The Transformative Imagination

Rethinking Intercultural Theology

George Newlands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351880961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

At the beginning of the twenty-first century there is an increasing tendency to retrenchment within the Christian churches and among other world religions. Religious fundamentalisms are on the increase. In Europe, at least, there is an accelerated decline in church membership. In theology there is a corresponding move away from addressing basic theological issues in the contemporary world, towards increasingly technical interpretation of historical tradition. This book draws on the strengths in classical liberal traditions in theology, augmented by other perspectives, to present a creative proposal for the future of theology and society. George Newlands explores the nature, scope and limits of an intercultural Christian theology, setting out a working model for a new open theology which relates theology and culture. Contributing to the cumulative effort to re-imagine faith in the contemporary world, a focus on the Christian understanding of God lies at the heart of this book. Exploring the interface between theology and particular cultural activities, The Transformative Imagination engages with politics, literature, philosophy and other humanities, and the natural sciences. The relationship between theology and the social and geographical sub-cultures which characterize human life, is explored through diverse examples which make connections and initiate dialogue. Connecting Christian theology and human rights, religion is seen to link constructively with some of the most intractable problems in contemporary global conflicts of interest. Theology is re-situated as a team player, a catalyst to facilitate dialogue in contrast to triumphalist theologies of the past.

I
THINKING INTERCULTURAL THEOLOGY

CHAPTER 1
The Quest for Intercultural Theology

Faith, Culture and Civil Society

This study explores the nature, scope and limits of an intercultural Christian theology, especially within contemporary Western society, which both respects particular commitments and facilitates dialogue between communities of belief and other dimensions of culture in society. The primary focus of the Christian understanding of God remains at the heart of the project. It is understood as part of a cumulative effort by many scholars to re-imagine faith in the modern world.

The word ‘intercultural’ is the most useful term to describe the dialogue which I want to examine. Intercultural and cross-cultural theology is most often used to describe dialogue between different religions. I shall concentrate here on the Christian religion. ‘Multicultural’ often emphasizes the heterogeneity of different ethnic groups in society. I am concerned to look for continuities while respecting the discontinuities. There is a need to go beyond fragments towards a genuinely integrative theology, while avoiding the colonization of other disciplines which has been an unfortunate characteristic of much traditional theology. ‘Intercultural’ emphasizes a relationality beyond relativism, while refusing the standardization inherent, for example, in much transnational corporate enterprise. The intercultural is closely related to interdisciplinarity, which can be pursued through many disciplines other than theology. Christian theology, through its claim to be relevant to all human well-being, has particular reason to pursue an intercultural approach.

Intercultural theology has tended in the past to concentrate much on interfaith issues and on non-Western cultures. Christian systematic theology is increasingly focused on particular Church community and confessional loyalties. The aim here is to develop a programmatic approach to theology in dialogue. There are two distinct but connected issues to be faced here. One is the interface between specific theological frameworks and particular cultural activities. An example might be the relationship between theology and English literature. Here it is naturally important to look at both sides of the dialogue. How has literature in its diverse modes understood the religious and theological imagery with which it has often worked? Only a listening theology is likely to be able to achieve a constructive engagement.

A second major issue is the relationship between theology and the social and geographical sub-cultures which characterize human life. What characteristics might a theology which arises from a community of Hispanic women in Latin America contribute to the understanding of God in other cultures, or indeed to a more cosmopolitan perspective, or are their reflections only intelligible within a local group? These questions are not of course exclusive. We live in increasingly overlapping and cosmopolitan subcultures, in which some Hispanic women also have qualifications in English literature.

In the face of such almost infinite possibility for diversity it might be thought best for Christian theology to stick firmly to an agreed classical pattern of expression, which may be appropriated everywhere in the same way. It is increasingly clear that such a strategy is only effective in very limited circumstances, and is, or may be perceived to be, coercive in ways which are contrary to the nature of faith itself. Christian theology is by definition concerned for the relation of faith to the whole created order. It is equally clear that not every strategy for relating faith to culture will do.

Overview

Intrinsic to the approach is the aim both to respect cultural particularity and to facilitate dialogue between diverse cultural groups. This entails a repositioning of theology’s traditional self-understanding, to become a catalyst or facilitator in a constantly developing conversation with a wide range of disciplines.

Part I, ‘Thinking Intercultural Theology’, considers the role of theology in the postmodern era. This introductory chapter examines the need for an intercultural theology today as a collaborative effort, not least in the light of the continuing challenge of secularization. There is analysis of types of correlation between theology and culture. Chapter 2 examines the legacy of liberal theology, and evaluates the success of the recently revived perspectives of Barth and Tillich in relation to culture while avoiding the pitfalls of Kulturprotestantismus. Chapter 3 opens up the intercultural project further, in interaction with philosophical proposals from Bernstein and Berlin, and considers the ambiguities of culture, religion and talk of God.

