Ecklesiologi efter Sekt och Sekularitet : Arne Rasmussons radikalreformatoriska teologi i dialog med Ernst Troeltschs kyrka-sekt typologi

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis was to create a dialogue between the church-sect typology of Ernst Troeltsch and the Radical Reformation theology of Arne Rasmusson. The hypothesis was that Rasmusson has good reasons to take the dialogue with Troeltsch more seriously; that the perspective of Troeltsch can help to clarify aspects of Rasmusson’s theology and show tendencies of inconsistency in it, and therefore also contribute to a development of Rasmusson’s Radical Reformation theology. In order to test the hypothesis the thesis worked with three main questions. 1) What does Rasmusson’s criticism of Troeltsch’s church-sect typology consist of, and is this criticism legitimate? 2) Can Rasmusson’s Radical Reformation theology be used to construct an alternative to Troeltsch’s church-sect typology? And 3) can Troeltsch’s church-sect typology contribute to a development of Rasmusson’s Radical Reformation theology? 1) Rasmusson’s criticism of Troeltsch’s church-sect typology was found to consist of the issues of terminology, the social ethic of the Gospel and the narrowness of the typology. In all these issues Rasmusson’s criticism was found to be only partly legitimate. 2) Rasmusson’s Radical Reformation theology was used to construct a revision of Troeltsch’s typology – incorporating an axis around the poles of collective-individual over the accepting-rejecting axis of Troeltsch’s typology. This construction was found to be a political typology, with an ability to move from pejorative terms to a more contextual terminology. 3) Troeltsch’s perspective was able to show that in Rasmusson’s theology there is a slight tension between a Radical Reformation theology and a broader post-secular theology, that the ecclesiology of Rasmusson tends to be more and more abstract and without context, and that its emphasize on the social ethic of the Gospel tends to be partly dualistic. The term post-sectular was coined – by a combining of post-sect and post-secular – both to help Rasmusson remember that his Radical Reformation theology is built on and requires a radical and distinct kind of ecclesiology that coincides with the sect-type of Troeltsch and to help get around the (both historical and fabricated) criticism that this ecclesiology often generates. The hypothesis was verified.