The New Theology

So we're here at the end of another term. On Wednesday, I had a long tutorial and we went over a bunch of theological points of interest. Of course, we talked about all kinds of other spiritual and personal stuff too, but we had a good theological chinwag - I think Richard appreciates it actually, and I hope it gives him a hard time. As he said to H the other day, "Simon always gives me a run for his money." Sometime this week I'm going to take one of the other tutors a bottle of wine and we'll put the church to rights.

One of Richard's predictions is that in the future I'll really engage with Barth, and that I'll come to love the Church Dogmatics. Now I don't really care much for Barth: my view is that theology has to have a purpose, and justifying evangelicalism over and above Roman Catholicism and liberal Protestantism just isn't a good enough purpose, really. Certainly not worth spending your life working on, when you could be doing things for God instead. And you're welcome to expound the doctrine of God, but six million words is either not enough or way too many. I reckon the church should have told Barth that one of the sections in II/i should be "The Love of God", and if he ever completed writing it, we could burn him as a heretic.

So I'm becoming very apophatic in my theology - if you've got a lot to say, say nothing. But, you know, I have this feeling that Richard knows me better than I know myself - and he certainly knows the theological quest better than I do - and so I think he's probably right.

Anyway, this is not supposed to be a post about old theology, it's supposed to be about the new theology, how theology will look once the postmodern generation have finally got it into their hands. Open Source Theology recently asked what a "redeemed theology" would look like, and I have a few ideas on this front. Gazing into my crystal ball, this is what I see the future of theology to be:

• The new theology must be directed. It is not going to be an academic theology that has no application; it must be all application. From my point of view, the new theology will be missiology, but I'm a missiologist and I'm biased. But mission's a good enough application; it'll be something like that. The danger it must avoid is that it flees so far from being so God-directed that man doesn't get a look-in to becoming so man-directed that God doesn't get a look-in. As I've said elsewhere:

  The "re-rooting" of the Christian message involves not merely working upwards from man's situation, nor downwards from God's situation, but takes place at the interface of the two. The Incarnation was an interface of natures: fully human, and fully divine; incarnational theology must strive to be the same.

• The new theology must be self-critical. We're not going to see it blindly making pronouncements about how it is right and other Christian traditions are not; I don't know if it will claim correctness over non-Christian traditions. It probably will, but not without questioning the value of "correctness" in the evaluation of religions. This was the big problem with Barth: he correctly identified religion as unbelief, but still worked within the sphere of religious dogmatics. The new theology will not be dogmatic, but will borrow from Bosch's sense of "creative tension." It will be happy to leave questions unanswered, to admit what it does not know. It will, above all, resist the urge to systematize.
• Hermeneutics and spirituality will form the twin planks of this theology. Now, big disclaimer: these are the twin planks of my theological thinking right now, so it may just be that I'm not thinking beyond my own head, but it may also be that I'm representative of the generation that will cook up this stuff. Hermeneutics because this is where the whole postmodern revolution came from: literary theory. The big question in postmodern literary theory is "how do I know what someone's words meant if I'm not them?" This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and even more difficult if the words are supposed to be your sacred text. And spirituality because (a) that's what the outside world wants rather than religion, and (b) that's what stops us from creating ethical and philosophical systems and calling them Christianity.
• The new theology will be communal and consensual. Individual scholars battling over fine points of doctrine will be out; Orthodox concepts of "the sense of the church" will be in. (This doesn't mean that the new theology will take place within an Orthodox milieu, just that the emergent leaders and all the other cool people are currently very busy plundering Orthodoxy for all the doctrines that the rest of us forgot over the past thousand years.) Ergo...

• The new theology will not be created by people like me. This is essential to grasp. My role in the new theology will be to facilitate and to document, not to create.

  Traditionally theology has been the preserve of the middle-class Anglo-Saxon male, but now the realisation has dawned that the majority of Christians do not fit in this category. Even now the WASPs have all the money and, sadly, this means that both WASP worship style and WASP theology are successfully traded on the open market for now, but I believe that in the future, the voice of the majority world church will be more and more heard.

  This is great, because these guys - the BECs of Latin America, say, or the post-Catholic churches in India; not to mention the multifaceted church expressions coming out of Africa - are theologizing as they go along, meaning that their theology is always entirely directed in the sense mentioned above. The European/North American church will not give up its power willingly, but it will give it up eventually, and then the new theology will really develop.

  In a post-imperialistic world, we need to be very careful how we encourage the development of theologies from the majority world. If I say "No, I don't think we should do it your way", I'm obviously being imperialistic; If I say "Yes, I think we should all do it your way" I'm equally imposing my view on everyone else in an imperialistic way.

  So the new theology will grow a diversity of theological ideas. The place of the white middle-class Anglo-Saxon like myself will no longer be that of the conductor of an orchestra but of the gardener of an arboretum: we do not tell the plants where to grow, but we feed them, nurture them, allow them to grow as they will, and help them to harmonize with their surroundings.

Now don't get scared, this won't affect the churches for a while - theology at the developer end doesn't tend to hit the user end for about a hundred years or so, and we're hardly at the developer end yet. But something is going to happen; I can hear the rumblings already. The postmodern movement in the West is forcing it to head East, and the numerical and strategic dominance of the South is forcing it to head North. There are interesting times ahead, and I'm merely privileged to be around while it happens...

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