Essay on Theological Method
I offer a brief reflection on theological method.[1]
Like other disciplines of study, such as philosophy, psychology, and sociology, theology has an aspect of its area of study that is self-reflective. What is theology? How does one go about the task of theologizing? The danger is that a theologian could reflect upon method so obsessively that one never engages the major themes of theology in the way the method describes. I do not intend to do that. The following is my best judgment as to the method I have followed over the course of my pastor life in preaching and teaching.
I offer this reflection while acknowledging that many cultures lived and thrived without that concept. In fact, no view of the divine is necessary to live a human life. One can thrive without the notion. Yet, every culture and every historical phase includes those who reflect upon the divine dimension of life. Such persons have a sense that matter is not a sufficient reference point for understanding reality. The secularity of this culture offers the challenge that God has a blank face. Many participants in the culture are clueless to the beliefs and values that the community of faith considers so important. Many cannot imagine why anyone would waste their time on anything related to the divine and what the divine realm might expect of us. Yet, I also suggest that in the modern situation a hunger exists among many as to the nature of their significance and the meaning of their lives amid the complexity of modern life. The strangeness of the notion of the divine may suggest the lack of a sense of meaning in modern life or a sense of the unity and totality of life. The wholeness of a human life is an unanswered question.
I would like to think that most modern persons would know they can enter a church and have an honest dialogue about the beliefs and values of the church. Sadly, the church has a negative image in the minds of many, an image it has earned through its many failures to be a true witness within this culture. The church seems to view itself as too fragile to provide meaningful places where that discourse can take place. The church appears fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, and fearful of knowledge.
My assumption is that the theologian lives with the theology he or she writes and that it contains power for that person. The question is whether it can direct others to experience such power in their lives. Theological reflection is a practical discipline in that it helps people live and act in the world. The test of a theology is the types of activity and forms of experiences they make possible. As such, this work will be both critical and constructive reflection the faith, life, and practices of the Christian community. Theology should help the worshipping community become aware of the difficulties in forming beliefs and values in the context of a modern culture. Faith expresses personal devotion. Confessional statements put into rational statements communal faith. Theology seeks a better understanding of the faith, devotion, and confessional statements of the community and individuals. Faith and devotion do not easily make the transition to theology. Both can sense a threat in theological activity. Yet, for many who think theologically, it has been worth the risk. Granted, some persons who adopt the theological path lose their faith and devotion. Many others find faith and devotion deepened and broadened by theological reflection. The task before me is the articulation of a model of Christian belief that witnesses to the norm of the Bible, demonstrates being historically informed, and that has cultural relevance. It has the purpose of assisting the community of the followers of Christ in their vocation to live as the people of God in a particular social and historical context in which they live. The issue within a denomination family is whether its devotion and confession remain defensible considering the historical transitions that occurred. Properly understood, the themes of Christian theology involve a Trinitarian identification of the essence of God, the Christian community as a provisional embodiment of the respect God has for the individual and for the emergence of Christian identity out of the community, and the orientation of belief and life toward a future that fulfills the virtues of faith, hope, and love. Thus, Christian theology proceeds from the premise that one cannot experience God directly. Yet, people experience God indirectly through their total experience of finite reality. Finite reality is in the throes of a historical process, and as such is incomplete and open to the future. For this reason, humans can experience the fullness of meaning in anticipatory snatches each time they experience meaning in its universality. One can experience the reality of God in such subjective anticipation of total reality. From the scientific, secular, and pluralistic world in which we live, the theologian needs to acknowledge that God is a hypothesis and is therefore problematic. Any reference to the divine is not self-evident. We can meaningfully ask whether they are right and true. Any truth they contain is hypothetical. One can test it or ignore it. Such statements will always be debatable. Justification of the hypothesis occurs in the course of reasoning and of the way in which belief in God has grasped the theologian and the Christian community. Yet, the belief will always be hypothetical in our pluralistic setting, regardless of the depth in which the belief has grasped the theologian. Their truth rest upon the reality of God which will show itself in the consummation of humanity and world in eternal life with God.
We need to make a pre-interpretive decision as to the primary texts we will want to interpret as representing the best of Christian belief and life. I am not sure what I would say to people who might say they want to explain such belief and life apart from these texts.
Let us consider the norm of the Bible. In most denominations and theological perspectives today, we recognize the biblical text represents significant changes in perspective and the stance one takes in the world and toward God. The paradigm of the divine that guided the Patriarchs involved seeing the divine at work in ordinary ife, especially in the desire for land and progeny. It was a nomadic life centered around the clan. The clan would migrate to Egypt and kept its faith in the God of the Patriarchs through oral tradition as story tellers passed on their stories of life in Canaan. However, a new situation emerged of slavery to the oppressive powers of Egypt. If this faith was to continue, a new perspective was needed. Through Moses, the revelation of the Lord would be there for them in their oppression, liberation, and migration to the land of Canaan. This paradigmatic change included the Lord as divine warrior on behalf of the people and the establishment of a covenant with these people that bind them to the Lord and bind them ethically to each other. This paradigm would guide them through the period settled farming in Canaan and the period of tribal federation and into the period of the sacral kingship. The king was under the covenant and was to enforce the covenant among the people of the Lord. The period of exile and post-exile saw the emergence of a view of monotheism, of the Lord of all people. Yet, this God was still committed to a specific people and their formation by torah, temple, and priest. Through persecution under the dominance of regional empires, they developed an apocalyptic view that transferred the fullness of justice and righteousness into a future act of God. Into this world came the preaching of the nearness of the rule of God in Jesus of Nazareth. He proclaimed his version of the apocalyptic rule of God in word and deed. His life, death, and resurrection gave birth to a new people of the Lord that would join Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor into one people in union with the risen Christ and uniting with him in witness in the world. They would form the first communities in within the perspective of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic.
