"So What?" #1 Part 2: Grounding Theology

This is the long overdue sequel to my last entry. What I want to do is talk about why I defined theology the way I did in this post. As a refresher, I said that theology is "the cognitive, correlative process that is a part of the church's past and present experience of God."

The first problem, or so it seems to me, is to decide what grounds the discourse we call theology. What are we talking about anyway? Are we just making stuff up? Are we doing something like science, or is it something more like poetry or writing fiction? Interestingly enough, both anti-intellectual Christians and naturalist atheists tend to write off constructive theology as basically making stuff up, so this question is quite important, at least if you're someone who thinks theology is something more than that.

In my own denomination, most people tend to assume there is nothing more to theology than biblical exegesis: once we know what the Bible says about an issue, then we know what the proper Christian belief is. Then, the theory goes, if we've done our exegesis properly, the theological claims we come up with rest on the reliability of the Bible--which is to say, they are completely certain.

But for my part, this view has become more and more impossible to accept the more I've studied the books in the Bible and the history of the church. It's become more and more apparent that we all read through a lens that is necessarily quite different from the ones with which the authors wrote, meaning a truly "objective" exegesis is impossible. All interpretation is--in some way or other--creative. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't seem to me that the texts of scripture represent one, unified and coherent theological system. Deuteronomy and Job interpret suffering in markedly different ways. The book of Samuel and Kings interpret Israel's history quite differently than the Chronicler. The gospel accounts don't all fit together very neatly from a modern historical perspective.

So for these and other reasons, the biblicist concept of theology doesn't work for me. For that matter, adding in "Tradition" as an authoritative guide to interpreting scripture also doesn't work for me, because it is even more true that the tradition does not all agree, is always read through a lens, etc. All adding in "tradition" does is to pile more books ontop of books, and I have become convinced that a foundation of books cannot succeed in grounding theology.

So what are we left with? For that matter--some might ask--if I don't think those things succeed in grounding theological claims, then why am I still a Christian? My answer is this: while those texts don't provide an epistemic norm--that is, a perfect guide for beliefs--they do provide a new kind of life that I can only make sense of by being a Christian, by immersing myself in and wrestling with the practices, the creeds, and, yes, the texts, of the Christian tradition, and by participating in the community that receives these various elements as a means of grace and new life. So at the end of the day, what grounds Christianity for me is not the epistemic reliability of a set of texts, but rather the experience of new life found in engaging those texts, among other things like sacraments, songs, disciplines, prayers, etc.

So, for me, Christianity is primarily an experiential thing, a kind of life experienced by a community through a tradition. Therefore, theology must be grounded in that experience. It must be centered not on either the tradition or the contemporary experience, but on the connection between the two. The best description I've come across of that connection is 'correlation.' That is to say, theology is about connecting those traditional elements with our current context.

To that I add that theology is clearly a cognitive endeavor. It is the our creative response as thinking beings to the experience of life found in the tradition. If we recognize the contextual nature of our thinking--that our cognitive response is going to be shaped by our particular location in time and space and culture--then we learn not to be dogmatic about our claims. And yet, recognizing that as human beings we experience a sort of urge to connect, to make sense of things, we cannot simply write off theology as merely subjective. There is still the need to be rigorous and coherent.

It also needs to be said that theology is more than merely a response because it also shapes our continued experience. This is the way the world of thought works: as we experience things, we attempt to form an understanding of that experience, and then our interpretation of future experiences is shaped in important ways by our understanding. Some experiences push us to modify our understanding. The process of shaping goes both ways.

That is more or less what I think theology is (for now, anyway). It's a very human sort of thing, and it doesn't lead to epistemic certainty. It is grounded in revelation only to the extent that God is involved with humanity in and through the Christian tradition. And if it is true that God is involved, that is a truth that can only be known be experience, I think.

But despite this lack of certainty, despite the fact that we can never get outside of ourselves or take off our lenses, there is reason for hope. If God is involved in things as human as the writing of scripture, our reading of scripture, in our practice of Christianity, and perhaps even in our cognitive attempts to make sense of it all, then perhaps as a part of new life we are also being led into all truth as well. This is the hope that motivates me.