The task of the theologian
as we enter
the twenty first century

Being originally an essay in MA Theological Understanding of Contemporary Society

Note: This is based on an essay produced for my MA course Theological Understanding of Contemporary Society to a title As we approach the twenty first century, what in your opinion is the task of the theologian? As probably my final academic essay as a student I wanted it to be as experimental as possible within the rules of essay writing. Furthermore, within the theology course I wanted to criticise the whole enterprise of modern theology as an parody of an academic subject, in that its prime purpose seems to be to keep Church doctrine going while the thinking world all around it has utterly changed.

Rereading it the experiment only partly works, and it is a tough read, but I have added to it to help the reader where there are italics. The bold is original text, and illustrates the contrast between his male gender theology of holding on to the old scheme despite the use of postmodern devices and her female gender theology which lets Christianity pluralise into something much broader through the experience of postmodern thought.

ABSTRACT

Two broad strategies respond to the crisis in the credibility of theology especially relating to high modern or postmodern plurality. One involves devices of retreat to hold on to once apparent revelation or tradition in Christianity and the other embraces difference and a fully opening out of metaphors still with a commitment to critical and creative rationality.

Adrian Worsfold

Originally June 1997

By the end of the nineteenth century denominational varieties and biblical criticism affected theology but Darwinism provided the huge challenge to theological method. Writing twenty four years after the publication of The Origin of Species (1994), Charles Beard noted that although the hypothesis of evolution was presented for "minute enquiry", in fact:

...with quite unexampled rapidity the idea of evolution has established itself, not only in biology, but almost every other department of human thought. What was a few years ago a daring supposition in one one branch of investigation, has risen to the dignity of a general method... (Beard, 1927, 392)

Yet he was still optimistic for theology.

...again it is obvious that what is really involved is not the abolition of Divine action upon matter, but a change in the method of its operation. No form in which the doctrine of evolution can be put dispenses with a primus mobile... (394)

So the purpose of theology and the role of the theologian seemed secure.

Now science, philosophy, sociology, social anthropology, economics and politics have their own world communicative views and need make no reference to theology. The theologian has nothing essential for any explanation of the workings of the world.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. (Dawkins, 1996, 54)

So the real problem is with the status, purpose and direction of theology itself. There are a number of choices. One is to protect the old beliefs and their scientific, historical, philosophical and ethical elements. The problem is outlined by W. Donald Hudson:

There are generally-held, regulative beliefs, common to believers and unbelievers alike, says MacIntyre, but Christianity does not conform to them. Therefore, what a believer has to do, in order to make his religion believable, is 'to supply a social context which is now lacking and abstract a social context which is now present'. In other words, he has to suppose the rational system is other than it really is... On this view, Christianity demands an out of date physics and out of date ethics to make it credible. But this very fact makes it incredible. For the rational system of beliefs cannot be tinkered with just to suit the convenience of believers. (Martin et. al., 1980, 94)

Such a theologian must be condemned to social sectarianism.

Another approach is to try to combine inherited theological terms and science as does John Polkinghorne (1986, 1988). This seeks out oppositions to "common sense" in both trinitarian paradoxes and quantum matter-energy. As Daphne Hampson well argues, this is done either by beginning with doctrinal inheritance or by bad analogies of falsifiable science against unfalsifiable dogma. (Hampson, 1996, p32-34).The academic optimism of the past then is being replaced by the shrinking rationality and communicability of a lost older world.

Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells (1)

Astrology parallels Christianity in this. It reaches out to the world with its claims, and has a long world history. It contains suggested science elements. It has, apparently, trained professionals who are more "reliable" than the mass outpourings of newspaper columns using detailed charts and established knowledge. People get meaning and help from the encounters with practioners. We know, however, that the basis of such knowledge has moved on. Traditional theologians are in exactly the same parallel conundrum in that, whilst they are more thoughtful than the minor outpourings of pulpits and can offer cultural comment, they are still linked with the cult.

