THE RUINS OF DISCONTINUITY

The book was intended as an implicit challenge to certain forms of liberal Protestant theology that, uprooted from any ecclesial setting and accountability, rapidly had come to endorse a historicist relativism and subjectivism and eventually ended up embracing and celebrating individual arbitration in all matters of faith and morals. To me this conclusion felt like a new discovery, but of course I had only reproduced, in an "evangelical catholic" key, what then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger already had argued in his small but important book The Nature and Mission of Theology (1995): that theology is essentially ecclesial, and theologians have an essentially ecclesial vocation. [...] with a firm sense that becoming a Catholic theologian required me to enter into a specifically Church-oriented tradition of intellectual and spiritual formation, I gladly became, once again, a student of theology, this time Catholic instead of Lutheran.

Duke Scholars

Author Reinhard Hütter Divinity School