The Sacrament and the Secular: The Sociopolitical Significance of Henri de Lubac's Sacramental Ecclesiology in a Post-Christian World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis will argue that the political theology that emerges from de Lubac’s thought has the church as sacrament at the center because the salvation that is integral to human flourishing is social, supernatural, and mediated. The attendant sociopolitical vision can be summarized as an “ecclesial humanism.” One of de Lubac’s key contributions to modern theology, alongside his supernatural thesis, was his retrieval of the sacramental understanding of the church. This was part of his sustained effort to properly reunite various realities which had been separated in modernity. Working from within “secular” France, he labored to reconnect Christianity and society in the modern world. The image of sacrament for the church functions to foreground three essential aspects of salvation: salvation, according to de Lubac, is social, supernatural, and mediated. Together, these three aspects constitute the church as the indispensable social embodiment of transcendent realities for which humanity ineradicably longs but cannot obtain by its own resources. If any of these three aspects of salvation which are enshrined in the sacramentality of the church are neglected, the church will misunderstand its role in the world and societies will organize in inhuman ways. These three themes correspond to the three main genealogies which de Lubac provides to narrate the emergence of modern secularism. While de Lubac’s political theology is consistent with regard to these aspects, he emphasizes different ones at respective junctures relative to the varying threats posed to properly understanding the church’s relation to the world. In the two broad periods, the theme of the relationship between nature and grace—which this thesis summarizes as the supernatural aspect of salvation—is a central hinge on which the other themes—salvation as social and mediated —hang. The value of this argument for de Lubac scholarship will be that it displays the coherence between his earlier efforts to reintegrate the church with the world and his later concerns about doing so in the wrong way. The focus on the church as sacrament supplies a certain concreteness that can help resolve ongoing debates in political theology about the implications of his supernatural thesis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".