In fact, it is not just a question of whether we can 'understand' stories which are receding steadily into a lost world of the past, but whether we can go on believing - as we have to do if this is to be a case of revelation - that the stories are protean enough to communicate to twentieth century readers lost in a maze which changes all the time, and in ever more terrifying ways. (Kent, 1982, ix)

A larger religious system continues when its images are powerful enough to renew themselves. Kent's study of modern historical theology suggests that:

...if Christianity is nearing the end of its main, public line, this is because it has exhausted ways of keeping its public images alive. (ix)

Therefore some theologians attempt to shift the ground of theology to take account of high modernism or postmodernism. They allow more general and accepted modes of discourse to govern the basis of theology rather than the world view once held by everyone in the religion. So Some reuse Jurgen Habermas's modernist The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987), which is a Frankfurt School style response to pluralism and the differentiation of "lifeworlds" of meaning cultures. As in Marxism, the "system" keeps an economic base to cultural lifeworlds. Unlike in Marxism, however, culture is important. But it has become separated into private and public, a decline in the old sacred canopies and undermined traditional given moralities. There are similarities with Berger's analysis (1967, 1974). Habermas's solution to the contradictions of current institutional and ideological arrangements which produce legitimation crises, and hegemony, and the clash of rationalities within such culture, is the intellectual's rationality of communication and conversation. The normative claims of religion are lost as are its integrative functions based on old authorities and inheritances. Therefore the only Truth now is conviction by the best argument in freedom although this modernist approach remains as a case for Truth.

Nevertheless, some theologians use this. To fit in with this scheme and method, Francis Shussler Fiorenza (Browning, Fioerenza, 1992, p75-77) points to theology's transformation by its uncoupling from traditional mythology and cosmology, its movement away from traditional authorities and towards a universalised anthropology, and that religious symbol systems are ethically evaluated and reinterpreted. Theology can thus continue to communicate widely. Jurgen Habermas himself in a wide ranging reply (226-248) accepts the attempt to separate theology and religion but raises the issue of whether this leaves Christianity intact.

...the more that theology opens itself in general to the discourses of the human sciences, the greater is the danger that its own status will be lost in the network of alternating takeover attempts. (Browning, Fioerenza, 1992, p231)

The price at this modernist level could well be Habermas's preference for a rationality based around methodological atheism. It is parallel to pluralism of world views producing the 'Homeless Mind' (Berger, 1974) and therefore for Habermas at the general level of dialogue. An alternative would be plural language games and only ad hoc alliances for discourse. As Gellner (1992, p.37) says, it is one step from the Frankfurt School (and indeed Berger) to postmodern hermeneutics, of which he is very critical.

As we approach the twenty first century a number of theologians note the emergence of high modernity or postmodernity. Pluralism intensifies so that truth itself becomes relativised into the process of language (away from Habermas's modernist truth maintaining communication) with a loss of the old objective-subjective division. Methodological non-realism (not atheism as such) becomes significant here where rationality is radically uncertain.

The consequence seems to be, metaphorically, a his and her split. His theology remembers the old tunes: doctrines are maintained as central even during an encounter with postmodernity which shifts the way of understanding them. This is one possible method or task. Her theology, on the other hand, becomes increasingly diverse, where a Christian inheritance is joined by other (e.g., Pagan, Buddhist, Hindu-like and secular) elements. It implies plurality of the most diverse kind, including facing the challenge of dialectic and "differance" postmodernity. This is another possible method or task.

His theology is all about preservation and retreat. It was asserted with Barth. Orthodoxy now involves an increasingly little relationship to the conversation of human knowledge or culture. God became completely and absolutely distant. Thus was a seed sown to this use of postmodernity because from this Hans W. Frei put meaning into biblical narrative without objective reference and George Lindbeck followed on with an inherited regulative doctrinal and traditional language in order to continue to define an existing community. In other words, God's distance and non-objective relativism met. There is no historical real, its just a community following a faith stance in itself. So community follows text, that's it:

The meaning of the text must not be esoteric: not something behind, beneath or in front of the text; not something that the text reveals, discloses, implies or suggests to those with extraneous metaphysical, historical or experiential interests. It must be rather what the text says in terms of the communal language of which the text is an instantiation. (Lindbeck, 1984, 120)

With this possibly ecumenical (he decides!) tradition, he wants churches to:

...socialize their members into coherent and comprehensive religious outlooks and forms of life. (126)

After summarising the sociology of pluralism he states that churches in fact are not regulative as he recommends but allow the pursual of the "commodity" (his put down because it is of the individualism he despises) of individual quests.