Let us shift to another way of viewing the biblical text. A significant role of literature in general is to enable readers to create a world or worlds for themselves, cognitively, affectively, behaviorally - in all the ways that individuals and groups are related to their world. At implicit and explicit levels, readers create their own worlds in the process of reading. World and self do not exist in isolation, however, and the reader is transformed in the process. Biblical texts share in this role in a particular way as they provide resources for the creation of a comprehensive universe, which has space for the human and for the divine and which sees the human in the light of the divine and the divine in the light of the human. The text is genuinely other. As such, the community engages in an open conversation with the text. It means a charitable reading of the text by the believer. To state the obvious, the first century was imperfect in its cultural life. The first Christians used the cultural material they had at their disposal to formulate their theological conceptions. It provided categories, models, and metaphors that New Testament authors considered adequate to communicate their understanding of the work of God in Christ. They accepted a three-tiered universe and the expected apocalyptic end of human history brought about God. They accepted the revelatory character of the Hebrew Scriptures, the importance of temple worship and the sacrificial system in understanding forgiveness, and the law as a way of life and expressive of the moral character of God. They understood the mercy and grace of God shown in significant moments in history. Their theological reflection arose out of the debate with Judaism and the spread of the movement into the Greek and Roman world through the cultural model of the household.
The Bible is a witness to a paradigmatic event that witnesses to the God of Israel and to the Father of Jesus of Nazareth. It involves the believing re-presentation of the witness of faith of Jesus of Nazareth; the fully reflective understanding of Jesus as the Christ. The task of theology is not simply to make this affirmation but also to understand it. Such an approach acknowledges that the possibility of the knowledge of God must come from God. We can think of this on an analogy with how we know another person. The person reveals his or her inner feelings, spirit, will, or intention to us. We cannot know the person except as the person chooses to engage in genuine self-disclosure. The same is true with knowledge of God. Unless God chooses to reveal the will and purpose of God, our knowledge of God would be only guess-work. The failure of God to reveal who God is would be a self-absorbed God. For Paul, as an example, God has revealed the depths of God through the Spirit so that we might understand the gifts of God bestowed upon us (I Corinthians 2:10-13). Theology could not exist without this communication. The ambiguity of theological conversation arises from the possibility that it could be no more than human talk. In the modern era, advocating the truth of Christian conversation about God is problematic at best and one might legitimately wonder if it is possible. Where does theology begin the conversation with such a culture? This concern already suggests that theological reflection has a universal dimension in the sense that it does not view itself as simply the private perspective of the one writing. Therefore, talk of “the Christian God” is not helpful, for it regresses to a situation of a plurality of gods in the world rather than pointing to the unity of the human condition that finds fulfillment through connection to the one God. Theology seeks a far wider audience through its witness for God and for the sake of humanity. Theology revolves around God and the knowledge of God in a way that orient the way of belief and life of one who acknowledges the paradigmatic significance of this revelation. Thus, theology will also reflect upon humanity, the created world, the church and its acts of worship, and the Christian life. Theoretical and practical knowledge unite in theological reflection.
A paradigmatic event is a historical occurrence that captures the imagination of a community in such a manner as to shape or form the community’s way of conceiving the totality of reality and its understanding of its ongoing experience of reality. Because of the event's wide-ranging influence, the community preserves its memory, while both reinterpreting the event in the light of the subsequent situations in which the community finds itself and discovering in it the source of a renewed hope for the future. Hence, paradigmatic events connect the community and its participants with the past and the future. Through their appropriation of these events, succeeding generations understand themselves in relationship to the experiences of the past and in anticipation of a future that will bring about the actualization of the ideals of the community. Such paradigmatic events have the power to create a meaningful present.
Let us consider what it means to for this work to be historically informed.
The Bible is the primary witness. However, we would not have a canon if it were not for the decision of the Christian community to elevate certain texts above others. At this point, from the standpoint of personal faith, the work of the Holy Spirit involved guiding the witness of the Bible, guiding the Christian community to accept certain texts as representing its rule of faith, and guides the interpreter of the text.
