(Ir)religiosity

You know that another semester is gearing up when I don’t have time to write up a blog post.  I have been writing though.  One of my tasks this semester in my constructive theology class is to comment upon various theological concepts and to, as much as I am suspicious of the enterprise, develop a systematic of sorts.  So I will be sharing some of my statements periodically in hopes that they will spark some conversation.  I hope you will excuse the more scholarly form and academic tone.  Keep in mind that all this is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. I have no interest in dogmatism or I wouldn’t be studying theology; I’d be enrolled in a “Bible School.”  Each section begins, in true Barthian form, with a summary sentence of the following discussion.  I look forward to the dialogue.

The locus of Christian authority and the centerpiece of revelation lies in the God who was revealed in the  incarnation of Jesus Christ — Scripture bears witness to this reality; as such the bible is the primary source of revelation and it becomes the contextual word of God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as it is responsibly interpreted and faithfully performed in the community called church.

God is the locus of Christian theological authority, more specifically, the God that was revealed in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ. But what is the nature of that authority? Often in public theologizing appeals to religious authority are made in order to validate and legitimize specific truth claims to simply settle the issue in hand. In that sense, such authorities are more authoritarian than they are authoritative. This is problematic because theology, as a finite discipline, “is always potentially vulnerable”¹ and therefore can make no completely absolute or objective claims. Authority in the strict sense must therefore be abandoned lest theology be relegated to the sphere of modern, post-Enlightenment science, a move that has become all too popular since Descartes and Kant. Furthermore, since religious and theological authorities always require responsible interpretation, the order and placement of authority in the line of normative argumentation must be reversed so that it is not at the end of theologizing as a validator of certain claims, but rather at the beginning as the starting point from which all theologizing emerges.²

What then, are the sources of theological authority? Scripture is without a doubt the prime source of authority and the primary source of God’s special revelation insofar as it points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not, however, the only source nor does it exist in a vacuum; like any other text, it requires responsible interpretation. In our time the claim that “Scripture interprets Scripture” without any subjective mediation is wholly untenable and makes for a wholly irresponsible hermeneutic. Here the so-called “Wesleyan quadrilateral” is helpful. If Scripture is the primary source of theological authority and the locus of Christian revelation then tradition, reason, and experience — helpful sources of authority and revelation in their own right — constitute a sort of hermeneutical triad by which Scripture is responsibly interpreted in various contexts and performed, that is made incarnate, by various communities.

Through responsible, communal interpretation, Scripture becomes the Word of God and is thus authoritative for Christian thought and practice. As Karl Barth writes, “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His [sic] Word, to the extent that He [sic] speaks through it.”³  Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the text becomes the word of God as it is read, interpreted, and performed by the church. This does not mean, however, that the text (each passage, chapter, or verse) as a single, fixed, objective, and determined meaning for all places and in all times. Such an illusion is unsustainable for at least three main reasons.⁴  First, as finite persons each of us is socially, historically, and culturally situated in a such a way that is hardly impartial, disinterested, or purely objective. Each person, whether they are completely conscious of it or not possesses what Heidegger calls a “hermeneutic pre-understanding,” which is inextricably woven into the fabric of that person’s subjectivity and serves as a sort of “implicit fore-structure [guiding] all interpretation in advance, upon which all interpretation draws, [and] by which every inquiry which is anything more than an ‘unphenomenological construction’ is nourished.”⁵   Even if there is such a thing as “objectivity” no human being would be able interpret it purely and without bias or prejudice. In other words, we are human, all too human. A white, American male from the rural south will read the bible very differently than a woman in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether Christians are making room in their theology for the bible to become the word of God for both persons, perhaps with different meanings, purposes, and ramifications. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Robert C. Neville, A Theology Primer (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1991), 13. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, edited and translated by Thomas Forsyth Torrance and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York, New York:  T&T Clark, 2004). [↩]
4. There are many more reasons which draw upon the insight of 20^th century continental thought, but this is not the place to explore them in depth. [↩]
5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God:  A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 113. [↩]

This is awesome.  A mashup of the unedited Dark Knight audio with video from Toy Story 2.  Brilliant.

[Ht. Marko]