Would that they did! Rather, churches appear doctrinally fossilised, do socialise, regulate, and are increasingly sectarian (Lindbeck does not seem to want to pay this price). Even if it is language and not cognitive truth, the motive is the same as the sectarian's: protection of the tradition, to even pickle it. This is opposed by more open theologians:

My chief criticism of this position is that while it rightly stresses the formation of into a religious community, it neglects the other necessity of reforming the tradition. (McFague TeSelle, 1993, 240)

In any case active languages mix and match, and only then do they become successfully and openly regulative. As Daphne Hampson says:

I find it possible both to say that religion is a response to something that is experiential and also to acknowledge that experience can never be separated from our linguistic and cultural matrix. (Hampson, 1996, 316)

Postliberal approaches of the regulative kind reject proper enquiry. Enquiry exists from properly open critical realist liberalism through to diverse and semi-Christian postmodernism. Postliberal pickling should bring academic discredit.

In theological terms, there is no doubt that intellectually the more radical approaches have won the day. The clearest evidence of that is that there are virtually no new substantial and intellectually attractive statements of traditional Christian belief which counter successfully the well-established criticisms of it....

Many people are still prepared to be interested in fundamental questions like the existence of God, the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the basis of morality, not to mention the very nature of language and all issues raised by 'post-modernism'. But are the churches? There is little evidence that they are. All the signs are that they are concerned above all with the routine of 'business as usual', 'proclaiming the Gospel', being the churches as they have ever been....

Without a coherent intellectual foundation, what defence is there to the charge that much Christian teaching is brainwashing and indoctrination and that in ethos Christianity has become one more ideology - a closed society run along lines laid down by those who choose to belong to it? (Bowden, 1993, 82-83)

Real enquiry does not keep going round the same old roundabouts, to nod to plurality to pursue devices to hang on to a previous age's doctrine.

Liberal theologians were committed, as long as they wanted to remain theologians in the Christian tradition, to the belief that western religious thought and behaviour must stem from the Bible and the Church in history, whatever other sources were drawn on in addition. They were like politicians who perpetually proposed legislative changes which somehow never reached the statute-book. (Kent, 1982, 130)

We end up with the kind of nonsense from John Robinson who wanted "Honesty to the story-line wherever it may lead" (Robinson, 1980, 72) but does not as he stated beforehand:

...I want to hold to the irreducability of incarnation as a distinctive, perhaps the distinctive, Christian category, while at the same time sitting loose to many ways of stating it which have come to be associated with traditional orthodoxy (60).

His Church theology with interests in preservation should be confined to seminaries. But truly academic theology, if it is to be proper enquiry, must be pluralistic, or its existence is privilege and historical hangover.

A modern Unitarian hymn suggests openness:

Though the truth we can't perceive,
This at least we must believe,
What we take most earnestly
Is our living Deity.

Our true God we there shall find
In what claims our heart and mind
And our hidden thoughts enshrine
That which for us is Divine. (2)

A creedless Church, truly free to change, is a rather difficult principle, sociologically, to organise around, but it is the only kind consistent with theology as enquiry. Such a Church may be more theoretical than real (3). A pure open liberalism is thus a human, cultural and creative rebuilding process. It meets other faith positions, secular philosophies, political movements, and, in linguistic dialogue, changes. It is pluralist within itself, even individualist. A community identity is fluid: identities may arrange into camps (progressive and conservative). Theological language is going to be closer to poetry and literature, interested in the varieties of human meaning, even as a process of rewriting.

Still, even with plurality, there is the attempt to produce a revised system. John Hick (1989) thinks that the variety of faiths and ways all suggest that humans can transcend themselves to a Real, despite the contradictions between faiths. His is as an Hegelian synthesis. The problem is that Buddhists would certainly see Hick's Real to be another expression of Christianity. It has the quality of Martineau's theism beyond the beyond, the undefinable creative spirit within and without heard about in Unitarian churches. It makes the Trinity a specific subset of something greater - the theistic Real. It is its own package deal and an imposition on other faiths.