Christian tradition comprises several historical attempts by the Christian community to explicate and translate faithfully the original witness of the Bible into the language, symbols, and practices into new historical settings. Early theology especially arose out of the Cappadocian theologians regarding the Trinity, the Nicaean Creed, and the Creed of Chalcedon. Augustine stands as a significant figure. These thinkers were guided by the intellectual perspective of Hellenistic culture. This period would give way in the 900s to the strengthening of the power of the Pope and its attendant scholastic theology, with Aquinas, being the leading figure here. It includes the separation between the western Roman Catholic expression of Christianity and the easter Orthodox way, which would continue the Hellenistic paradigm. A period Renaissance and church reform through an early form of Christian humanism would emerge. It would give way to a significant paradigm shift with the reformation, with Luther and Calvin being significant leaders here. We are already seeing polycentric expression of Christianity in Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Lutheran, and Reformed groups. These would quickly give way to further splintering of Christianity into evangelical denominations (Wesley, Edwards, Whitefield), anabaptist groups, and the emergence of liberal Christianity (Schleiermacher). This era we might think of as the formation of classical Christianity. This means acknowledging some harsh realities. In this way, the official affirmations and confessions of faith that arose out of ecumenical councils and the statements of faith out of the various Protestant traditions, have become part of that trajectory. However, such theology was a partner in the oppression of women, the subjection of races, the use of war and crusades to oppose those who disagreed with their vision of God, subjected the masses to a rigid hierarchical structure, became a partner with kings in the subjection of the masses, and inhibited the growth of science and technology. However, the deconstruction of classic texts wants to uncover what it views as the hidden oppression contained in the texts, deriving its interpretive tools from Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Such an approach is a convenient way to eliminate thousands of years of human thought. Thus, the communities out of which classic texts arose have also sustained the lives of women, serfs, slaves, and improved the lives of millions through its worship and communal life. We need to discern whatever is true and holy in classical theology, so that Christian community today may reflect the divine light that they share. The classical themes suggest that no symbols, metaphors, or words we use can contain what we mean by God, the analogical nature of all talk about God, and the necessity of many names and metaphors for God are parts of the heritage quite relevant to us today. The community engaged in a debate that led to what we might consider as the orthodox faith. To participate in the fellowship of the Christian community is to participate in this hermeneutical trajectory and to embrace the joint responsibilities of maintaining continuity with the past and addressing the context in which the community is situated today. Recent theology includes the voices of Barth, Bruner, Tillich, Bultmann, hope theologians Pannenberg and Moltmann, and the re-emergence of theology out of the Pentecostal tradition. Theology arising out of oppression, first in Latin America but expanding to other parts of the world, has added another dimension to the theological conversation. The theologian today needs to be aware of these shifts in the cultural challenges that faced the community. Even these are not a final authority since the ongoing life of the church moves toward its destiny.
Such classic texts have an excess of meaning that resists its bondage to its moment of creation. This statement would be true of other classic texts as well. That is why we continue to read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and so on, with so much profit. Their images, symbols, events, rituals, and persons are continuous sources of reflection. Our experience of such classic texts vexes, provokes, and elicits a claim to serious attention from us. The interpreter must now interpret to understand the experience of this text claiming attention. The type of interpretation we might want to consider is the conversation that releases us to the to-and-fro movement of the question and response under discussion. The claim to serious attention provokes our questioning and response. I want to stress that anyone can engage in this type of interpretation. However, use of various methods of literary criticism help to keep the interpreter from an overly subjective interpretation, in which the text will mean whatever the interpreter wants it to mean. Since we are considering religious texts, the provocation in the interpreter will be toward existential questions of the human spirit, such as the issue of finitude, our guilt, the issue of that in which we trust, the issue of meaning, as well as initial comprehension of the text. Such provocation will alert us to the otherness of the text by forcing us to recognize our pre-understanding of self, our religious beliefs, and our culture. The nature of our participation in a community and in the wider culture become clearer to us. We are now in a genuine conversation with the text. The interpreter cannot simply impose a prior value judgment upon the text. The subject-matter of that which has provoked us and claimed our attention is the focus of our attention. We lose ourselves in that conversation, even as, in an enjoyable conversation with another person, we will lose ourselves in the subject-matter under discussion. To be clear, such a conversation cannot occur if the reader already knows what a religious text is going to say, and thus does not allow the text to provoke them. A conversation with the text cannot occur of the text is so autonomous that the response of the interpreter is not possible. A conversation cannot occur if one must get behind the text to the mind of the author, to the socio-historical conditions of the text, or the response of the original audience. If we allow the conversation to start, the text is presenting us with a genuine possibility to our imagination. Such a mutual critical correlation of contemporary experience and the Christian tradition renders explicit the hermeneutical character of theological reflection.
The claim to truth and reality in theological reflection takes seriously the event-character of the revelation to which it points.[2] The event has the power of a disclosure. Such an event has a dialectical character. The event is an existential intensification of particularity. I am going to consider the forms of religious expression as manifestation and proclamation. These expressions suggest the dialectics contained within Christian and Jewish classic texts, but also represent the dialectic within Christian consciousness. As one might expect, they need each other. From an historical perspective, Christianity includes both trajectories. The complexity of human experience might suggest to us that we must not choose between them. We may well be poorer theologically and spiritually if we do not.
