Constructive Theology

A Contemporary Approach To Classical Themes, With Cd-Rom

Paul Lakeland

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780800636838
• eBook ISBN: 9781451416299
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Coordinated by Serene Jones of Yale Divinity School and Paul Lakeland of Fairfield University, fifty of North America's top teaching theologians (members of the Workgroup on Constructive Christian Theology) have devised a text that allows students to experience the deeper point of theological questions, to delve into the fractures and disagreements that figured in the development of traditional Christian doctrines, and to sample the diverse and conflicting theological voices that vie for allegiance today.

1

God

Ellen T. Armour, Paul E. Capetz, Don H. Compier, Laurel C. Schneider (chapter editor)

A church in a big city decides to respond to the increasing number of immigrants from Muslim countries living in its neighborhood: adult education program participants begin to study Islam. Some members of the church wonder whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God or different gods.

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A seminary student, called to ministry out of her large Afrocentric church congregation, questions why her systematic theology class privileges the concepts of God that come predominantly from white Eurocentric theologians.

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A young woman who has had great difficulty establishing and maintaining good relationships begins to see the source of her problems in a childhood dominated by an abusive and violent father. Her response is to reject all language, images, and concepts for God that are male, especially those that emphasize the fatherhood of God. She finds she can no longer enter a Christian church without feeling sick to her stomach.

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A high school student taking a biology class asks his pastor, “How can we believe in a God who created the world out of nothing, when science is telling us that the cosmos evolved naturally?”

State of the Question

All theological construction comes out of and is largely shaped by particular social, political, economic, cultural, and historical dynamics. Even the kinds of questions we choose to pursue in theology are profoundly shaped by those same forces, but not in some linear cause-and-effect way. Our probing represents a much more complex and interesting interweaving of mutually dependent influences. As authors of this book, we begin to envision and discuss how we understand divinity and the sacred today. Yet in the same breath our shared commitments to theological reflection that recognizes the social location and specificity of every claim mean that we must explore what our particular investments in ideas of the divine might be. Why indeed do we seek to construct new concepts? Why now? And while we seek to keep in mind these questions of context, we can never forget that tradition has played a very strong role in shaping our present situations. So our constructive task as it relates to concepts of God for our contemporary scene also involves identifying and working with the effects of inherited concepts on the present. We remain accountable to as well as for our inherited traditions even as we may criticize or celebrate them.

Perhaps one of the most distinguishing features of our contemporary horizon resides in our understanding of language. We no longer believe that we can simply seek the best translation of traditions and doctrines into today’s parlance. For neither tradition nor our mode of expressing it is a given, inert entity. We are more aware of the structural dimensions of language and the productive dimensions of culture. These realities must be carefully scrutinized as we endeavor to articulate ideas, traditions, and doctrines in more effective, accountable, and truthful terms. Neither tradition nor present modes of interpretation and experience are objective matters; both entail particular investments and influences. The very question of where to begin our reflection, in other words, has become extraordinarily complex.

Nonetheless, we can still identify key features of this particular, millennial point in theological history. We can distinguish relevant forces that shape and give a particular meaning to the way we ask our questions here and now. We are engaged in this thinking and writing in the aftermath of the attack on New York’s World Trade Center and in the midst of the United States’ declared “war on terror,” which resulted in the invasion of Iraq. We recognize anew that ideologies of faith, coupled with global economic and military tensions and legacies of domination, demand our best and most critical work as contemporary theologians. We cannot afford to ignore the particularities of the global context that increasingly shape both our questions and the resources we have for answering those questions.

Aware of the ever-present risk of oversimplification, we might try to describe our current position in history as one characterized by pluralism, critique and retrieval of traditions, and syncretism. Theological approaches to concepts of God now develop in a context of greater religious multiplicity than perhaps ever before. Theism, for example, is not a concept that Christian theologians can take for granted any longer. This is particularly the case as the practical authority of mainstream liberal religious institutions continues to diminish in public and private life. Contemporary persons in the postindustrial West increasingly see their own spiritual lives in highly individualized, syncretistic, or post-denominational terms. The mainline denominations, so closely associated with the cultural privilege of Protestantism in Europe and North America over the past several centuries, can no longer take for granted a strong membership in those regions. Church theologies that encourage denials of pluralism and cultural change attract huge numbers of people worldwide but at the same time lose them in huge numbers, at least in North America.

