As I continue to masticate upon the question of what will be the core of my project, two Latin phrases keep coming to mind: participatio Christi and pericrucis. (I think I may have made up the second word.)
Participatio Christi is "participation of/in/with Christ." It is at the core of ecclesiology and the ecclesial question: what does it mean to be church, to participate in Christ? What I'm wondering is in what way our answer might be conditioned by paying attention to the biblical narratives pericrucis - around the cross. So much of our theology is dominated by the cross (justifiably so) and the eucharistic embodiment thereof of Christ's gift to the world, that I wonder if we, as church, have missed something vital in focusing too closely upon Jesus ministry upon the cross, and not looking to what Jesus is doing "around the cross." This seems especially important when we consider the individual salvific emphasis found in much of Protestantism. Did Jesus come to save ME? Or, if we look pericrucis, might we recognize a larger project, maybe even stretching all the way back to Genesis–the creation of a people of God-and, in the life of Jesus, before and after death upon the cross, descent, and resurrection, might we discover the content of what it means to be saved by Christ?
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