When this intensification releases itself to a radical sense of participation, the focus is upon manifestation of the whole that occurs in the event. Such a religion will focus upon the mystical, priestly, metaphysical, and aesthetic expressions of spirituality. The philosophical perspective we find in wisdom literature relates to the aesthetic and mystical hymns of the Psalms. It will focus upon persons who are priests, mystics, and sages. In modern times, think of Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, Pentecostal and Charismatic, the eastern Christian tradition, and Mircea Eliade. It reconfirms our radical participation in the cosmos of our divinization by the sacred. Such a notion expresses itself in the repetition of actions by which one remembers and experiences anew a connection with the paradigmatic event. Religious expressions occur through the hierophanies, theophanies, archetypes, rituals, myths, and symbols and thus not only through words. Religion becomes an eruption of power of some manifestation of the whole now experienced as the sacred cosmos. They occur in space and time separated from ordinary space and time. In this setting, the ordinary becomes profane. The extraordinary becomes the sacred because of the power saturating the manifestation of this rock, this tree, this ritual, this cosmological myth only to intensify that becoming into the sacred time of origins, the sacred spaces of a manifestation of the sacred cosmos. Entering the ritual and retelling the myth helps us escape the nightmare of history the terror of ordinary time. We enter true time, the time of the repetition of the actions of the whole at the origin of the cosmos. The power discloses itself to those who participate in the rhythms of the manifestation of the whole. The other side of the dullness of the ordinary is the power and fullness of the sacred. Yet, immersing oneself into sacred time and place will lead one to a reorientation of our lives within ordinary time and place. Participation in the sacred leads to sacredness of the profane. The root of all proclamation is its connection to real manifestation, keeping proclamation from become fanatical, arid, cerebral, and abstract. Manifestation provides the context for the eruption of the defamiliarizing word of proclamation, just as the prelinguistic precedes the linguistic power of the word. Kerygma joins logos; word becomes sacrament. Manifestation envelopes the word even as manifestation allows itself to be transformed by the word. Manifestation re-emerges to unite with the secular, the historical, the temporal to reconnect through participation in the whole, by something like a feeling of absolute dependence or the experience of fundamental trust in the worthwhile character of existence. Manifestation keeps Christianity in the human experience of the manifestation and revealing presence of God in all creation, in body, in nature, and in spirit. Today, those who hold to the significance of manifestation approach the experience through the philosophy of religion and fundamental theology. We recognize ourselves as already in the presence of a horizon of mystery. It suggests a mediated retrieval of the manifesting power of an originating religious immediacy, such as the feeling of absolute dependence or already in the presence of mystery. Yet, in theological reflection, the originating experience is constantly transformed. Schleiermacher, Cobb, Gilkey, Ogden in the liberal Protestant tradition and Aquinas, Rahner, Lonergan, Kung, von Balthasar, Teilhard, and Schillebeeckx show that many Catholic and liberal Protestant theologians are analogous in structure. Buber and Gabriel Marcel would also reflect this perspective. The event of manifestation tends to emphasize experiential limit situations like guilt, finitude, death, fundamental trust, utopian and eschatological hope, and fidelity.
When this intensification releases itself into a radical sense of distance, the focus is upon proclamation. Such a religion would focus upon a prophetic, ethical, and historical expressions of spirituality. In the Bible, the narrative discourse upon the founding events of Israel relates to the prophetic and prescriptive discourse, both of which are ethically and historically oriented. This portion of the Bible will focus upon persons who are prophets and heroes. In modern times, think of Johann Baptist Metz, Reinhold Niebuhr, those whose passion is social justice, and the western Christian tradition. A word of proclamation from the whole is is now experienced by a finite individual self living the reality of a graced history and time. This word of defamiliarizing proclamation now experienced by the self is the transcendent other. This God speaks a word of proclamation in which the whole discloses itself in a new manifestation of the presence of a personal, gracious, acting, judging, proclaiming God. This God acts in the word-events of ordinary history and time. This God acts in the words and deeds that shatter our usual sense of participation. That word discloses the existence of a participating and distancing, ethically and politically responsible self. This self is responsible to conscience and to others, responsible for this world and this history, responsible to the words and deeds of this God. That word comes as stark proclamation and kerygma to disconfirm any complacency in participation, to shatter illusions that present experience is enough, to defamiliarize us with ourselves and with nature, to expose all philosophic wisdom as foolishness, to demand disillusionment as the precondition of insight. Here is a radical, decentering experience of world-negation in the proclamation of the prophetic word through which will come a new and radical form of world-affirmation. It will express itself by faith in the power of the paradigmatic manifestation of God in the word and freed to express a liberated hope in ordinary history and time. It frees itself for historical action toward love of the other, the ordinary, the neighbor, freed to enter the future as a promise. Barth, Bultmann, and Brunner are notable proponents of this perspective. No one can doubt the utter seriousness of the hermeneutical struggle that allows the real subject matter of theology, the Word of God in Jesus Christ as event, to take over in all theology. Such persons command attention when “poor, chatty little Christianity, (E. M. Forster) has forgotten the power of any word, much less the unmasking power of a word of authentic proclamation.
My approach to theology is one that recognizes it as a culturally significant enterprise. Theology is a partner with others in the human enterprise of discovering the best human life we can lead as individuals and as communities.
The emergence of a modern culture through Renaissance, Reformation, the dominance of rationalist, empiricist, and romantic philosophies throughout the emergence of capitalism and democracy, the challenges of liberation theology and post-modernism, all represent new environments in which the church needs to find a way to remain faithful to its legacy while meeting the intellectual and lifestyle challenges of the day. One historical role of religion has been to legitimate the culture. However, it may also protect the individual from the culture from swallowing up the person. As such, the religious community becomes a hint that there is something more to which human beings are accountable, something that we might refer to as eternity. The larger point is that a theology free of or isolated from a culture does not exist. The faith community is not an alternative culture. The faith community shares with others a social world or culture. Christian identity grows within the shared larger culture. Thus, theology shares with the faith community the need to be in conversation with its culture. It will need to listen charitably, learn, and scrutinize what hears from culture. Modernity offers religious communities the gift of pluralism. During the Medieval and Reformation period, the church involved itself with the power institutions of society, and in so doing focused its energies on wealth, power, fame, and prestige. In a secular society, the church no longer sits with those in power, thereby freeing the church to direct individuals and culture to choose freely what is best. It can see itself in a pluralistic setting as co-participants with the rest of the culture in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human. A genuine conversation involves the risk of change. This includes re-thinking classical formulations of Christian belief and life in a way that remains faithful to the past and open to the possibilities of the present. In the secular and pluralistic setting, the Christian community comes a unit of culture that has a vital connection with each other, perpetuates itself institutionally, and proclaims its witness to a particular way of belief and behavior. It shares a set of values, beliefs, and loyalties that arise out of its commitment to its paradigmatic event.