Within this milieu of cultural flux and diminished ecclesial authority, we share with our predecessors enduring questions about the meaning and possibilities of speaking about divinity, world, and humanity. We are shaped by Christian cultures and histories. We also live in a time of immense religious experimentation, disaffection, and adaptation. As always, we are constrained by a variety of new and old sources. The newer influences include growing social, cultural, and religious plurality; syncretism in both mundane and esoteric affairs; advancing globalization that both uncovers and threatens real difference and plurality; postmodern concerns about the nature and accessibility of truth-claims; scientific disruptions of Cartesian and Newtonian certainties; and heightened concerns about global social justice.

Finally, other religious traditions, particularly nontheistic ones, have begun to influence significantly Christian religious practices and the intellectual milieu in which contemporary persons consider religious ideas. Science adds daily to the intellectual content of our considerations. Modern scientists and other scholars are deconstructing traditional presuppositions about the separation of body and spirit, raising new questions about the ancient theological conflict between apophatic and kataphatic claims about God (see The Medieval Synthesis: How to Know and Speak about God). For example, questioning the traditional argument that God’s absolutely spiritual nature is radically distinct from the world leads to negative and positive implications about divinity. The globalization of economics and media, along with the commodification of cultures, challenges the content and political investments of our theological constructs. Meanwhile, postmodern theories introduce interesting complications by reminding us of the partiality of every resolution. In sum, we are challenged to rethink more than just the content of our claims about God or divinity. We must think ever more rigorously about the complex investments and influences that shape us before we even begin, for these will be wielded productively, for good or ill, in our theological constructions.

The task of constructive theology, as we have said, requires attention both to the particular shaping influences of the time and place in which one seeks God, and to the shaping influences of the long and rich history of ideas about God that come to us from tradition. We cannot think about divinity apart from these influences. In this chapter, therefore, we will begin with the history that shapes us before moving on to our own preliminary sketches for constructing concepts of God.

A Brief History of God

The history of Christianity’s doctrine of God may really be a history of doctrines of God since Christian theology is the result of an ever-expanding circle of peoples who brought to the question of God their own social, cultural, and historical concerns and demands. Indeed, from the earliest attempts of Christians to articulate and determine their doctrinal positions on God, many divergent strands came together out of Hellenistic, Jewish, and other Near Eastern traditions to form a new synthesis. To put it bluntly, the emergence of classical Christianity in its so-called orthodox forms as well as its “heretical” forms is a thoroughly syncretistic phenomenon and, as such, represents a lengthy attempt to blend traditions that may not cohere with one another as neatly as we ordinarily like to believe. Reconstructing a doctrine of God for our time in such a way that it retains grounding in Christian tradition may mean not only having to recognize this syncretistic heritage but also having to choose from among these various strands in order to develop a coherent theology.

Ancient Israel

One key historical origin of Christianity’s doctrine of God lies in the obscure prehistory of Israelite religion. Early Israelite religion and mythology originated in a matrix of cultures of the Mediterranean and North African region often called the Fertile Crescent. Like all other ancient Near Eastern people, the earliest Israelites assumed the reality of what we call “deities” or “gods,” that is, personifications of the powerful forces with which all humans had to come to terms for survival. And like most ancient peoples in that region, the Israelites believed that these “personal” gods could be related to and appeased by appropriate rituals (religion).

Polytheism was characteristic of the ancient Near East. The religion that traces its origins to the story of the exodus of Hebrew slaves from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert near Mt. Sinai was not “monotheistic” (believing that only one god exists) but rather “henotheistic” (serving only one god despite the existence of other gods). From what can be ascertained about the historical development of Israelite religion from the Mosaic period (c. thirteenth century B.C.E.) to the Babylonian Exile (sixth century B.C.E.), it seems clear that monotheism was not characteristic of any religion in this early period.1 The twelve Israelite tribes, which eventually coalesced into a single nation in the tenth century B.C.E., were unified officially by their worship of the god named “Yahweh.” The relationship between Israel and Yahweh was codified in a suzerainty covenant recorded in the Book of Exodus that governed matters from the sacred to the mundane. The biblical record suggests that syncretism played a large role in the religious life of Israelites: worshipping the gods of the indigenous Canaanites alongside Yahweh (see the contest between Yahweh and the Canaanite god Baal in 1 Kings 18). Archeological finds include statuettes representing Yahweh (a male god) with his female consort, often called Astarte or Asherah, indicating the blending of Israelite and Canaanite traditions.

