Honest Rituals, Honest Sacraments: Letting Go of Doctrines and Celebrating What's Real - Softcover

Martos, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1532640455 ISBN 13: 9781532640452

Publisher: Resource Publications, 2017

Synopsis

Honest rituals are ceremonial actions that celebrate what is actually happening in people's lives. Religious rituals, however, often celebrate beliefs and doctrines (e.g., the birth of Christ, God's forgiveness of sins, or the gifts of the Holy Spirit) that have little to do with people's experience. Martos argues that early Christian rituals were grounded in experiences such as conversion, community, commitment, and self-giving. Lacking a vocabulary to name such experiences, the authors of the New Testament and other early documents resorted to metaphors such as baptism into Christ, receiving the Holy Spirit, forgiveness by God, and the presence of Christ during worship. By the fourth century, however, those metaphors were taken to be unexperienced metaphysical realities rather than experienced realities. The medieval schoolmen developed philosophical explanations of what went on in church rituals, and the Catholic Church continues to teach that its sacraments are automatically effective despite growing evidence to the contrary. What if religious rituals were to regain their original authenticity? What if the guiding value in designing church ceremonies was honesty rather than liturgical correctness? After liberating the reader from doctrinal constraints, Martos invites Catholics into a re-visioning of the traditional sacraments and a reawakening of ritual imagination in non-Western cultures.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Martos is a retired professor of philosophy and theology who has been a visiting professor or guest lecturer at more than two dozen universities and seminaries during his lengthy career. He is the author of Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (1981, 1991, 2001, 2014) and The Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study (2009).

Edition details

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1532640455
• ISBN 13: 9781532640452
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176