One could add many other threads of culture that became fertile ground for New Testament theological reflection. Throughout the history of the church, this use of culture as a valid theological source for reflection has been important, suggested in the use of Plato, Neo-platonic thought, Aristotle, feudalism, the penitential practice of the Roman Catholic Church, mystical experience, and the legal system, all provided fertile material for theological reflection throughout the early church period and the medieval period.
If the reader can travel with me this far, then maybe the reader can take another step. Modernity is not so superficial or evil that it does not have categories, models, and metaphors suitable for theology. Many fundamentalists (because of science and evolution) and many on the religious left (because of lingering racism and sexism) seem to think of modernity as something to oppose. Christians need to pay the modernity that embraces them the compliment of taking it seriously, rather than accepting it in secret, as so many do. Modernity has no more imperfections or apostasies as any other era. Christians need to discern the ways of God through modernity, rather than propose alternative communities and patterns of thought to it. Our culture provides some helpful ways for the church to reflect theologically on matters of concern to it. The task of theology is to discern those ways.
A large element of the theological task is to correlate classic texts with individual and corporate life. We investigate common human experience and language as we explore the limits of science, technology, and moral life. We find openings in human life toward God as we experience the boundary situations of life that are beyond the methods of science and math. We explore Christian tradition primarily by exploring classic Christian texts, becoming an historical and hermeneutical investigation. What we seek in theological reflection in this way are the ways God is present.
Modern human life distinguishes itself from primitive culture, tribal society, feudal culture, Communist systems, military dictatorships, and any religious culture: Roman Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. Objective alienation occurs when the social institutions participate in a social situation that oppresses the masses, keeping substantial portions of the people in poverty related to the availability of food, clothing, shelter, limits to the expression of freedom, limits to the expression of the worth and dignity of the individual in intellectual pursuits, political ideas, personal happiness, and religion. So much of the history of human civilization involves the spirit of oppression and domination. Such institutionalized violence is not a social setting that a caring and compassionate people need to tolerate. Yet, the culture is not monolithic. Participants in any culture do so in fragments. Oppression may intersect with an individual rarely, while other forms of life are meaningful producers of happiness. Granted, for example, a culture may be patriarchal, but this does not mean one will not fulfill the pursuit of happiness in other ways. People to do not experience the full weight of oppression. The human desire to find happiness is not one that any oppressive system can obliterate. One could imagine such visionary Christian leaders lovingly calling for repentance from Christian secular leaders with the hope of new secular leadership emerging that would have a significant role for the rights and dignity of the people. One could also envision a church in such a setting that adopts simple style of life in solidarity with poor masses, adopting a spirit of service, and disengaging from ties to other social institutions that oppress the poor. Such an approach would, through passive resistance, help bring the collapse of an oppressive system.
The emergence of a spirit of freedom in the 1600s to the 1850s represents a paradigm shift in understanding of the economic, political, and cultural arrangements of society. It arose out of the stagnation of royal, hierarchical, colonial, and feudal Europe. The writings of John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Kant, and Hegel, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers form the intellectual basis of the paradigm shift. The thriving science of the time sought to lessen the suffering of the masses. The same is true of the emergence of economic and political freedom, and with it, increasing tolerance of a variety of beliefs and values as people pursued happiness in their separate ways. Respecting the worth and dignity of the individual by the academic, economic, religious, and political institutions of society was a major step in the growth of the spirit of freedom. Such respect meant that individuals pursuing happiness would have the benefit of decreasing suffering among the masses. Their actualization of the spirit of freedom was imperfect, as one would expect. To use an analogy, they were the first act of a play that has the theme of the value of freedom. Expansions of freedom, such as the ending of slavery, the expansion of voting rights to women, the ending of legal racism in the South through the Civil Rights movement, continued the paradigm shift begun with the Enlightenment. We are still completing the play with the theme of freedom. We live in a time greater fairness to persons of differing race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. For good or ill, Americans participated in a social experiment that has transferred vast sums of money to the poor, in such a way that most American poor have the lifestyle of the middle class in many countries of the world. Many participants in modern culture need the reminder that the spirit of freedom is an ideal and the present social arrangements are a pen-ultimate activity of human beings. The present social order is not the goal of the human quest. One will not find in it the fulfillment of one’s meaning, purpose, and direction in present social arrangement, but only in that which transcends all such human activity. The present expressions of alienation from the institutions of modern life that include attacks upon the founders, attacks on the constitution, and attacks on Christian institutions, arise out of impatience with the imperfections of modernity and its institutions. In the 1960s, the advocates of such alienation were organized cells of young, radicalized groups. Today, the advocates are in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. They are willing to use their considerable economic power and the power to distribute knowledge to limit public speech and guide political decisions. Their willingness to cancel access to the conduits of knowledge to those with whom they disagree, their willingness to submit to tactics of intimidation and allow groups devoted to the alienating critique of Marx to guide their decisions, shows willingness to surrender the spirit of freedom to their international economic goals that often involve cooperating at a deep level with the oligarchs of Russia, the Chinese Communist Party, and the religious leaders of political Islam. For the sake of economic gain, they surrender to totalitarians abroad and they offer financial support and educational support for totalitarian views within the western democracies. The attacks from these quarters have risks that include opposition to the spirit of freedom promoted by modernity, the re-emergence of intolerance, and a new form of totalitarianism that embraces restrictions on individual speech and behavior implemented by the new oligarchs of technology and industry. The present generation inherits a spirit of freedom embodied in the early writings and institutions of modernity. The question for this generation is whether they will be worthy children of the paradigm shift toward freedom or bring down the institutions that preserved freedom and create a pathway for a new form of soft tyranny to emerge.
