Christian Languages and Cultural Communication

Abstract Michel de Certeau’s work questions the theological discipline surrounding language. Although Certeau does not directly elaborate a theory of theological language, his intellectual project addresses the approaching crisis of the Church in the post-Vatican II era as a symptom of the broader crisis of culture and institutions in the West. This implies an archaeology of the erosion of language and its yet-unexplored possibilities. This progressive awareness of the epistemological consequences of the 14th-century nominalist rupture involves the desontologized language (mainly, but not only, that of Tradition); a complex and fruitful analysis of modern mystical language (dialogical and relational), which continues to problematize the subsisting vestiges of clerical theological language (non-dialogical and patriarchal); and a theoretical and practical vindication of the ordinary language, which opens up enormous possibilities for a theology and spirituality capable of taking cultures and everyday life as the place where a believing subjectivity emerges in our contemporaries.