Das Evangelium im postchristlichen Europa verkünden

Abstract

Summary As a result of the process of secularisation, Christians in Europe are increasingly becoming a minority. Therefore, European churches are challenged to develop appropriate innovative models of contextualisation for the gospel instead of swerving into nostalgic retrospection or uncritically adopting theological approaches from other continents. This article presents the contextual pole of such a model, which consists of three areas: aesthetics, ethics and ecclesiology; they match people's aesthetic and ethical needs, and their desire for truth, manifested in the search for the legitimacy of one's actions in a group. Each area is assigned an adequate theological source that enables contextual correlation: aesthetics, the ambiguous imagery from Revelation; ethics, the theology of mission of the First Letter of Peter; and ecclesiology, the call to the disciples in Matthew 5 to ‘be salt and light’. This ideal-typical model perceives the increasing aestheticisation of society as a dominant cultural feature and uses it as a starting point for a process of contextualisation. The context pole is determined by the anthropological dynamic which leads from the ‘beautiful’ to the ‘good’ and from the ‘good’ to the ‘true.