English Summary:

The question of justification, may be because of its very nature, has been the common question of both Christian faith and theological endeavor. However, this interest is due more to the fact that through this teaching the Christian individual and the Christian community find their place not only in the church but in the world as well, which often rejects theological reflections pertaining to its life. The near future and even the present time serve a great amount of such examples. For this reason this condition poses a serious question to theological thinking. From what source can theological thinking and the church offer a point of orientation to participating in the life of the public? The need for this theological reflection is even more emphasized by the fact that there are some who are eager to replace the idea of modernity with the idea of postmodernity. In Central-Eastern Europe these two factors strengthen each other. This fact makes even more important such theological reflection. The aim of our work was to spread light on how the doctrine of justification and the idea of postmodernity as it is increasingly influential in our thinking, can be brought into conversation. It is of special importance pertaining to the fact that it is more and more difficult to articulate our Christian voice in the public arena. Theological argumentations are often treated suspicious. This state becomes even more complicated when it is deepened by the argument that stresses the skepticism about participating in forming the life of the public. This way human life is simplified, so that the human being is not able to find his/her place in relation to the larger context. Thus the human being is overwhelmed by unanswered questions. All this results in a quest for anew orientation center. This is a vivid characteristic of present Central-Eastern Europe, and evidently means two things: first, a critical task for Christian theology as it is compelled to find new ways in dealing with challenges through the rediscovery of tradition; second, Christian theology from its own source should constructively be present in forming the life of the public, which is also a critical task. The purpose of all this is to present that theological thinking has relevance in forming the life of the public. However, the question may arise: why do we take just the doctrine of justification from the wide Christian tradition? On the one hand, it is because the doctrine of justification is the central element of Christian thinking. This centrality is present in the joint Roman Catholic – Lutheran declaration on justification in 1999. On the other hand, this doctrine presents such a metanarrative, which means the basis for understanding the human reality, and thus a possible way of evaluating the idea of postmodernity. In order to reach our aim we decided to approach our theme from a special perspective, which helped us to observe those insights that helped us in initiating a dialogue between the doctrine of justification and postmodernity. Our first question was to answer: whether there was any relevance to talk about postmodernity and its influence in Hungary? The answer to this question was yes, besides being aware of the different opinions. Some advocate that it is not postmodernity but post-communism that means a more serious concern. The local theological thinking also started in the near past to formulate its opinion regarding postmodernity. It is also convinced that the influence of postmodernity could be experienced in many fields of life. Thus we come to the conclusion that the idea of postmodernity is increasingly influential in Central-Eastern Europe. The next step was to work with the history and the idea of postmodernity. Some believe that it is already at the end of the 19th century that reference to postmodernity can be identified. However, the phenomenon itself is very young, since the definition itself appeared in a literature-critical context. The only possible way to understand it is if we compare it with modernity. For this reason, we go back to Hegel and Kant. In relation to Christianity we refer to the possible connection between the birth of postmodernity and the loss of influence of the providential thinking. The most influential articulation of the idea of postmodernity is in Lyotard’s book, titled The postmodern condition. His basic assumption is that the time of metanarratives is gone. This means that it is not possible any more to attain knowledge about the world based on such narratives. Habermas questions this by saying that postmodernity is not arrived yet. For him there is a narrative in which the autonomous individual and the social content of the community have a meeting point. Thus metanarratives do have role in evaluating the human reality. We introduce feminism as one, who is a vivid example of rejecting metanarratives. Feminist thinkers believe that metanarratives are to legitimate power dominance. However, in our endeavor it turns out that feminism with its claim is much closer to modernity than it would think. As one step further in our endeavor, we introduce postmodern theology. We observe that its appearance coincides with that of postmodernity. We also observe that in postmodern theology there are two main streams: deconstruction and process. Special attention is paid to David Tracy, Mark C. Taylor, John B. Cobb whose work leads us to think of the practical implications of postmodern theology. J. B. Cobb is convinced that we should talk about Christianity as a ‘sociohistorical movement’ in which the Christ-event is placed in the center. Having dealt with postmodernity, we turn our attention to the doctrine of justification from a special perspective as we are looking for those significant traces that underline the narrative and relational characters of this doctrine. The starting point in this is the biblical witness, which strengthens the idea that the doctrine of justification describes a relational setting. It is even more emphasized in the Gospels. Thus we see that a justified human life is full of social relations. This character is further stressed in the historical revisiting of the doctrine. At the end of our rethinking of the doctrine of justification we come to the conclusion that: it stresses a radical Christ-centeredness and turns from anthropocentric thinking to theocentric thinking; as a relational scheme it rejects every total human claim over other human life. This is its anti-totalitarian character; in its relational scheme the emphasis is on the person instead of the individual. At the end, we brought the doctrine of justification and postmodernity into dialogue with the intention to give impulses for public theological thinking. It is necessary to introduce the basic idea of public theology. In our view public theology can be considered as a positive apologetics on the one hand. On the other hand, it is grounded in the biblical witness to human reality. We explain our idea in relation to the three consequences which is underlined by H. Richard Niebuhr’s idea about the meaning of revelation. Thus in the relational scheme we define sin as non-relation, grace as relation with humanity, and faith as relation in Christ. Its anti-totalitarian character is stressed through the idea of constructive pluralism as the person comes to the fore. Such a relational scheme is defined as the community of solidarity. During our research we paid special attention to the vocabulary in use. Some expressions proved to be impossible to translate into Hungarian. There is some knowledge about and use introduced in Hungarian. However, it was better to stay with the original forms in our work. They were: metanarrative, narrative, ‘one’ and ‘other’, otherness, public, individual and person. Similarly, the expressions that were introduced by us: subnarrative, relational model/scheme, community of solidarity, person in relation, non-relation, relation with humanity, relation in Christ. We used the resources of Speer Library in Princeton, NJ, USA, the Library of Otto Friedrich Universität Bamberg, D, besides the Hungarian Libraries to our research.