A theological understanding of the present situation of the culture is difficult. To listen to the culture for its struggle with fundamental questions is not an easy task. A significant difficulty is that people participate in culture in a piecemeal way. The segmentation of modern culture has increased in matters of personal interests and hobbies, sports, work, play, and friendships. Those who reflect upon culture will see what holds it together in a variety of ways. Every culture has its tensions, conflicts, change, and contradiction. Rather than a harmonious unity, culture generates its own resistance and contradictions. Like every generation, this generation struggles with finitude, estrangement, alienation, oppression, fundamental trust or mistrust, loyalty, anxiety, and mortality. The list is endless. The forms they take in this generation disclose a genuinely religious dimension of contemporary experience and language. The theological interpretation of contemporary experience is also a way of interpreting Christian proclamation theologically and applying it to contemporary experience. We are correlating these distinct interpretations. The theological task involves developing a mutually critical correlation between an interpretation of the contemporary situation and an interpretation of the Christian tradition. The theological act of interpretation involves a correlation of two distinct constants, the theological interpretation of the contemporary situation and the theological understanding of the Bible and Christian tradition. To refer to this act as mutually critical is to recognize that modern culture has much to teach the tradition of the church and that modern culture may have taken turns towards its destruction. A theology will emerge out of the theological interpretation of the experience of oppression and alienation. A different theology will emerge out of the cognitive claims occasioned by science, the Enlightenment, and the emergence of historical consciousness. I think of the fundamentalist reading of the Genesis 1-2 in contrast with the development of evolutionary theory. A different theology will emerge out of the struggle with tribal beliefs and values, the powerful experience of the Spirit, or the personal need for transformation. A theological interpretation of sexism or of anti-Semitism will lead to differing interpretations as well. Any unity such theology will have will be due to their common acceptance of the pre-interpretive claim to the significance of certain texts. However, significant paradigm shifts can occur as new situations confront the interpreter with new challenges to interpret the situation, the Bible, and the tradition in a creative way. The point is that a genuinely theological interpretation questions both the meaning and truth contained in the theological understanding of the situation and in the Christian proclamation as it brings them into mutually critical correlation. Acknowledging the reality of our denominational age, such a view of the theological task should increase tolerance and understanding of the pluralism of the age. The authentic community of inquiry has its grounding in a community of commitment to is paradigmatic event and to its classic texts.
Our post-modern setting has the positive aspect of offering the potential of learning across denominational lines, across religions, and across those opposed to belief in God. Each of these has their paradigm shifts within their histories. It has the potential of being an era of humility in which we value our traditions and their perspective on that which unites Christians: the paradigmatic event of Jesus of Nazareth, the biblical witness, and the witness of tradition. Awareness of the paradigm shifts within the Bible and within traditions ought to help us today to develop approach to what we have and reach out to learn from others. Thus, most Christians today have different approach to the Bible and their traditions from those of even a generation ago. We are more attuned to the ambiguities and nuances of Bible and tradition that could lead to greater learning.
Theology will address the culture in which it finds itself, the challenge of the current community of faith, and the academic community. In most cases, it will do so weakly, given the modern, secular, scientific, and pluralistic setting, much of which will ignore theological insights. The reason is that theology embraces the truth of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ in an historical setting that dismisses this claim. Theological reflection does not help itself by simply repeating traditional concepts and solutions for today, since the situation of the church has changed. Such an approach makes infinite and eternal a finite contribution from the past. The challenge for theological reflection is to offer a coherent presentation of Christian proclamation that informs the life of the church in a way that will strengthen its witness to this generation. The beauty of the pluralist setting is that gaining adherents contributes to the aspect of a theological reflection that is true. Yet, its staying power is not one we can predict, so it is not sufficient criterion for truthfulness. In taking seriously the theological situation of those outside the community of faith, the risk is losing oneself to the culture. How to take the cultural setting seriously without surrendering the proclamation of the community to the whims of the culture is always the challenge.
I want to offer an example of the challenge presented by modernity to the perspective proclaimed by the church regarding the providence of God guiding humanity and the created order toward lit end in God. Modernity is highly attuned to the suffering and tragedy of the human condition. Its notion of economic and constitutional political freedom has unleashed creative powers and released people from the oppression of the feudal system and from the oppression of kings. It has created a web of private and public care for the poor and disadvantaged. It has promoted respect for the individual and personal responsibility in the pursuit of happiness. Science and technology have an orientation of improving the economic condition of the masses, thereby relieving much suffering. Yet, science also tends to view human history as moving toward a tragic end, the heating of this planet to a point where the sun will make it unlivable, and the universe will eventually die. Continuing to present the human life and the created order as in the providential care of God, considering the science of the situation, becomes difficult, although it is possible to do so.
The point is that the beliefs and values presented in the proclamation of the church needs to meet the challenge of offering an orientation toward God and world that will have sufficient meaningfulness and motivating power to face the serious adversities, troubles, and catastrophes of modern life. It will not be sufficient to appeal to an authority, whether it be denominational statements, the pastor, the Bible, ecumenical councils, or the Pope. Such an appeal attempts to create insulating bubble the protects the community. It tends to be a defensive response to modern life that does not recognize the seriousness of the present age and its challenge to the way human beings find their way to core beliefs and values that enable them to live in this world. It prevents the community from engaging in a real conversation with the world and therefore inhibits a genuine witness to this generation. Genuine conversation will open the community to new possibilities for learning creative ways to affirm the Christian proclamation and move into fresh territory.
