There are many incredibly naive ideas afoot in the world about Christian theology and its understanding of God. Many people seem to think that Christian thought is something about an old man with a beard in the sky, perhaps close to a cross between Santa Claus and Genghis Kahn. As I mentioned in a
diary from yesterday, I am undertaking a protracted series to consider issues in theology. As I said yesterday, this series is not for everyone; I recognize many at Daily Kos do not appreciate this kind of thing. Over the coming months, I will treat systematic theology, scripture, moral theology, and church history.
In truth, it is not possible for human beings to speak about God, but that is what we're going to do: There is a paradox at the heart of what I am doing in these diaries. As human beings, we probe things; we think about them. There is a branch of theology called Foundational (or Fundamental) Theology that explores the relationship of faith and reason. I intend to use my daily diary across several weeks talking about important issues in Foundational Theology.
Foundational Theology is not the whole of theology, but the issues that it treats are issues that cut across all the theological disciplines. The question that goes to the heart of Foundational Theology is how an infinite God interacts with his finite creatures. The answer to this question touches on everything from prayer to evolution.
In recent years, there have been theological approaches that have been judged as giving too much over to culture, but in doing theology, we always need to situate the message within a particular cultural setting. Simply put, people have presuppositions. The Migratory Peoples (a new PC term for the barbarian hordes of northern Europe) heard the gospel differently than Hellenistic believers did. All of us have cultural presuppositions about what is good, about what is valuable, about how to define and structure family. There are going to be things in any culture that the gospel will critique and find problematic. But at the same time, a sophisticated theological approach will never wholesale throw out an entire culture. It is a serious mistake, and one that Christianity has made numerous times, to believe that a culture must be dismantled to receive the gospel.
When it operates at peak, Christianity attempts to adopt what is best in a culture and creatively engage it. The joys and hopes of the people of a place in an age: these are the joys and hopes of the followers of Jesus. To carry forth the work of the Lord, the church has to interpret the signs of the times and open a dialogue with the cultures of the time. It would be false to the gospel to preach it as it was preached in another place in another age.
Fundamental Theology helps people to answer questions in a way that is truly Christian and truly contemporary. We are living in a time when the same gospel requires a pastoral response that reflects current realities.
To do this properly, we have to have a sense of the culture in which we live. We need to understand the audience's education, its economic circumstances, its capacity and facility with communications, its system of symbols, its language, ethnicity, regionalism, and so on. In short, we need to understand the audience's culture.
The nature of the age in which we live is a subject of ongoing debate, but many scholars argue that we live in a transitional period as we move out of the concerns and preoccupations of the Enlightenment into something entirely new and different. We seem to be immersed in a mix of modern and postmodern ideas. Many of these ideas are not explicitly expressed but part of the backdrop. It is not possible to talk about the gospel in a contemporary way if we do not know what went before us. In this transitional period, these are two perspectives that are in the air:
Truth-The question of how a culture understands truth is very important to a theological discussion. The nature of truth is very contentious issue in our culture. There is the rejection in our culture of the very idea of truth. A light form of this proposition, that issues from the thought of Immanuel Kant, does not deny that truth exists, but it denies we can obtain it. There is also the strong version that there is no truth at all, just culturally-bounded truth but no absolute truth. In this theory, we construct a variety of worlds through language and symbols. As there are many languages, there are many truths. This proposition rejects the possibility of metanarrrative. There also is the very popular idea that science is the only way to find truth. In this third theoretical framework, there is truth but only science can get to it. Since science and theology work differently, Christianity ipso facto lacks truth. To the extent that something is different than science, it is not reliable as truth. This is one of the biggest problems Christian theology faces, this notion that truth is everything that can be tested and measured, but that everything else is subjective and poetic, that is, not true. The key, I think, is to know that poetry is a form of science.
History-Christianity is intrinsically an historical proclamation. At a particular moment in time, Christianity claims that God became man. In the present age, history is not valued. Few Americans can name the year that the Constitution was signed or deduce the number of years that transpired between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In the face of widespread historical illiteracy, Christianity proclaims an historical gospel, rooted in a place, a time, and a culture. It also says that God works in history, and history is important because events happen in order. One can be a first rate physicist and know nothing about the history of physics-one has to know the products of that history, but one does not have to know when they were produced. For people engaged in the project of theology, history is very important. As the famous Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan observed, "Concepts have dates."
Tomorrow, I am going to consider the three world views that have dominated the west since Christianity's emergence.