Chapter 4 considers the collapse and retrieval of the classical hermeneutical tradition, following the explosion of emancipatory theologies and their accompanying new awareness of cultural diversity. This leads to Chapter 5, focusing more sharply on the specification for an intercultural theology. The profound, though fluctuating, impact of the secular, together with social fragmentation and the need for political engagement, renders traditional theological triumphalism obsolete. There need be no contradiction between effective political action and theological engagement with the cultural and the aesthetic

Part II, ‘Focusing Intercultural Theology’, focuses upon the specific topics of human rights and Christology. It develops the structure of a theology which draws integral connections between political engagement and transcendental affirmation. Chapter 6 is devoted to a critical study of the relationship between theology and human rights. This reflects a distinctively but not exclusively Christian approach to God and the world. It points to a God who is not the dominating subject of triumphalist theology, yet remains the creative source and goal of human life. Unapologetic stress on the humane and on human rights is the hallmark of a theology which is neither tribal nor supracultural but intercultural.

Chapter 7 focuses on the distinctively Christian contribution to the understanding of the human through Christology, and the relation of a postmodern theology to morality.

Part III, ‘Integrating Intercultural Theology’, is devoted to the tensions between traditions and interruptions, transculture and sub-culture. Interdisciplinary dialogues are examined in Chapter 8, on cases in theology and literature, philosophy and intellectual history in the humanities, and Chapter 9, on theology and science, underscores the differing impacts of the pure sciences and technology on the theology/culture interface. Chapter 10 draws together the findings of the section in the application of postfoundational theory to the intercultural, to suggest a theological perspective which is metamodern but not anti-modern.

Chapter 11 sums up the project, reflecting on the mystery of God in a critical culture, as a credible way of speaking about divine action and about God.

Facilitation and Resistance

Discussion of theology, culture and society often lacks specificity and criteria. It has to take account both of cultural pluralism and of relations between the aesthetic and the practical. Theology and culture are not separate worlds: there has always been mutual interaction and critique. There is no simple key to this issue, with which theology continues to struggle – in a classical tradition from Aquinas and Augustine to Schleiermacher and Troeltsch. What may critical theology contribute (a) to the understanding of God in a pluralistic culture, and (b) to the resolution of conflict in specific social and political issues, involving human rights and values? Can theology help us distinguish in practice between legitimate and illegitimate strategies for change and development in cultural and social structures? How is the dimension of religion and transcendence to be appropriated in a constructive way in the modern world?

As well as listening, Christian theology has an obligation to make a distinctive contribution of its own in dialogue with culture.¹ What exactly does it have to offer? The widespread turn in Christian theology from religion to Christology as the central Christian theological motif in the twentieth century suggests the possibility of a fresh critical hermeneutical exploration of the symbols of the Christian tradition. The results of this exploration may then be correlated to an analysis of human values within conflicting cultural frameworks. Concepts of facilitation and resistance may be explored as potential paradigms for a transformative theology. There is an increasingly wide gulf to be bridged between many of the professional concerns of the guild of systematic theologians and the major issues, ethical and political, which often polarize society.²

What is offered here is not an overarching postfoundational theory of the relation of theology to culture, but a series of suggestions which may facilitate the practice of an intercultural theology, and provide pointers in the direction of a deeper interaction. Our concern is not just with the inculturation of traditional theologies in different cultures, but with a critical interaction between tradition and culture. Not every contextual theology is an adequate theology. Our concern will not be for the local but for the best perspective. Theology needs to benefit, always, from the whole Christian tradition, from conservative and liberal elements, but in a self-critical framework.

Culture and Society

Theology, as traditionally conceived, is a function of the Church. Faith as the Christian faith is the logic of redemption, the self-accountability of Christian community. But redemption is intimately connected with creation. Faith is given, in Christian understanding, not as therapy for the individual or even the elect group, but for the service of all humanity. Grace is given to be given away, and God is love, characterized by generosity and hospitality. Grace should be central to intercultural theology.

Theology reflects on God as creator and reconciler. In the sphere of humanity, creation involves culture. It encompasses the communal habits, quest for meaning and behaviour of people in groups. What is culture? There have been numerous definitions, all of them themselves embedded in particular cultural contexts, and themselves limited and somewhat arbitrary. In his famous definition of 1871, E.B.Tylor held that ‘Culture or civilisation, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’(Primitive Culture, I,1).

Geertz (1973,5) put it like this:

Believing, like Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’

Culture is about webs of meaning. Geertz explores the task of ‘thick description’, of setting down the meanings which particular social actions have for those who perform them, and then asking what these meanings tell us about the societies in which they are found, and about social life as such.

