On the Scope and Truth of Theology

Theology as Symbolic Engagement

Robert Cummings Neville

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780567027320
• eBook ISBN: 9780567077417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This is the first volume of Robert Cumming Neville's magnum opus, Theology as Symbolic Engagement. Neville is the premier American systematic theologian of our time. His work is profoundly influenced by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the American pragmatists John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce. From Tillich he takes the notion of religion, art, and morality as symbol, and the notion that religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion. Thus, theology is symbolic engagement with cultural forms, and Neville explores the ways that such engagement occurs among various religious traditions.

One of the most important tasks in theology is to devise ways of testing, correcting, or affirming claims that we had been unable to question before. This book will argue that "system" in theology is not merely correlating assertions, but rather building perspectives from which we can render the various parts of theology vulnerable for assessment.

In fact, one of the unique features of this book is its engagement with other religions. Such dialogue has been a feature of Neville's work from the beginning. Theology as Symbolic Engagement breaks the boundaries of systematic theology and moves away from the static character that characterizes such enterprises from Barth onward. Instead, Neville's book showcases the dynamic character of all theology.

The hallmark of this entire project is its effort to show theology to be hypothetical and to make it vulnerable to correction.

C H A P T E R 1

Approaches to Theology

Theology is reflection on ultimacy or ultimate matters, embracing things that are ultimate and the ultimate dimensions of things that are not. We will see the value of this vague definition in the long argument to follow that makes its elements specific and displays why theology is so interesting, exciting, compelling, and urgent. Theology discerns, articulates, systematizes, and guides practice with regard to what is ultimately important and valuable. At least, theology has always attempted to do this and is called to do so now.

In this book I lay out and defend the complex hypothesis that theology as reflection on ultimacy is best understood as symbolic engagement. The conception of theology as symbolic engagement shows how theology can be normative, that is, true or false about ultimate matters, and not merely descriptive of what people believe about them. The general thesis of the “symbolic engagement hypothesis” is that reflection on ultimate matters takes place by means of symbols through which ultimacy is engaged and thereby interpreted.

According to the hypothesis, interpretation in general engages reality by symbols in at least four modes of symbolic engagement. The analysis of the four modes of symbolic engagement in theological topics constitutes the argument structure of this book. To use shorthand labels for very complex matters, the four modes of symbolic engagement are (1) imagination, (2) critical assertion, (3) dialectical systematic theorizing, and (4) practical reason or symbolic interpretations guiding religious and other practice. Interpretations in each of these modes allow being true or false, and interpretations in the second, third, and fourth modes can assess the claims to truth. Theology as reflection on ultimate matters is concerned with the truth of symbolic engagements in all modes, and critical theological concerns for truth are raised in the modes of assertion, system, and practical reason.

Any given theological interpretation might involve one or more of the modes of symbolic engagement, blending them in various ways. Nevertheless, as I will sketch out in chapter 2 and detail subsequently, a predominant emphasis of each of these modes defines a specialized locus of theological reflection. Each locus has its own concerns, norms, and kinds of truth. To thinkers neglecting a view of the whole, each might seem to define a self-standing kind of theology. These loci of theology, to state the matter in a preliminary way, include: (1) primary revelations and witnesses, in which imagination is predominant; (2) articulated teachings, doctrines, and claims typically associated with theology, including the cases made for them, in which critical assertion is predominant; (3) systematic theologies, worldviews, and theories of religion adumbrated by scientists and secular scholars as well as religious thinkers, in which theoretical systematizing is predominant; and (4) symbolically directed spiritual exercises, liturgies, communal practices, personal lives, ritualized wisdom, and informed leadership as these are shaped by and in turn test all the others, in which practical reason is predominant. Theology as symbolic engagement interprets ultimate matters in all of these loci, and in their interconnections.

Whereas most religious thinkers want their claims to be true in some sense, vast disagreement exists across cultures about the scope of theology. Is theology almost exclusively reflection on scripture, as many Vedantist and Protestant Reformation theologians say? Does it include the evolution of traditions, authoritative pronouncements of officials or religious bodies, appeals to firsthand experience, reflections from other religions, intellectual tools from the secular world, insights from the arts, literature, and sciences? What are its genres and modes of thought?