I invite you to consider theological reflection as an unfinished work of art. My hesitation is that the work of art is external to the creator. The theologian is willing to commit his or her life to the beliefs and values presented. One is risking one’s life. However, set that difference aside for a moment. Theological reflection is an uncompleted play. Part of the initial task of the actors chosen to improvise the new final act will be to immerse themselves with full sympathy in the first four acts, but not so as merely to parrot what has already been said. They cannot go and look up the right answers. Nor can they simply imitate the kinds of things that their character did in the early acts. Good successive acts will show a proper final development, not merely a repetition, of what went before. Nevertheless, there will be a rightness, a fittingness, about certain actions and speeches, about certain final moves in the drama, which will in one sense be self-authenticating, and in another gain authentication from their coherence with authoritative previous texts. This suggests a conception of theological reflection more like a work of art in need of completion. We might consider the biblical story as involving successive acts: creation and fall, patriarchs, Mosaic liberation and law, tribal federation, Israel, Judaism, Jesus, the Spirit and church, the redemption of humanity and the created order. When we consider other acts, many would reflect on the seven ecumenical councils and the theologians that guided their decisions as having special significance. As we continue the story, the division of the church in between east and west, between Protestant and Roman Catholic, the continuing splintering of the church as a voluntary organization within secular culture, and the continuing tension between modernity and the church. Recognizing the lack of completion contained in the Christian story might be better ways to deal with the unresolved questions of theology.
Such an approach has an apologetic dimension in that it views those outside the community as people of good will and openness to rational argument and genuine witness. The early apologists of the Christian community in the second and third centuries gave a great complement to their world by adopting an apologetic form. Such an approach also is an encouragement to those within the community to refuse to become insular. It encourages them to view themselves open to the wider world, eager to bridge the misunderstandings separating them from others. They have a shared culture that enables such bridge building. Such an apologetic seeks to persuade those outside the community to enjoy its life together, while also encourages those within the community to be intelligible to themselves and to others. It strengthens community even as it seeks to communicate it. At the same time, it takes the risk of transforming the symbols of the community into a form and content in a way that becomes a bridge to those outside the community. This risk is present because one must be willing to use language and symbols familiar to the culture to build the bridge. The aim is greater understanding and tolerance.
I have used the phrase “belief and life” several times. Theological reflection occurs today in the denominational age and in a pluralistic culture. The notion of consensus in such matters remains helpful. It suggests a positive role for genuine pluralism and a positive role for the biblical witness and the traditions of the various faith communities. Christians have deep differences in beliefs and ways of life that deserve respect. Respect includes taking the beliefs and ways of life seriously enough that they may no longer be able to share life in the same denominational family. Much of theological reflection concerns itself with properly identifying who God is, who the people of God are, the destiny of humanity, the content of the Christian life, and the witness of the community in the world. Communal identity and personal identity weave themselves together. There may be formal acknowledgement of shared history and official status of creeds and doctrinal statements, but they may no longer function operationally as shared areas of belief and Christian life. Controversy regarding the norms that will guide communal life may well lead to acknowledging that the closer fellowship of a denominational family is no longer possible, even if they acknowledge that they represent differing ways of being the body of Christ in the world. However, that does not exclude the possibility uniting in various theological conversations to learn from each other and uniting in shared areas of worship and witness in the world. Thus, the global Christian community is a variety of theological interpretations, conversations, and understandings of its identity that we can look upon in a dialectical way as a community of argument that is divisive and encouraging of community. Such debate occurs out of desire to see itself with increasing clarity. This will be the way of life for the global Christian community for the near future. Differing communities can still engage in biblical reflection, creedal discussion, liturgical practices, acts of worship, and the Christian life, in respectful and tolerant ways. The expectation is a clearer vision of witness and discipleship without expecting reconciliation of all disagreements. One can hope for organizational unity while recognizing the actuality of remaining divisions. They can unite in their shared commitment to the paradigmatic event that is the source of the community, their acceptance of the Bible as the primary witness to that event, and their shared history. As one example from philosophical history, the various schools of philosophy in Athens held true to their principles, whether as defined by Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, and Epicureans, but they engaged in fruitful conversation and debate. In the Medieval period in Europe, while recognizing certain lines crossed made one heretic, it also kept a lively debate among the Dominicans, Franciscans, Thomists, Scotists, Augustinians, Occamists, and so on. The stakes of this debate are high for the global Christian community, for its concern is not some personal truth but its interpretation of divine truth. The community will need to leave open the question of the extent to which any of its denominational families embodies and reflects that divine truth. The modern setting has moved the Christian community a long way past the notion of using coercion by authority to resolve such conflicts. Such a means is inappropriate if the goal is clarity of communal identity. The global Christian community can recognize the positive good of diversity, diversity is a happy reminder that Christians cannot control the movements of the God they serve and worship.
Modernity easily accepts pluralism. I think of personal taste. I think of matters of public policy where reasonable people can differ, and votes decide the direction. Religion remains in the role of opinion, myth, and fictional stories. Logical and factual disputes also suggest the value of pluralism in reaching consensus. Truths contained in poetry, fiction, or myth contradict each other, but such contradiction is tolerable. The difficulty here is that the value in modernity of science and history can lead to discrediting certain religious beliefs. Religious people who continue to hold such beliefs enter the doorway to superstition rather than genuine belief.