Among the hundreds of studies of the nature of culture among cultural anthropologists and others, definitions have been the subject of fierce controversies, not least those around Marxist theories of culture. Surber (1998) provides a useful overview of critical discourses on culture. He distinguishes the critical discourse of liberal humanism, the tradition of hermeneutics, the materialist critique, based on Marx, the psychoanalytic critique, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, formalist and structuralist analyses, postmodern discourses and present-day cultural studies. Schafer (1998) characterizes culture as embracing holism, context, value, identity, conflict, criticism, vision, creativity and power. An intercultural theology will be open to learning from each of these critiques, without necessarily being committed exclusively to any of them, in the world of late modernity.

The study of culture should enable us to understand the world in which we live a little more clearly. It should also help us to see ourselves in better perspective:

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves among others, as a local example of the form human lives have taken locally: a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes. (Geertz, 1983, 16)

The importance of trying to see ourselves in perspective, however difficult this may be, is obvious in view of theology’s traditional tendency to triumphalism:

The objection to anti-relativism is not that it rejects an it’s-all-how-you look-at-it approach to knowledge or a when-in-Rome approach to morality, but that it imagines they can only be defeated by placing morality beyond culture and knowledge beyond both. This, speaking of things which must needs be so, is no longer possible. If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home. (Geertz, 2000, 65)

There is a continuing dialogue between theology and culture. It takes different forms, is explicit or implicit, and depends on a continually changing perception of both theology and culture. Talk of God and experience of divine presence is articulated within particular cultures in different ways. There is always a new quest for a better understanding of God in each generation and in each cultural group. However, the search for appropriate relationships between theology and culture has never been easy. There have been patterns of correlation and patterns of conflict. There is need for connections between theologies and cultures. There is need, too, for awareness of disjunction and difference.

In the search for understanding of the theology/culture dimension there has been much unclarity, and with this an understandable tendency to scepticism, and to abandonment of the issue in favour of more obviously profitable projects. But the relationships between theology and culture remain unavoidable for any theology which aims to relate faith to the world outside the church in which the great mass of humanity lives.

Theology is also related to society. Society and culture overlap. In society we are dealing with the institutions, the commercial, political, economic, legal and geographical institutions by which life and work are determined, from leisure industries to town planning. Each of these institutions has its own cultures and sub-cultures, considered in microcosm and macrocosm. Within societies there are debates about social and moral values, about the nature of human goods and human dignity. The relationship between church and society has always been an evolving one. The last century has seen continuing debate about these issues, for example from the critical realism of Reinhold Niebuhr to the emancipatory theologies and the debates about civil society and the public square in North America. Conflict over religion and family values has led to ‘culture wars’ in which the ethical content of Christian faith is hotly disputed. The conflict over specific social and political issues – capitalism, family values, racial discrimination – has usually been more focused than the most intangible and amorphous reflection on ‘culture’. But the cultural divides set the tone which affects the specific social and political agendas. A theology which understands God as creator as well as reconciler has to pay serious attention to the different levels and textures of human relationship, at cultural and social, communal and individual levels. Not least, it has to reappraise its understanding of God as the source of faithful engagement in the world.

As human activity using human language theology can never be acultural. Christian theology understands revelation, knowledge of God which can come only from God, as part of its basis. Revelation comes in, with and under human reflection and activity, and is integral to the dynamic process of critical engagement with culture. A dialectical understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine is central to the long-standing discussion of the connections between theology, religion and religious studies.

I have reflected elsewhere on a culture of generosity. Generosity implies justice and fairness, and going beyond what is required in giving. It implies hospitality, spontaneity, grace. It needs to have its own content; it has to have something worthwhile to give. Christian faith contributes the gospel of God in Jesus Christ. But if it is to be saved from elitism, generosity also requires mutuality and reciprocity. Generosity is paradigmatically open to listen, to learn, to share mutual hospitality. That is not always easy. Faith seeks to move forward by reflecting imaginatively on all the paradigms of the past, in their continuities and disjunctions.

Theologians sometimes need to reappraise their roles in relation to culture and society. They may have to learn to play more convincingly and effectively as contributors to a team, while at the same time making a decisive and distinctive contribution. Theology may not often be done by a group, as in the natural sciences, but it should not be done in isolation. We must be willing to learn from society and culture as well as contribute to it. We may have to acknowledge that our internal tradition has sometimes got things wrong, and has been rescued despite itself from outside. Critics often point to what they see as the appalling record of Christendom, and they note that the Church has often changed its mind on theological and social issues only in the face of overwhelming rejection of its tradition from society beyond the religious community.

It is possible to see this dialectic as the providential divine correction of theology from the created order. To use one popular ...