Emerging Africa

I am pleased to see that you are so interested in the emerging church movement in Africa.

Since you have expressed such an interest, I'm sure the members of this community will send you lots of interesting information about the emerging church, theology and so on to your e-mail address at

michaeljohn225@gmail.com

The following is just a start of the exciting theological literature you will receive.

The uniqueness of secularism, its difference from the great heresies of the patristic age, is that the latter were provoked by the encounter of Christianity with Hellenism, whereas the former is the result of a "breakdown" within Christianity itself, of its own deep metamorphosis... At the end of the twelfth century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements is "mystical" or "symbolic," it is not real. The Lateran Council which condemned him - and here is for me the crux of the matter - simply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christ's presence in theEucharist is real, it is not "mystical." What is decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice, the acceptance, on both sides, that they are mutually exclusive. Western theology thus declared that that which is "mystical" or "symbolic" is not real, whereas that whichis "real" is not symbolic. This was, in fact, the collapse of the fundamental Christian mysterion, the antinomical "holding together" of the reality of the symbol, and of the symbolism of reality. It was the collapse of the fundamental Christian understanding of creation in terms of its fundamental sacramentality. And since then, Christian thought, in Scholasticism and beyond it, never ceased to oppose these terms, to reject, implicitly or explicitly, the "symbolic realism" and the "realistic symbolism" of the Christian world view,
Source: Schmemann 1988:128

I hope you will play your full part in contributing to the edification of our brother who has expressed such keen interest in the cause.