosmic in the liturgies of an ethical and historically oriented Judaism and Christianity, only in the troubled dreams of our sleep, the disturbing underflow of our unconscious, the desperation of our fascination with astrology, science fiction, and the 'mysterious' East, the move by the most modernist secular art - Faulkner, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Picasso, Stravinsky - away from the banalities of history into a search via an art destructive of all traditional historical and ethical forms for some a-historical, a-temporal myth which will save us.

More than any contemporary Western thinker, Eliade has articulated - through his sheer scholarship, his ontology, his religious passion and his art - what the reality of a real participation in the whole as sacred might bet a participation familiar, in ordinarily more muted tones, to any genuinely and explicitly religious expression, including the Christian. His dialectic is a dialectic of the sacred and the separated profanes. It is a radical dialectic demanding our separation from profane reality, because of the powerful religious manifestation of the whole in the rituals, myths, symbols of the sacred. His doctrine of the coincidentia oppositorium, his insistence that all religious myths - even the eschatological ones of Judaism and Christianity - are finally cosmogonic myths of origins, his scathing judgments upon Western cultural 'parochialism' and Western madness in expecting ultimate meaning from time and history, his insistence upon our need for a genuinely global 'New Humanism', his belief that even Judaism and Christianity are not finally historical but anti-historical religions, his love for the early Renaissance search for a primordial revelation, his belief that Indian religious practices and philosophy best fulfills that search, his affinity for the Platonic doctrine of forms, become Eliade's own doctrine of the archetypes, his seldom explicit but real commitment to an Eastern Orthodox envisionment of the cosmic and ritualistic character of authentic Christianity. All these realities lead Eliade to posit on the other side of the religious person's separation from the profane, the presence and power of radical religious participation in the whole, the cosmos, the true time of the Archetypes, the models, the paradigms present in rituals, symbols, myths, of real religious participation, and in really creative interpretations of all religious expressions in honor of a New Religious humanism. Only then will we know that only the paradigmatic is the real.

No single Western thinker, I repeat, seems as able to disclose this radical sense of belonging-to, participating-in, - even being saturated by - the power of nature, of the cosmos, of the whole, as a sacred power as does Eliade. Few thinkers, moreover, seem as ready and as able to challenge our usual Western prejudices upon the centrality of ethics and history for religion - and even more radically, upon the centrality of word and time for ultimate religious meaning. From a Christian theological perspective, moreover, no contemporary thinker seems as able to challenge the usual Western Augustinian assumption as does Eliade with his extraordinary retrieval of the genius of Eastern Christianity: a theology oriented to and from not history and ethics, but nature and aesthetics; a style of religious practice oriented not so much by the word of scripture as by the manifestations of the sacred image, icon, ritual, and cosmogolical theologies; a way of being Christian that demands radical separation from the ordinary and real participation in the manifestations of the sacred. That any interpreter of Christianity could deny that this way of being religious - indeed, this way of being Christian -lacks the obedience of faith to the desacralization commanded by the ethical, prophetic, historical 'core' of Judaism on, Christianity is a point that makes sense, I suggest, only on the other side of a real recognition and acceptance on Christian grounds of that sense of real participation in the manifestations of nature which Eliade's work articulates with modern and classical force for both the secular and the Jewish and Christian West.

And yet another religious dialectic has occurred in the West which Eliade's emphasis upon manifestation alone seems to discount as paradigmatically religious: those religious expressions where a word of proclamation from God in an address to an ambiguous self occurs as the paradigmatic disclosure of religious reality. The first clue why the paradigmatic role of proclamation is not present in Eliade is his crucial emphasis upon that radical sense of participation which manifestation's dialectic of the sacred and the profane both discloses and elicits. And yet the very nature of Eliade's dialectic as a dialectic of the sacred and the profane suggest that the experience of the sacred, of a reality, a power saturated and belonging-to the whole, posits itself by implying its opposite. The essential feeling of dependance of the individual upon the whole already dialectically implies the same individual non-identity with the whole and thereby the presence of a real finite individual self. The self's memory of its actual 'profane' estrangement from the participatory power posits itself by implying that even the participation in the moment of saturation is a participation not merely of a finite but of an estranged individual self. The very radicality of the participation discloses our equally real non-participation in the whole.- our finitude and our estrangement - the emergent and uneasy conscience of the essentially good but existentially estranged, the participating/non participating, in a word the ambiguous self of that real individual so familiar to Western thinkers.

