"There is nothing in the New Testament understanding of our imaging of God which could justify the monadism we find in the notion of the imago Dei as the contemplative imaging of a monadic absolute, the Deus Unus. This notion of the imaging of God by man ... [is r]adically nonhistorical and Middle Platonic in its origins, [and] is saved for theological purposes only by the recognition, in Origen as in those who follow him, that the human imaging of God is fulfilled only in worship, although since Origen the worship has been conceived largely as contemplative, not as sacramental and historical."
-- Keefe, CT, v. 1, p. 356, n. 13
In non-Keefian terms, this passage demolishes the notion of someone being "spiritual but not religious," because literally every-thing in the world is rooted in the Eucharist; and because the Eucharist, in turn, is irreducibly sacramental (i.e., historical), everything in the Catholic life is irreducibly sacramental. This is why we must not trifle with liturgical worship but must see it as one of the primary ways that we "image" God.
Keefe was not a "traditionalist" but he does at times countersignal the cosmological flabbiness of what Vatican II officially taught, and gives no quarter to the immanentist excesses to which that Council's contested claims exploited.
Suffice to say that the obscurity, if not outright ignominy, of Keefe's genius is itself yet another argument against what post-Conciliar Catholicism has become.
Keefe was not a "traditionalist" but he does at times countersignal the cosmological flabbiness of what Vatican II officially taught, and gives no quarter to the immanentist excesses to which that Council's contested claims exploited.
Suffice to say that the obscurity, if not outright ignominy, of Keefe's genius is itself yet another argument against what post-Conciliar Catholicism has become.
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