The question of truth in theology is directly related to the question of scope. The scope of theology consists of all the things from which it might learn: its resources, including all those positions that might give it correction. In the long run, the scope of theology determines the public to which theology is accountable in some sense or other. The conception of a theological public is a central topic for the general hypothesis about symbolic engagement. The conception has three nested elements. The first, the “audience element,” is that a theology’s public consists of those it intends to address, with the institutionalized language that makes that address possible; this element will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. The second or “dialogue element” is that theology’s public consists of all those religions, disciplines, and points of view that might be resources and corrections for theology. In this sense, theology has many publics, connections with which are made by various languages resulting from many dialogues. Chapters 5 and 6 explore this element. The third or “assessment element” is that theology’s public consists of all of social, intellectual, and spiritual life that collectively tests a theology. In this sense, a theology is tested by the living of it, and the public to which theology is accountable for testing is the whole of human civilization as this can be interpreted as probating theology. Chapter 8 makes this assessment point. The fourth or “practical element” is that theology’s public consists of all of life that needs to be guided by theology, for which theology is a certain practical reason relative to ultimate matters. The contours of the practical element of the public have to do with how intelligence can be brought to ultimacy in human life. Chapter 7 argues this case. The argument shall be that only insofar as theology is practically embodied in life as its reflective guide in ultimate matters can theology be tested in a public with an assessment element. Audience, dialogues, assessment, and practical elements are obviously intertwined in theology’s public. I shall argue that, in the end, the audience of theology is not a limited community but the whole of life that it might guide and by which it is assessed. Each element provides a sense in which theology is accountable to its public. The scope of theology is directly relevant to the dialogical element of the public, because it consists of all those things from which theology might learn and be corrected.

Theology needs to make its case in each and all of the loci. For some thinkers, a case might be little more than citing scriptural warrant, or historical precedent, or consensus of a community. For most theologians from any tradition, however, the scope of theology is a complicated network of diverse appeals, of reflections on reflections, of methodological considerations, and of philosophical considerations about the nature of theology itself. To make a successful case for its truth, a theology needs to address to the extent feasible all elements within its scope in appropriate ways. Its public, to which it is accountable both for making its case dialogically and in assessing ways, and for offering practical guidance, is as complicated as the whole of its scope.

This book argues that theology cannot make a stable case for its truth unless its scope includes a global public of all religious traditions with which it might interact, and these as brought into dialogue with secular thought. Moreover, theology needs to learn from the expressions of ultimate matters in the arts and imaginative literature, the natural and social sciences, and practical normative disciplines such as law and economics. For theology in the long run needs to be vulnerable to anything that might correct its biases, errors, or omissions concerning ultimate matters. Not to be so vulnerable is to have a shaky case for truth. Practical emergency might justify postponement of vulnerability, but only on the supposition that whether it is true in the relevant respects does not matter as much as the emergency. Most emergencies require truth. These remarks outline the hypothesis for considering theology as symbolic engagement. The next chapter will begin its positive defense.

Our current intellectual situation requires preliminary orientation, however, because theology is no innocent discipline. Many modernist thinkers among us, including people in the humanistic disciplines as well as in the social and natural sciences, are skeptical of theology as such. They doubt that there is anything ultimate to serve as its subject matter and suspect theology to be just the ideology of religious organizations that rationalizes their claims to power. Many postmodernist thinkers agree with the modernists in this.¹ So theology from the outside cannot be taken for granted as a discipline with proper critical rigor and legitimacy.²

As a preliminary orientation, therefore, this chapter will introduce the project of theology as symbolic engagement by examining four orienting considerations about theology in general. First, it will discuss the nature of “ultimacy” and its cognates, the concept at the heart of the definition of theology’s subject matter above. This discussion will be only of an orienting nature because ultimacy is the topic of the entire next projected volume of Theology as Symbolic Engagement. Second, the chapter will make some remarks about the history of the term “theology” and its cognates, especially in relation to philosophy. An argument will be made that it can be expanded from its particular history in Western, mainly Christian thought to be the collective term for reflection on ultimacy in all traditions.

