"The spirit bloweth where it will. Against that there is no argument. One
can also experience (I experience it within myself) the stench of
religious language to the extent that it is not directly linked to the power of
the living spirit of God." I think you (my interlocutor) have done a nice job in
putting for us in a few words, something of the spirit of the UCC vision.
Still, unless one is going to depend on an
experimental epistemology as the center of value, and I’m not sure this is UCC
teaching, without providing some stabilizing structures to ground a
christo-centric calling. For evangelical theology it is in sola scriptura
as the final authority. As put by the astute Gordon-Cornwall theologian,
Richard Lints:
We will understand ourselves only if we first
understand Scripture. Once we understand the framework of Scripture, we
may then interpret our place in the historical unfolding of the redemptive
activity of God. The Scriptures ought to interpret the modern era rather
than vice versa. This is a lesson from which modern evangelicals might
greatly benefit (The Fabric of
Theology, p. 190)
This perhaps is even the position of
Brueggemann when powerfully pushed from the perspective of his narrative
theology, although he is also immersed in contemporary critical biblical
scholarship and is largely empathetic to it.
For WB it still remains difficult to determine whether culture
(postmodenism) or the strange new world of the Bible is the determining source
of legitimacy. While WB would wince at
the “essentialism” of Lints’ evangelical theology, he does say elsewhere that
the Scriptures are normative, although, for WB, the revelation through the
spirit comes only one verse at a time in its “funding” of secular postmodernity,
a voice that is extremely difficult to articulate, never mind legitimize in the
current era. What WB identifies is a
moment of time, and those moments can be very crucial. Still, except for a theology based on the
grounding point of the “spirit bloweth where it will,” one wonders how one can
come close to stabilizing a religious identity, and more perplexingly, perhaps,
how that plays out for the life of a congregation. I’m not rejecting such “funding” as one of
the crucial ways in which the Kairos is speaking to
modernity/postmodernity. What I want to
do is examine the implications of such an existential theology, however much it
is grounded on a certain reading of narrative theology.
What happens when we can’t hear the spirit,
or when we hear “the spirit,” what makes the voice of Christ
determinative? What grounds the choice for that
voice as opposed to another—Ghandi, Buddha, Krishna, the Jewish God without
the mediation of the Christ, the voice of secular reasoning? Does it
matter? Perhaps not so at the level of the pure indwelling of the spirit,
a place, however, that even Pentecostals cannot perpetually live, never mind
staid New England Congregationalists. Does experience (the pure
phenomenology of it as a living truth), then become the ultimate arbiter, for
not only the spirit, but for experience itself, which bloweth where it
will? On this topic, I heartily
recommend Modes of Revelation
by Catholic theologian, Avery Dulles. As
he puts it, “Scripture and tradition are not used atomistically to provide
logical premises for deducing arguments, but organically and imaginatively to
provide symbols and clues so that the mind of the believer can be ever more
fully attuned to the truth of the revelation” (p. 283).
For Dulles and Lints, the construction of
theology is a late work, essential to the development of faith in the fleshing
out of the “full meaning” (which can only be aspired to) of the Christian
revelation through the flow of historical time.
Both Lints and Dulles draw on different founding premises. However, they both press hard on the
necessity for theology as a discipline of faith and the need for grounding
faith in something more stabilizing than the ineffability of subjective experience. The key is not to minimalize the discipline
of theology, but to view such formal probings as critical tools (more formally,
heuristics) in the thinking and working through the matter of faith.
Then what are we to make of the
Incarnation? One can reject easily enough (raise the most acute of
suspicions about) any simplistic claim that the historical person Jesus of
Nazareth ever said, “I am the truth, the way, and the life.” What one
cannot do is deny that it is a core statement of the Christ Jesus of the New
Testament, in which the claim is nothing other than this Christ is God in human
flesh, and that this Christ (through grace) is accessible to those who seek
after him with all their heart, mind, strength and soul. This is a form of biblical literalism that
narrative theology cannot lightly move beyond short of denying what is
fundamental to its premises.