In the context of the dialectical recognition implied by Eliade's own dialectic of the sacred and the profane, therefore, a. word of proclamation may be addressed to this disclosed self. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, that word is a - finally, the ‑ paradigmatic event of disclosure and concealment from the whole. For the whole is now understood as a power via word as the transcendent, unnamable Other which has now disclosed itself as a who: The self of God, the radically monotheistic, the jealous and living God; the God who cannot be adequately named disclosing a future, eschatological time of promise which cannot be rendered adequately in any image. This God speaks a word of gifted proclamation of future promise and present command, whereby and wherein the whole discloses itself in a new manifestation as the mystery, the presence, and absence of a personal, gracious, acting, proclaiming revealed and hidden God. This God acts in the word-events of a now empowered and charged ordinary history and time. This God proclaims in word and deed the existence of a participating - non-participating, an ethically and politically responsible self: responsible to conscience and for others, responsible for this world and this history, responsible to the word and deed of this God; a self gifted, enabled, empowered and commanded yet finally incomprehensible to itself.

If that paradigmatic word of address does occur, then the existential complexity of the actual self as an ambiguous self, both participating and not participating in the reality of the whole now disclosed as the hidden and revealing God happens. That same self is caught up in the gift and command of a saturated, paradigmatic power of a word addressed from God. The self finds that the proper expression by the self and the covenanted people to that paradigmatic proclamation is the radical response of fervor and obedience named faith. Faith's primary expression will be a faith in the word addressed; a faith freed to express a liberated hope in a now empowered ordinary history and time; a self liberated to express itself in ethical and historical action; a self liberated to love the other, the ordinary and estranged self of the 'neighbor'. For the ordinary is now recognized - on the other side of the power of the extraordinary word of address from God to a covenanted people and a. responsible self - as extraordinary. Indeed the religious vision of the extraordinariness of the ordinary, for the Jew and Christian, at once dissolves the reality once named profane and liberates the religious significance of time and history, of ethics and individuality, of the saturated uncommonness of the common. This emphasis on the power of the proclaimed word will occasion expressions in words, in sentences, in texts, via different genres - narrative, prophecy, hymn, prescription, proverb, parable - expressions produced by the impulse to express what that paradigmatic proclamation means in history for the individual and communal conscience.

The limit-word of all these genres and all these words, as Exodus reminds us, prove to be an unnameable name for, the God who both discloses, and, in the very disclosure, also conceals the divine reality. The limit-image will be the non-imaginable but powerful presence of a future end-time, a utopia become, a religiously saturated eschaton. The memory of that finally unnameable but - through the proclaimed word - palpable power aid that finally unimaginable - but through the word of promise - real and empowering eschatological future will become an unnerving, a ‘dangerous’ memory. For the memory of that word will relativize all the claims of the present to completion, will remember all the suffering of the centuries as significant and literally unforgettable, will liberate all those who have felt the power of that unnameable name and that unimaginable future, and all who remember the words of gift, of promise, of command that have been spoken, the deeds that have occurred and been narrated; the suffering of the oppressed everywhere which that word discloses. In the light of the past and the future proclaimed in that word, one will now find a charged present of responsibility to the other now understood as the neighbor, to the extraordinariness of ordinary time and ordinary history, to a self whose ambiguity is intensified but whose responsibility in the clearing which that word makes present is religiously unmistakable. And these normative words - these scriptures - will themselves be continually reinterpreted, applied, and preached to aid the expression in deed of the freedom of the self; a freedom for the neighbor, for society, for history, for the future which that paradigmatic word gives as pure gift and real command by the very power of its originating proclamation.

