Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

Return to the Word
DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 225
Every aspect of spiritual life, even sin, has a direct and essential
relationship to the word, because that life was created
through the word: “All being, which has fallen from God and has
become wordless, is destined to return again to the word – in
man and through him.” 48
There is a concrete moral dimension to Ebner’s thought in
the fundamental premise that we are created in the Word: God
calls to us in love, and we are free to respond to that love or not.
The call-response dynamic of I-thou relationship has an ethical
content in the sense that the moral life is our response to God,
and at the same time one’s behavior is good or bad mainly in the
context of relationship with others. Humans are the animals
that speak, but there is an ethical or “responsible” dimension
such that speaking orients our existence toward the thou, that is,
we do not speak as isolated individuals but within relationships,
which presumes an orientation toward communal life.
While Ebner does not develop the theme, if the moral life is
a lived response to God’s address, this suggests a “moral” dimension
to sacraments. Ebner’s understanding of the “dialogical”
power of the word coincides with the Church’s traditional
understanding of the sacraments as “efficacious.” Aware of the
necessity for formal expressions of man’s I-Thou relation with
God, Ebner is sensitive to the the risk that the sacraments might
be celebrated as empty, external forms if they lack a contact with
life. On the other hand, in Ebner’s view, when an institution, as
a “sacrament,” in its spiritual reality, is structured in a way that
engages the personal and dialogical dimensions of life in the
faith, then it truly is an authentic Christian sign.
Ebner offers no extensive application of his thought to the
sacraments which, from a post-Vatican II vantage point, seems
a weakness in his thought. Still, Ebner points in this direction:
in sin, being falls from God and thus loses the word, and is destined
to return again to the word – in man and through him.
This “return to the word” suggests an opening to sacraments in
48 GREEN, 266; WR, Schriften 1:320.