One may interpret this incarnational New
Testament claim in a variety of ways (and much subtlety as well as the greatest
simplicity is warranted as the spirit bloweth).
Even still, I cannot fathom how even the most “generous orthodoxy” can
equivocate on this central claim without sacrificing something essential of
such orthodoxy. (One may move beyond orthodoxy, but that is another
matter). That is, one may quibble about this and that interpretation, but I
cannot fathom how any orthodox belief can do other than accept the
Incarnation as a foundational source of Christian truth. On that, can there be equivocation? That is a question and not a statement, and
it is not a rhetorical one. Of course, unless that belief is spiritually
based, dogma, as mere words is worse than dung. But let us assume that we
have some sense of what we are speaking here and that every once in a while we
actually experience the indwelling of the holy spirit, which I view as nothing
more and nothing less than Christ consciousness speaking within and to our
consciousness, however partially and fragmentarily so. It is neither
spirit nor word alone, but spirit and word together which is essential, even as
at any given time within any given individual or community of believers,
one may prevail over the other.
This is where dogma, or more formally,
theology, as well as apologetics comes into play, to say nothing of a grappling
of the relationship of faith within the context of culture, articulated most
programmatically, perhaps in H.R. Niehbur’s (as timely as ever) Christ and Culture. More
to the point, one cannot even begin to deal with theology and apologetics in
any thorough way unless these critical topics of faith are grounded in what the
philosopher John Dewey refers to as the “cultural matrix.” For, if nothing else, the Judeo-Christian
tradition is about a faith in God moving through historical time at specific
times and places. However fictional such history may be, the Bible is a
historical-like narrative that seeks to account for the drama of human history
through the prism of God’s redemptive work in time. However apologetically and hermeneutically
construed, these dynamics of faith need to be factored in within our own
contemporary accounts, particularly for any theology that purports to be
orthodox.
Such work might be viewed as a sterile
academic exercise if the theological dimension of faith did not matter.
That it does is based on at least three assumptions:
(a)
The
practical impossibility of living in the continuous sphere of the spiritual
realm as even as one does not want to do anything that stifles such an
indwelling of the spirit of Christ.
(b)
The
compelling questions and problems that people in the pews and those who might
attend the pews have that do not beget easy answers is often the source that
drives the quest for a meaningful theology and apologetics, which are far from
merely “academic,” matters. While such
questions may or may not be posed in formal theological terms, as defined by
theologians, just by their very nature they are theological in intent in the
manner of faith seeking understanding, and understanding, at times, challenging
core faith assumptions.
(c)
The
need for the UCC to grapple more dynamically with the creative tension between
Christ and culture because it is in and through this nexus where we
reside. Given our residence as post-Constantinian Christians in the
secular city of postmodernity, it is impossible, in my view to grapple
meaningfully with faith over any extended period of time without a coming to
terms with where we are situated within the Christian drama. And how
where “we”, for whomever and however that is defined, relate to “they” whether,
they are traditional evangelical Christians or those who reject any claim of
religion at all and embrace purely secular values. Can these relations
and these nexus of situations be mediated purely in the spirit, or does it take
the full work of our collective heart, mind, strength, and soul to grapple with
these matters even in the acknowledgement of our diverse gifts? Obviously, I sense that something is
incomplete without this intentional grappling.
To press this further, the lack of willingness as a denomination to
engage in more intentionally theologically probing analysis of the human
condition within the context of faith, at this time and place, may be in part,
an unconscious desire to escape from the more radical implications of what it
may mean to believe. I offer this as a
hypothesis only, but worthy of consideration.
The Logos speaks in its own idiom. Since we do not live perpetually in that
state of blissful at-one-ness with God, formal thought about what drives us
when the spirit is more evidently active is also crucial—hence theology and
apologetics even for the experience-driven, spirit seeking UCC. When theological work is well done it forces
the writer and reader to come more acutely to terms with ultimate issues. This is why it is indispensable work—work that
all of us as lay theologians, in one form or another, need to take on both for
ourselves as individuals and collectively as the body of Christ.
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