Summaries
Jean-Michel Maldamé - How can the Ascension of Christ be a foundation for universal salvation?
The mystery of Ascension gives us food for thought about a visible transformation of the humanity of Jesus, which is not an escape out of this world, but the accomplishment of flesh. This prospect, which proposes a cosmic dimension to salvation, can be linked to the current changes in the scientific view of the world, in which there seems to be an interdependence between man and a historical, factual universe, of which he is a microcosm. In the eyes of faith, in the context of the other events in the history of salvation, the Ascension states a new way of being of the cosmos, a transformation of the earth into a celestial state, which brings to completion both the work of "giving birth" to the Creation and the eschatological movement inaugurated by Incarnation.
Dominique Lambert - Georges Lemaître and the problem of creation
Georges Lemaître, the "initiator" of the Big Bang theory, had not deduced from it a sort of "scientific proof" of creation. Confronting modern cosmology with the Catholic theology of creation, he had already looked into the hypothesis of a universe which would have a theoretically infinite past, like the one proposed today by several new models of initial singularity. These new approaches revive in particular the old debate on the distinction between creation and beginning (St Thomas) and the more recent debate on the relationship between time and eternity (Prigogine, Hawking).
François Euvé - Inventing the world. Towards a play-based theology of creation?
Formulating a theology of creation today requires asking the question of the relationship with nature sciences. The fascination exerted by the different views of the world, whether they belong to the determinist-mechanical model, as in the past, or to the "chaos" model, as is more often the case today, is an obstacle for perceiving the singularity of the biblical message. It is better to focus on the research approach. The plurality of the modes of description can mirror the plurality of the images of God within a theology of creation. The notion of play, provided it is not too quickly identified with "Dionysian" spontaneity, can help reflecting on the relationship between the two areas by opening up a space for inventiveness.
Emmanuel Gabellieri - The « Theodramatics » of S. Weil
Isn't there a connection between the "beauty of the world" celebrated by the Greeks and a determinist view of the cosmos, which is necessarily incompatible with the biblical theme of creation structured by freedom and historicity? If the thought of S. Weil seems to ignore this dilemma, it is because her thought on creation as a "withdrawal" of God and a "kenosis" of the Son, has led her to the idea of a divine drama in which the play of cosmic "necessity" is linked to the Trinitarian play of divine love and human freedom. This vision, which grants a greater status to the notions of event and historicity than might have been expected, has resulted, however, in rejecting the evolutionist schemata of modernity as well as the relativist and indeterminist views which had started to conflict with them.
Jean-Marie Breuvart - Whitehead or the divine play on novel possibilities
The purpose of this article is to outline the major principles of Whiteheadian cosmology, which can be reduced to three main ones:
- founding subjective activity on "eternal objects", the relationality of which makes "actual occasions" possible;
- the creation of subjectivity on the basis of these objects being embedded in the effectiveness of a particular experience;
- setting the creation within a "harmonic" type of metaphysics which is actually quite close to that of Leibniz.
A few consequences are then drawn from it about the "divine play on novel possibilities" in the cosmology of the author of Process and Reality.