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…A Bit More Before We Jump In Together

 
Hello again! In the first installment of this column I wrote a bit about my Mennonite background and the impact it has had on me to live a good part of my young adulthood in Communist Hungary and Socialist Austria. Coming back to America in the last couple years of the Reagan Administration was a real shocker for me, and in many ways I am still adjusting to the changes that took place during those few years.

This was also true on the religious side of things. There was a clearly conservative, evangelical backlash that took place during those years in the public sphere. In Europe, I had read about groups like the Moral Majority being formed in America, but I could not imagine the strength of their impact. While the Mennonite church became increasingly conservative and identified with American Evangelicalism, my views as I returned a newly minted theologian had been moving in a more or less diametrically opposed direction.

For one thing, my experiences abroad had convinced me strongly that any future theology that was worth its salt had to be not just thoroughly ecumenical, but also thoroughly interfaith in it fundamental perspective. That is to say, it was not enough to formulate an entire theology and then tack on an appendix or two about the importance of ecumenical and interfaith work. Rather, an adequate theology had to begin with the recognition that we all inevitably see what we see through a glass darkly, to use the Pauline phrase. My understanding of this was based on language studies that situate language as a product of human interaction and development. No matter how much we might want to see it otherwise, we have no way of talking about, or even thinking about, the world except through the use of language. One text interprets another.

While this was not too difficult to think about in terms of literature, it was a more startling experience to begin thinking of authoritative and sacred texts in this light. Our authoritative and sacred texts are also constructs of language, and thus inextricably a product of human beings. The authority and sacredness they contain in not contained in them inherently, but rather only in the authority given to them and the sacredness in which they are held by particular communities of human beings. Thus also, the language of theology, of speaking about God, is also a product of human interaction and development, and carry authority only as it is given authority with particular communities of human beings.

Though I eventually learned that this train of thought was being called Postmodernism, I was brought to it more indirectly and I have some strong disagreements with many points of many postmodern writers. For me, it was simply a recognition that we humans must struggle with an imagination that constantly leads us to want to describe that which is going on “outside the box” that confines us, yet in doing so we must remain inside the box, and have only tools that were developed inside the box for expressing our imaginative leaps.

Once we have digested this simple description of the human condition, it becomes clear why none of us can claim more authority than another in speaking about God. When we do so, we are usurping a “God’ Eye View” of the human condition, that is, pretending a perch outside of the human condition from which to view it and make pronouncements about it. That is rather foolish self-inflation on one hand, and more or less defining idolatry on the other.

Yet we do imagine and have experience of transcendence, even if but partial and fleeting, And this is exactly why we must begin theological with an epistemologically humble attitude, willing to share our truth, but just as ready to learn the truth of others and be willing to criticize our own truth in the course of learning from others. The whole will always be more than the sum of its parts. This, it appeared to me, and still does, as a simple application of The Golden Rule, offering to others an equal measure of dignity and respect for their views and experiences of life as we would hope to be offered by others for our own.

I hope this short introduction in these two columns gives you at least some sense from where I am coming. I wrote about this already in my book, Theology in Postliberal Perspective (1990) and since that time I have continued to work away at clarifying this approach to human understanding and knowledge more generally, developing it into what I have been calling a Theory of Generative Death Anxiety, which I will be presenting in subsequent columns in thesis form, one thesis for each column. My hope is that we will have a good time discussing each thesis as it appears. I want and need your input into this developing set of ideas. And maybe we can eventually all come up with a much better and more catchy name for it!

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