Precisely in the power of the paradigmatic, the proclaimed word posits itself by implying its need for expression in word and deed. As expression the ordinary was formerly considered the profane and robbed of all ultimate significance. The ordinary, however, is now recognized in hearing that word as that realm of faithful action named the ‘secular’. All expression involves some distanciation: the expression of this religious paradigmatic experience of the proclaimed word demands some distancing from the original and compelling sense of saturated participation in the whole. Proclamation will, in short, demand the kind of distancing called that desacralization of the cosmic and nature religions familiar to the prophetic character of both Judaism and Christianity. For the very religious power of the proclaimed word - a word addressed by God to both a community and a self - demands that the major expression of one's religious experience now be found in one's fidelity through word and deed in this time and this history to the enabling command of the God who gives that word and to the future that word promises. In giving the address of command to the covenanted ones, God empowers the individual and the community to listen, to obey, to act, and thereby to express that word anew.

Yet we must also note, as Catholic and Orthodox Christianity have insisted, that the religious expressions of manifestation are not lost in the proclamation of the word. Without manifestation there is no place for the word to be heard and history is not merely distinguished from nature, but separated, indeed ruptured from its source. Nature and the entire religious, power of manifestation soon become the domain of conquest, of determination and eventually of manipulation by a proclamation of responsibility in history degenerating into a destruction of nature and manifestation. Yet just as surely manifestation no longer bears the dominant role, the focal meaning it once did. The language of radical participation in the religions of manifestation will now seem extravagant; the rejection of the ordinary as the separated profane, in the proclamation of the word that the ordinary is the extraordinary, will now itself be negated in favor of an empowered, paradigmatic eschatological personal and social ethics of the ‘secular’. All claims to radical participation will be disowned by this new religious hermeneutics of suspicion upon the nature religions. 'Idolatry' 'magic', 'superstition', and 'manipulation' and, finally, 'blasphemy' will become new religious words. The realities once dismissed as profane - time, history, even the individual as an individual - now become saturated with the genuinely religious meaning and truth paradigmatically proclaimed in the word's call to obedience, action, and freedom. The religious dialectic of the manifestation of the sacred and the profane becomes the new dialectic of the proclaimed word of faith and the secular. The secular now emerges not as the realm of the non-religious, but as the realm where the power of word itself must be constantly represented in new words and deeds for justice and radical neighbor love, in the light of the unimaginable but real future of the eschaton.

The religious affirmation of the secular in contemporary Jewish and Christian theology, therefore, is not properly understood as some collapse of Christianity and Judaism in the face of contemporary secularism. Rather a really secular Christianity and secular Judaism are, in fact, faithful to the paradigmatic eruption of a proclaimed and addressing word-event which founds these traditions and drives them on as their religious paradigmatic force. Some desacralization of the claims of participation via manifestation must occur. For the very proclamation is a proclamation whose power comes from a word which radically affirms time and history, which demands expression in and for ordinary history and time, and in the ethical conscience of an authentic individual. The very word of this proclamation frees Jews and Christians in and for the world.

When the paradigmatic religious power of that word has become a merely nostalgic echo, a presupposition that is no longer a cause, then it is the case that the danger of a merely secularist Judaism, a merely secularist Christianity, a really secularist culture will emerge. Yet the great religious movements of secular, not secularist Reform Judaism and Liberal Christianity have become classical religious events freeing the Jew and Christian for the world in fidelity to the proclaimed word heard in the scriptures. That same fidelity to that same word were responded to with clarity in our history by the classical religious event called the Reformation in its response to the graced freedom of the Christian before God's Word in Jesus Christ: a freedom which enabled and commanded all Christians to live in and for the 'world'. Where the paradigmatic power of that word saturates the religious consciousness with its power of a real negation of all over-claims to participation, all 'magic', 'superstition', 'legalism', and 'ritualism', it will burst upon any complacent resting in any religion of manifestation, any non-dialectical solace in a too-easy humanism or an impacted sacrality.

