Where Everybody's Crazy

Well, of last year, really. But it's something that I keep getting drawn back to. Martin and Hazel are doing great stuff in Argentina, and thinking hard too. This is a part of one of their blog posts that really spoke to me:

And I'm also reminded of a Martin Joseph song from the 1980's called "Treasure the question". As a new young Christian student in the late 1980's the one thing that our teaching definitely did not encourage us to do was to "treasure the question". As good modernist evangelicals, questions were to be used as launching pads into pre-prepared answers, and in spiritual whist, the pre-prepared answer was deemed to trump the question and end the game. Suggestions that the pre-prepared answer might not be entirely adequate in the face of real life, often resulted in the questioner being treated as an embarrassment, and subjected to "ministry", or being isolated altogether for fear of contamination. I think that one of the most positive things that the postmodern era can bring is about being able to "treasure the question" and enjoy the adventure of not knowing, with honesty and authenticity.

Apart from the obvious show of good taste in Christian music, this post says something important about postmodern theology as well. I think there's something in the ability to "treasure the question" that's good for our integrity, too - the ability to say that we don't have all the answers, only God does. It keeps us humble.

A mate asked me a couple of days ago what I thought about postmodernism. He'd been reading some books that said it was a really bad thing from a Christian perspective, but he felt that the books were so negative that they showed a lack of love. At that point I know that something has already gone wrong. I was reminded of Brian Maclaren in "The Church on the Other Side" who said something like: the church can resist postmodernism, but it's like resisting change in the English language. You can do it if you want, but you'll just end up sounding irrelevant.

See, the really, really ironic thing is that the postmodern ethos can trace its roots right back to the Reformation. Those naughty, naughty ideas of rejecting a centralised authority figure and allowing every man to determine his own interpretation of the truth, those are the outcomes of the Reformation that we Evangelicals particularly pride ourselves on after breaking away from the Catholic church. If we then reject postmodernism, we're saying that it's OK for us to do but it's not OK if the world does it, and that's not good.

There's a lovely site called Christian Agnostic, and I go there for inspiration from time to time. Because that's me: a Christian agnostic. I don't have all the answers. There's an amazing amount I don't know. I know not why God's wonderous grace to me has been made known. This is anathema to the modernist cause, which must be able to draw a straight line from the question to the answer. I know not how this saving faith to me He did impart. This is anathema to soteriology, which needs to develop and baptise a certain interpretation of the cross. I know not how the Spirit moves convicting men of sin. I get out there and witness to him, but I know that I cannot persuade people, and I know that if it is the Spirit's job then I am not the one to ram grace down their throats. I know not what good or ill may be reserved for me.

But I know whom I have believed, and I'm persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him until that day.

And until that day, I'll treasure the questions. I hope you will too.

"I take a moral stance; you are an intolerant bigot; he is being prosecuted under section 5 of the Public Order Act."

This story confuses me. There's obviously something more to it than meets the eye, and I don't know what - on further digging I find that despite the UCCF saying:

We would not dream of telling a Muslim group or a political society how to elect their leaders or who could or could not become a member

it's only one of the two Christian groups on campus that was affected, and one other Christian group and other religious groups - indeed, the Islamic group, who will presumably have had the same religious objections - have complied with the new regulations. So it's not as simple as that. Something else is going on. Is it actually direct persecution? Or is it just another example of a UCCF group manufacturing themselves a persecution by being unnecessarily arsey? I honestly don't have enough information.

But it got me thinking - is it possible to take a moral stance without being an intolerant bigot? Iqbal Sacranie got a severe Tatchelling recently, and a visit from the police, for expressing an Muslim view on homosexuality. I'm not interested in the whole "we're becoming a police state, freedom of speech, moo moo moo" thing; the fact is that we are in a postmodern society, something for which I am usually very grateful, and this means that the right to be whoever you want to be without someone judging you on it is non-negotiable.

Instead, I'm more interested in looking at if there are ways to make moral and ethical pronouncements (whether a third party considers them justified or not) in a postmodern society. Can there be a postmodern ethics? Maybe there simply can't, and that's the end of the story. Maybe you just have to be an intolerant bigot if think there's a moral code that others should live by. But are there ways of communicating and "recommending" ethics that don't end with people shooting the messenger not the message? I don't know.

Man, heavy blogging today.

Update: I have in my hand "Postmodern Ethics"; so presumably, it is possible.

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...