In later centuries, when the nation was divided into two kingdoms, prophets inveighed against this syncretism and the popular religiosity to which it gave expression. When the northern kingdom of Israel was swallowed up by Assyria and the southern kingdom of Judah exiled to Babylon while Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem was destroyed (722–587 B.C.E.), the people assumed that their god Yahweh had been defeated by the stronger gods of the Babylonians (see Ps. 137:4). But the prophets and ancient Israelite historians, in a theological move that would echo down the millennia, interpreted these national crises as Yahweh’s punishment of his people for their infidelity to the Sinai covenant. The exile was not a defeat but a victory for Yahweh over his people. And the fact that Yahweh could use a foreign people with foreign gods as instruments of his righteous purpose suggested a wider divine power and scope than had hitherto been the case. This retrospective retelling of the nation’s story by ancient Israelite historians also accounts for the remarkable historical fact that what we now know as the religion of Judaism with its monotheistic theology was born out of the ashes of the older religion of Yahwism with its henotheistic theology.

Whereas previously Yahweh had been imagined to be the national god of Israel exerting his power locally within a larger context of national deities, Israel’s god came to be viewed as the only deity in existence (see the Book of Isaiah, beginning with chapter 44). Increasingly, the theologians of this emergent religious view drew sharp distinctions between idolatry, or the worship of so-called gods who are in fact not gods at all, and worship of the one true God who created the world (see, for example, Isa. 44:9–19 and Jer. 10:11). In monotheism, there are only two categories: the creator and the creation. Monotheism, in this sense, is the indispensable presupposition of Judaism as well as the other two religions that derive from it, namely Islam and Christianity (though, as we shall see, the church’s trinitarian Christology will pose a serious question about the extent to which monotheism remains intact here).

Emergent Christianity

Christianity emerged at the intersection of Judaism and Hellenism. When the Jews came into contact with the culture of the Greeks through the dissemination of Hellenism on the heels of the military conquests of Alexander the Great (fourth century B.C.E.), their ability to maintain a distinctive way of life as a people was seriously threatened. They faced the challenges that many traditional, indigenous cultures struggle with today, for example, in the face of expanding Western capitalism. As Hellenism spread across the ancient Near East, some Jews found it so attractive that they aspired to complete assimilation through an erasure of the marks of Jewish identity. Others shunned and denounced Hellenism as nothing more than Gentile idolatry. But some took a moderate position between the two extremes. Philo of Alexandria (c. 13 B.C.E.–45 C.E.), a contemporary of Jesus and Paul, advocated observance of the letter of the Jewish law and appreciation of the brilliant intellectual accomplishments of the Greeks. Philo’s allegorical readings of biblical texts demonstrated his view that Greek philosophy and Judaic tradition led down the same path. Philo’s was a balancing act that set the pattern for the classical Christian tradition: Greek polytheism was emphatically rejected as idolatry, but Greek philosophy was retained and integrated as much as possible with the biblical tradition. The importance of this posture toward Greek philosophy on the part of Hellenized Jews for the subsequent development of Christianity cannot be overemphasized.

Greek philosophy had achieved its greatest accomplishments in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. under Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all of whom set the stage for a merging of Jewish monotheism with Greek philosophy through the rigorous scrutiny of reason that they applied to all assumptions of Hellenistic culture, including its pantheon of unscrupulous, unpredictable, and generally unreasonable gods. While criticism of the gods was not the primary concern of these Greek philosophers, the effect of their method of philosophizing did a great deal to undermine faith in inherited religious beliefs and, perhaps ironically, render Judaism increasingly attractive to many intellectual Gentiles who perceived in its monotheistic theology, its high ethical code, and its nonsacrificial form of worship in the synagogues a rational approach to religion (these Gentile admirers are mentioned in Acts 17:4, 17, and 18:7 and were prime targets of early Christian missionary activity). In Rom. 12:1–2 Paul even depicts the Christian religion according to the philosophical category of “rational” (translated “spiritual” in the NRSV, but the Greek word logiké means “logical” or “rational”). A critique of polytheism became a point of contact between Jerusalem and Athens, where the traditions of Judaism and Hellenism converged. From the Jewish side, of course, this critique was an expression of monotheistic theology, while from the Greek side it was philosophy’s insistence that all beliefs be tested by the criterion of reason since it is only on this basis that human beings may live a life of virtue. The Christians were particularly eager to appropriate this philosophical heritage against the charges of Roman citizens who accused them of being atheists on account of their refusal to worship the gods of Rome.

Christians as Atheists

In Acts 17:16–34 Luke presents the apostle Paul engaged in dialogue with representatives of the leading philosophical schools of his day (Epicureanism and Stoicism).

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. God
• 2. Human Being
• 3. Sin and Evil
• 4. Jesus Christ
• 5. Church
• 6. Spirit
• Glossary
• Index
• Notes