Using Hick's own comparisons and social anthropology it is equally possibly to say that the common religious strand is varieties of polytheism and magic, and this happens within different types of religion. Hick's Real is higher philosophy, as is so much theology, which is why Weberian sociology of religion usually classifies theology as a form of religion rather than necessarily its understanding.

Another higher philosophical approach refuses to close the system in theism. It keeps things open, plural, changable and unresolved. The fictional Professor Oldteaser debating with Miss Awdy rather well states its method.

OLDTEASER: ...That's dialectic. Negation is affirmation. Coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). Isn't it exciting?

MODERN WOMAN: I suppose so.

OLDTEASER: Of course it is. And you have made the right beginning in negation. You start with the radical denial, negate that, and that negation of course posits the negation of the negation, which is the radical affirmation. Or did I put in too many negations. Never mind. The point is that you, Miss Awdy, are on the tao (way) to wisdom...

('Mercy for Miss Awdy, in a Vile Acting for the Sacred' by Walter D. Love, p243-266, in Cobb, J. B., 1970, 246)

The enemy for Mark C. Taylor is systems that unify and constrain. To make sure he achieves irreconcilable oscillating difference and diversity, he uses a number of writers who express "differance" [the postmodern spelling!] through language play, eroticism and scatology, for example drawing on George Bataille.

The relationship between cartesianism and Hegelianism suggests further aspects of the pineal eye. Speculative philosophy, I have stressed, aspires to panopticism. To realize its vision, the gaze of the philosopher must comprehend everything. Philosophy's penetrating insights are produced by a penal eye/I that disciplines and punishes everything that tries to evade its grasp and resist its control. (Taylor, 1987, 124)

The result of Bataille's eye is association with excrement:

...a scatology through which he attempts to subvert the eschatology of all speculative theology and traditional theology. While Hegel is preoccupied with securing the system "proper" by wiping or flushing away kote, Bataille struggles to close the gap through wihich the oppressed eternally returns. (126)

Thinking - penser - is associated with the belly and so the scatology and taboo breaking aims to break that reasoning which tries to encompass everything. Such is atheology is happy heterology and asymmetrical difference.

All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon. (4)

Scott Cowdell (1989, 21) thinks Mark C. Taylor's writings have a mystical flavour, and that although Don Cupitt developed a similar atheology his background of English Empiricism removes the mysticism. Indeed, one suspects Cupitt's interest in preserving something of English Anglican church ritual (Cupitt, 1989).

There is a Cupitt like result with Ernest Gellner's anthropological method. He favours constitutional religion like a constitutional monarchy. Just as the ritual and symbolism points to genuine monarchy whilst society is actually secular and unsacralised, so:

On the assumption that ritual theatre is needed, but that the 'new science' either cannot produce it, or will only produce a disastrous version, the ritual and real spheres of social life become separated. (Gellner, 1992, 91)

This might be a preferred option if we think there might be truth out there (in science etc.); but that religion is false if personally and culturally useful. So religion's activities become a theatrical drama of illusions on an atheist base, with an appearance of postmodern games and to some extent postliberal preservations. This is the argument for Catholic ritual rather than Unitarian chatter. Except for one key characteristic: entropy and transcience. All reality changes, degenerates, recreates and at the deepest level is uncertain. Quantum worlds and fractal structures are highly variable, magnifying error; ultimately the sun will burn out and the universe will either collapse or disperse away. Time will end as it began.

So we still get a kind of Humanist Pagan-Christian Buddhism. At high point is an atheology where samsara and nirvana, systematically contrasted to each other, are identical (Cupitt, 1992, 112), where one is conditioned and the other unconditioned yet are not differentiated (as both are emptiness); where nirvana to be attained cannot to be attained. Nagarjuna like and Dogen like absurdity-consequences abound. Within are gods and myths coming and going.

The myths reflect social and cultural anthropolgies, even if theism is to be illusory and difference highly significant. Her theology is human plurality. Douglas Davies (1989) suggests a human drive to spirituality, preferring process to structure of framework (25). The natural world is grounded in subjectivity, intuition, culture and therefore faith is about probabilities. Myth-doctrine is dynamic, not static. Myth is part of body-experience, and theology must be pastoral and derived from symbolism. Much must be left undefined and to be found.