Culture and questions (3): Synthesis
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
OK, the title says synthesis, but I’m not sure I can do this justice. Anyway, let’s see how we go. I’ve got three or four different things floating around my mind that I want to try to link. The first two are the quotes on the previous posts (from Tony Campolo and Kwame Bediako). The third is the often-referred to book by Curtis Chang: Engaging Unbelief. The fourth-ish is the experience of the early church.
So, where to start? How about Bediako and the talk The Emergence of World Christianity and the Remaking of Theology (pdf, mp3). There are many interesting things in this lecture, but I was particularly interested the idea that theological development takes place, primarily at cultural crossings, when Christianity hits a new culture:
There is, then, a symbiotic relationship between mission as “cultural crossing” and theology as the process whereby the faith appropriated is lived, embodied and communicated. In as much as the several historical shifts of the heartlands of the Christian faith, as noted earlier, have been cultural crossings, they are privileged moments for understanding the meanings inherent in the faith, that is, for the development of theology.
And why is this? Because in the interaction with new cultures, new questions and concerns come to light. And so, the church finds it has to develop theology applicable to these new areas.
But isn’t this the way the early church did theology? They don’t seem to sit down, figure things out and then find how they apply. They experience new things, were forced into new areas and quickly had to catch up theologically. (Of course, the new theology then had new applications — see Paul’s letters where theology feeds ethics. In a similar way to scientific knowledge, experience produced theory produces new application.)
I think this links nicely with Curtis Chang’s ideas in Engaging Unbelief. If you remember (and if you don’t, why haven’t you read it yet?), Chang suggests that Augustine and Aquinas took an apologetic approach that listened carefully to the stories of those around, found what the key tensions were and showed how Jesus provided the answer. It doesn’t take much of a leap to think that what they were doing was more than apologetics — it fed into theology. Certainly, that is the way their writings were used subsequently.
And this finally brings us to the Campolo quote: If we are not careful, we fail to hear the questions of our culture, the tensions in the stories of those around. We are so socialised to limit our questions to the ones our theology has already answered that we forget that others may have different concerns. And, consequently, there are “areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions”. Bediako uses this quote in the contrast between the West and non-western cultures, but I think it is equally true from different constituents of one culture.
Somehow, we need to learn to listen to the questions of our culture and of the new cultures we meet. Only then can we be servants and agents for cultural renewal (as Tim Keller phrases it).
Tags: church, culture, Engaging Unbelief (Chang)
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...