Where the dialectical affirmation of the secular still lives through and in the paradigmatic power of the word, then the reformation-transformation of the church in and sometimes by the world will continue: as in Schleiermacher's, or Harnack's, or Maurice's, or von Hugel's insistence that Liberal Christianity is impelled and enabled in its responsibility for and to the world not by the world itself but by the word affirming that world. The ordinary is now recognized through the word as extraordinary. The ordinary is affirmed not as profane. but as secular. The 'world', as in Lumen Gentium, is really affirmed but never canonized: the world's real ambiguity -its possibilities for real good and real evil - are recognized on now religious grounds.

Where that relationship between world and word is broken, where only the dim echoes of that paradigmatic proclamation are still heard, then Liberal Christianity loses its religious paradigmatic vitality. It loses its religious dialectic of the proclaimed word and the secular and becomes merely another decent ethical vision living in, by, and for a world which sets its agenda and scores its new, its decent, its ethical, but its finally too harmonious, non- dialectical symphony. And yet the fidelity of Liberal Christianity to the impetus of the proclaimed word to and for the world which their clear vision of the Christian paradigmatic proclamation discloses compels us to aid all authentic causes of personal wholeness and societal justice.

Indeed, the authentic righteousness of any one who has heard that word and lives that dialectic of faith and secularity produces those classical persons named reformers and prophets in each generation who will be heard because they have been addressed by that word. There are abundant resources in word itself, as Karl Barth or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Jurgen Moltmann remind us over and over, to keep that word-empowered righteousness from becoming the undialectical self-righteousness of those evangelical Christians who forget that we all live 'simul iustus, simul peccator', in and for the world, by the power of the sola gratia, sola fides of a Word disclosed and proclaimed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So charged with the paradigmatic power of that word can some Christians become, so afraid of any claim to radical participation, any language of ‘divinization’, any reality of eros, any religion of manifestation, even any ‘point of contact’ between the utterly transcendent hidden and revealed God who proclaims that liberating word and ourselves, that they like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and are tempted to remove all manifestation from this word-centered Christianity; all mysticism and all metaphysics, and, in a final, desperate stroke, all 'religion' from the, stark and obedient faith of a 'religionless' secular Christianity 'come of age' and living in and for the world.

With the same radicality as Eliade, a Barth or a Bonhoeffer will also insist: 'only, the paradigmatic is the real'. Yet this paradigm of the proclaimed word will drive its proponents through its dialectic in and for the world, in and for time and history, into a direct confrontation with the equally radical 'only' of the paradigm of manifestation. For manifestation discloses not an entry into the secular but an escape from the terror, the nightmare, the nihilism of both time and history and the individual. For the paradigm of manifestation, not the profane and certainly not an illusory secular will save us; only our entry into the religion of manifestation, the worlds of sacred space, the repetitions of time, can do that. Eliade's work may serve in the contemporary period as a candidate for a classical expression of the Christian religion as real manifestation with its dialectic of the sacred and the profane and its passionately religious sense of radical participation in the cosmos through myth, ritual, and symbol. So too Barth and Bonhoeffer, with their distinct and sometimes contradictory positions, represent two contemporary candidates for classical expressions of the Christian religion as proclaimed word with its dialectic of faith and the secular and its refusal of any claim to radical participation.