Post-modernity has an uneasy relationship with pluralism. Its loss of the transcendent nature of truth and goodness tends to localize them in the tribe with which one has identified. The persons in another tribe become the embodiment of evil, while their tribe is on a righteous cause. We are losing what it means to be “with” others and “together” with those who disagree. Are we losing a sense of intimacy? Social arrangements are increasingly complex. Technology as practiced can lead to increased isolation. Yet, we are social beings whose center is outside us, that is, in the interpersonal and in our connection with transcendent mystery. Are we losing an ability to experience our world and contemplate that which is not us? Such a stance toward life requires the capacity of the long-distance runner rather than looking for every short-cut. Are losing the ability to have a critical spirit toward our own ideas, opinions, and groups with which we have united? This would be a great calamity for our world.[3] Our lives need more of the quality of welcoming others, especially those with whom we differ.[4] Adopting such an approach will be counter-cultural, it will take courage, Of danger is the progressive who magnifies the sins of modernity and undervalues the ways in which modernity has sought to repent of these sins and amend its life in the direction of furthering the spirit of freedom. The progressive who has adopted the alienating critique of Marx uses every difference in a pluralistic society to drive a wedge of alienation between groups. Such a person has the agenda of destroying the spirit of freedom in favor of their version of justice, which includes the suppression of those who intellectually and ethically differ from them. This is not the liberation theology of the 1960s to 1980s, for it has access to the corridors of political and economic power in a way that considers democracy, tolerance, and pluralism its enemy. The progressive Christian who adopts this view has allowed the idol of political ideology to supplant God in the name of doing the work of God. It can justify violence to accomplish their end.
Theology needs to have the power to persuade and to strengthen the practice of the Christian faith. For any religion to be living and active, it needs to become an affair of the heart and passion of its adherents. Such experiences are not legitimate sources for theology, for feeling is far too subjective. Such experiences contained in the act of faith, in conversion, need further clarification and confirmation in an ongoing process of experience. Irrational fanaticism that locates religious truth in the realm of feeling is a sign of weakness, leaving rationality to the culture. Religions deal with forms of human life, the ordering and shaping of individuals and communities. The question in any theological work is whether it has the power to do that today in sufficient numbers beyond the theologian who writes. It also has a future reference. Is it lasting and reliable? That which is true shows itself as such as time progresses. Truth is accessible to us as human beings in the relativity of our experience and reflection. We do not have access to the true meaning of things and events in our world so long as the course of history continues. The extent to which we humbly share truth as we have to experience it and reflect upon it, we rest upon the confidence that we are sharing an anticipation of the fullness of truth. The meaning we ascribe to the data of individual history and to the events of social history depend on anticipation of the totality that is developing in history. These anticipations constantly change with further experience because as we move ahead the horizon of experience broadens. This does not rule out the possibility of provisional experiences of the reality of God and of the faithfulness of God in the course of history. However, all the statements that we make in the specific mode of human talk about God, rest on anticipations of the totality of the world and therefore on the yet non-existent future of its uncompleted history. This applies also to knowledge of God based on the historical revelation of God. The knowledge of Christian theology is always partial in comparison to the definitive revelation of God in the future. Recognizing the finitude and inappropriateness of all human talk about God is an essential part of theological sobriety. Every religion meets its test in the power it influences in the lives of individuals. Human history records many religions. Most of them died. The same is true of Christianity in general. We have no way of knowing today the truth of Christianity. Every Christian theology has an open quality to it in that only the future will determine its power and influence. It must interpret the central symbols of the tradition for a theological interpretation of the present situation, risk new interpretation of the tradition and the present situation, risk envisioning a Christian future, and recognize the complexity and ambiguity of interpretation. It needs to provide some objectivity to what conversion to Christian belief and life might look like. Part of the theological task is to define itself as an activity, it presents a possible correlation between faith and a theological interpretation of the present situation, it must be appropriate and understandable, it contributes to proclamation and apologetics, it will recognize the interrelated disciplines of historical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology, and it will recover the essential unity of theological reflection.
Within the broad Christian community, in our pluralist setting, unity of theological perspectives is not possible. The conflict of our interpretations is our actuality. I do not see the possibility of a theological paradigm emerging that will unite various theological perspectives. Such an observation could lead to pessimism and despair. It could lead us to dogmatism of the Left and Right. However, genuine consecration and dedication to God can lead us out of captivity and into freedom. Conversation is our hope. Hope has a prophetic tone. It can lead us to creative fidelity to the community of the followers of Jesus of the past, present, and future. It can also lead to a form of creative destruction of what I love now so that I can embrace the new. Here is the challenge. Given the expansion of the spirit of freedom, it is tempting to look down upon previous generations of modernity with moral superiority. Given the advances in theological reflection in a time of pluralism, it is tempting for this generation of theologians to proceed with a moral superiority that ignores the insights of the past. Such a witness has made a commitment and is willing to stand in the presence of others to offer their testimony. Testimony bears on an event or that part of an event that is unique and irrevocable.[5] The spirit of freedom needs institutions like religious communities to strengthen the slender threads that hold a free society together. Religious communities need to take many of the insights of modernity into itself, listen with discernment, allow creativity to emerge, and become salt and light in a culture that desperately needs the insight and wisdom of the ages.
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