21/05/2024 08:30
- 13:15
HALL: LA PIRA - ROOM 1
Proponent:
Ferracci L.
Chair:
Ferracci L.,
Van Erp S.
Speaker:
Aquino F.,
Battin S.,
Ciciliot V.,
Guardado L.,
Lado L.,
Martinez Cano S.,
Oeldemann J.,
Ryan F.,
Wong A.
Born with mainly liturgical and catechetical purposes, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed immediately showed a double capacity for adaptation: of a cultural kind, as a bridge towards the Arian populations, and of a linguistic kind. Translations of the Symbol begun as early as in the 4th century (produced in the Armenian, Syriac, and Coptic regions and, later, also in the Arab world) and the expansion of Christianity during the Modern Age has resulted in the production of translations into even more diverse languages, from Slavonic to the idioms spoken in each of the so-called "mission lands". Yet the historical and theological analysis of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was marked in the past century by two ideas: one was expressed by Harnack in his book "Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte", which considered the Creed the evidence of a mixture between Christian faith and Greek philosophy and urged the modern (Protestant) confessional historiography to uncover such a process in order to draw
into the essence of the Christian message; the other one, becoming e.g. visible during the late Sixties in J. Ratzinger's "Einführung in das Christentum", declares a perpetual and irrevocable right of the Greek philosophy on the Christian faith.
However, in the late 20th century the research on the Creed in the philological, historical, and theological fields challenged both these conceptual schemes. Papers offered in this panel will demonstrate how, despite any thesis tending (positively or negatively) to crystallize the Creed in rigid and perennial linguistic and theological formulas, the Symbol of Nicaea and Constantinople was in fact a dynamic expression of the Christian faith, charged with universal value but at the same time open to processes of enculturation.
In the roundtable that will close the conference, Prof. Fainche Ryan and Steven Battin will offer two short statements (10 minutes) on Ratzinger's position and how the emerging paradigm of "World Christianity" challenged the idea that Aristotelian categories are the only way to transmit and understand the Christian faith. We will then discuss whether in contrast to Ratzinger's theory about the Nicene Creed as the cornerstone of a process of Hellenization of Christianity which is binding for other cultures, it is possible to interpret the Symbol of Nicaea and Constantinople as a dynamic reality bearing universal and ecumenical significance for the contextualization of Christianity.
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