Yet must the dialectic of the proclaimed word - the dialectic of faith and the secular - lead us to the impasse, indeed the abyss, which Barth and Bonhoeffer disclose? What of all those Christians who cannot accept the crucial adverb 'only' either Eliade's insistence that only the paradigmatic manifestation is real or Barth and Bonhoeffer's equally radical, stance that only the proclaimed word is real? Those Christians like myself who are unable to accept that critical 'only', to be sure, may simply be persons who never have experienced the power and reality of any paradigmatic expression of religion whether in manifestation or proclamation. Then, in honesty or confusion, we will unwittingly reduce both 'religion' and 'faith' to ethics or aesthetics or metaphysics. Yet these same persons may know a truth with articulating with similar radicality; that Chrirtianity does not live by any only, but by an all Christianity lives in and by the paradigmatic power and reality of both real manifestation and real proclamation. The paradigmatic experience of manifestation in Christianity is present in the tradition from its origin to the present. It is, of course, true that all manifestations are, for the Christian, themselves transformed, but never eliminated, by the power of the proclaimed word. The dialectic of the Christian religion is one where the word does really negate any pretensions to any form of participation which approaches an identity, really an idolatry. Yet the same word presupposes, demands the power of manifestation by transforming the manifestations of nature through the power of proclamation into the reality . . . Christian `sacrament.’ Christianity forbids the expressed words even of the scriptures or the expressed actions even of the best ethical and political reflection to divorce themselves undialectically from the encompassing manifestations of God's power in nature; in and through a doctrine of creation transformed in the light 'of the doctrine of redemption; in and through a doctrine of incarnation understood only in the light of both cross and resurrection. Where any Christian proclaimed word loses its roots in real manifestation, I suggest it may continue to live by the power of the Word, yet it will live a partial life. To live by word alone means that one is always in danger of becoming either fanatical and self-righteous; or arid, cerebral, and abstract. Nor is this insight lost even upon the theologians of the word. What Karl Barth snatches away through his attacks on religion and mysticism, he gives back through his doctrine of creation. No Christian ethical reflection ungrounded in a Christian sense of the real manifestation of God in the cosmos can respond to Eliade's disturbing inquiry to all Westerners: does the Christian any longer really feel the world as God's creation?

Manifestation is always the constant presupposition of the emergence, even the eruption of the word of proclamation. The pre-linguistic always precedes and finally encompasses the linguistic. Manifestation encompasses every word from beginning to end, it allows itself to empower and to be transformed by the paradigmatic power of that word. Yet manifestation always returns, thus transformed, to reunite even the secular, the historical, the temporal, the self, with the whole disclosed in nature and the cosmos encompassing them all. A Christianity without a true sense of radical participation in the whole - that sense which Schliermacher named ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’, which some contemporary theologians name a fundamental trust in the very worthwhileness of existence - is a Christianity that has lost its roots in the human experience of God's manifesting and revealing presence in all creation, in body, in nature, in spirit, and in history. Both Judaism and Christianity are finally religions which include both a prophetic, ethical, historical focus and a mystical, metaphysical, aesthetic core. Why then, must every Christian theologian finally choose some only? Is there not a wisdom implicit in the very complexity of a symbol system which responds to the complexity of human experience itself embedded in health nature and history by including both manifestation and proclamation in the fundamental symbols of Christian faith? For the Christian, is not Jesus Christ both the decisive word and the irreversible manifestation of God and ourselves? The real journey of the Christian religion - in fidelity to its decisive, paradigmatic recognition of both God and humankind in Jesus Christ must allow for, even demand that both manifestation and proclamation prevail in a Christian as genuinely ecumenical consciousness. Christianity's necessary move into the secularity of time and history cannot be at the expense of nature; its fidelity to its own paradigmatic proclamation in word can only posit itself by implying and demanding an equal fidelity to the threatened reality of manifestation.

Even that profound Christian negation of the profane by the secular, of the past and present by the power of the promised future does not negate the sacred cosmos. Indeed, at every major moment in the trajectory of the proclamation of Christian faith the cosmos is decisively re-presented under and with the liberating and paradigmatic power of a decisive word which is itself also a manifestation. The major illustration of this in Christian history is, as suggested above, the intrinsically sacramental character of Christianity. In its clearest Christian expression, the sacramental vision of Catholic Christianity, both nature and history', become sacrament by their transformation by, the word - the ‘prime sacrament;’ the decisive manifestation or representation named Jesus Christ. Here surely there is no negation of the cosmic or of nature; indeed a sacrament is, for Catholic Christianity, a decisive representation of both the events of proclaimed history and the manifestations of the sacred cosmos. In baptism, the water represents not only the Christian's dying to self and rising in Christ Jesus, not only the Christian's entry into the Exodus events which constitute God's history, but also our and history itself’s entry into the purifying waters of chaos - the chaos where all form disappears; yet the chaos which gives life and allows cosmos. Where the former, kerygmatic power of the word in the sacraments is lost, the distinctively Christian paradigmatic power of proclamation is soon spent.

