The Social Good of a Sacramental Ecclesiology: De Lubac, Liberation Theology, and Progress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Joseph Flipper has recently charged Henri de Lubac with a failure to extend notions of sacramental significance beyond the liturgical fellowship of the Church. This apparent restriction is displayed most prominently in de Lubac’s reservations about liberation theology and programs of “progress.” This article examines de Lubac’s criticisms of – and convergences with – liberation theology, with a focus on the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, who admits the influence of de Lubac on his own thought and offers a somewhat different version of a sacramental ecclesiology. I show that considering the socio-political and post-conciliar context of de Lubac’s work can inform a proper understanding such differences and convergences. While de Lubac certainly maintains an ecclesial center in his political theology, he is clearly concerned about the pursuit of the social good beyond the Church. I conclude that the inconsistency perceived by Flipper is mitigated by these considerations, and by reading de Lubac’s later comments on progress and liberation in the light of his earlier efforts in resisting anti-Semitism and racist nationalism
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".