Yet the opposite danger is equally debilitating to Christianity: if the cosmic and symbolic reality disappears, if the paradigmatic power of real manifestation in nature is allowed to quietly slip away under the transforming blows of the paradigmatic power of the proclaimed word, then the deepest needs of our hearts and imagination are themselves discarded and Christianity soon rips up its roots in the cosmos and retreats into the abstract rigorism of duty and obligation in an a-natural history. We are in nature; we are embodied. However ethical our conscience, however committed to time and history our spirits, we rob ourselves and history of their very roots and rip ourselves from our only firm ground when we dare to strip Christianity of its power of religious manifestation. It has always puzzled me, I confess, to read some Protestant commentators on Catholic Christianity who announce with sadness, to be sure, that Catholicism, although genuinely Christian, remains also partly 'pagan'. Surely, it seems to me, the so-called 'pagan' Catholic insight is a recognition of the need and the reality of manifestation in Christianity, Indeed this 'pagan' character of Christianity itself is, I believe, Catholicism's great and hidden Christian strength. For what a Christian fidelity to manifestation means is that the religious experience of the Christian, transformed through the proclaimed word, really transforms but never destroys its roots, its grounds, and its encompassment in the reality of the manifestation of the sacred myths. Manifestation alone maintains our Christian sense of that real participation in that real correspondence with the cosmos expressed in the great rituals, symbols, and myths of our 'pagan' - and our Jewish and Christian - ancestors.

Nor need we appeal only to the reality of sacrament in Christian life to see the importance of manifestation for the Christian religion. The proclaimed word which grounds and transforms all the Christian sacraments, is itself expressed in the scriptures, in a transformative, not purely negative relationship to nature. The narratives of the Exodus resonate not only to realities of the covenant but also to the drama of a sacred universe where victory occurs even over the powers of chaos. The proverbs do not speak simply to the mind and will, but to the heart and the imagination as great rituals of initiation where 'narrow is the gate and straight the path'. The parables resonate through their use of ordinary characters - sheperds, herdsmen, farmers - to the great symbolic cycle of nature itself. The resurrection, incarnation, and cross are symbols really disclosing God's acts not only in time and in history but in the cosmos itself - as the exemplary New Testament

accounts of the 'transfiguration' proclaim with clarity.

It is not my intent to mitigate the profound iconoclasm of Judaism and Christianity upon the claims of participation disclosed in cosmic religions. Yet Chr1,1:tians do-need to see again that in Christianity we do find, not merely words and historical action, not even merely The Word, but word rooted in, transformative of, and finally encompassed by the manifestations of the sacred in the cosmos. The 'profane' may be no more; the secular has been disclosed by the word as religiously significant; a real desacralization has occurred and will continue to occur under the religious cry of idolatry; yet the sacred cosmos and its manifestation yet lives and still envelops us. To restore the power of manifestation to the Christian religion - on the other side of and through the paradigmatic power of a proclaimed word - is a struggle which probably only a seriously, indeed radically ecumenical, Christianity will allow. Alone, Protestant, Orthodox, or Catholic Christianity seem trapped in historically hardened emphases upon some form of either manifestation or proclamation: unable to restore the power of both proclamation and manifestation in a manner which is not some uneasy compromise. Yet there is neither place nor need for compromise on fundamental religious needs and basic paradigms of what Christianity is and discloses. Finally we all confess that we must all turn to be judged by the incarnation, cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the decisive representation in both word and manifestation of God and humanity. Only in its light can we all say and mean the full reality of the Christian affirmation that in Jesus Christ, true word and decisive manifestation, we know that 'the paradigmatic is the real'.

David Tracy