Perhaps a majority of self-identified professional theologians in our own contemporary American situation, however, object to an easy transition from theology within and for a community to theology that embraces many traditions. For these theologians, theology is primarily the explication of the revelation on which their religious communities are founded, including the explication of personal and communal religious identities based on that revelation. Little need exists, from this point of view, to consider theologies arising from other revelations. The third point of this chapter, then, is to examine this position as a preliminary to theology as symbolic engagement, which does make theology among different religions essential. The fourth point of discussion, in sum, is to discuss different genres of theology as addressing different publics, from the internal public of a theologian’s religious community to larger publics.

Ultimacy

The philosophical approach to identifying theology has already been broached in the references to ultimacy. What is ultimacy, ultimate matters, ultimate realities, or the ultimate? “Ultimacy” is a kind of logical placeholder in much of the argument of this book for the subject matter or topic of theology. “Ultimacy” is a term that can be used to step back from specific conceptions of God and include alternatives to monotheistic ideas, such as Brahman, the Dao, Principle (in the Neo-Confucian sense), the One, or Non-being. All these are symbolized as ontological realities of one sort or another (actually, most are said not to be “sorts” of reality) and they are taken to be more basic than all other kinds of reality. The other kinds presuppose the ultimate ones, but not the other way around. In penetrating through to the last conceivable reality that does not presuppose anything beyond it, the ultimate realities are in the last place. The major religious traditions have different models of how their ultimate or ultimates relate to everything else.

This ontological side is only half the story of ultimacy, however. Some religions, for instance, most forms of Buddhism, argue that there are no “ultimate realities.” In fact, the belief that anything in reality is ultimate is a snare and delusion that binds the believer to suffering, according to both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Yet release from the ignorance and bondage causing suffering is ultimately important. The religious quest is ultimately important. So important is the religious quest that bodhisattvas, in the Mahayana traditions, postpone their own full release from suffering until all other sentient beings have attained enlightenment. In addition to ontological ultimate realities, then, we need to talk about what might be called anthropological ultimates: ultimate purposes, quests, or tasks.³

The theological conception of ultimacy, both ontological and anthropological, was introduced systematically by Paul Tillich, following Max Weber. In attempting to find ways to connect the ancient world in which he found the kerygma of Christianity to the late modernity of his time, Tillich devised a series of bridging categories that in fact are fruitful beginnings for a globally public comparative language. These all have to do with ultimacy. “Ultimate concern” was his guiding phrase for what might be called the anthropological side of religion, its quests.

Ultimate concern is the abstract translation of the great commandment: “The Lord, our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” [Mark 12:29, RSV] The religious concern is ultimate; it excludes all other concerns from ultimate significance; it makes them preliminary. The ultimate concern is unconditional, independent of any conditions of character, desire, or circumstance. The unconditional concern is total: no part of ourselves or of our world is excluded from it; there is no “place” to flee from it. The total concern is infinite: no moment of relaxation and rest is possible in the face of a religious concern which is ultimate, unconditional, total, and infinite.⁴

This characterization could apply to the Buddhist quest as well as to Christian concern, indeed, to a kind of concern that characterizes the ideal practice of most if not all religions.

On the ontological side, as Tillich put it, ultimacy names the most fundamental realities, symbolized as God in the West Asian traditions. Tillich explored at length the Christian tradition’s various candidates for the ontological ultimate and connected his discussions with the mystical as well as with kerygmatic traditions. For Tillich, the anthropological and ontological sides of ultimacy were always connected. That is, nothing is worth being the object of ultimate concern unless it is in fact ontologically ultimate, and the criticism of false ontological candidates is the critique of idolatry.

The point of Tillich’s discussion was to define the subject matter of theology. Theology has two formal criteria, he argued. The first is that the “object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us.”⁵ This means that any dimension of life that has ultimacy about it is part of the subject matter of theology. The second formal criterion for the subject matter of theology is this: “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.”⁶ Tillich’s existential philosophy gave him a particular interpretation of “that which determines our being or not-being.” Theology as symbolic engagement casts a wider net than his existentialism, as will become clear.

The working hypothesis of theology as symbolic engagement is that the topic of theology is ultimacy, either in ontological realities or in the anthropological ultimate; any dimension of human life that has ultimate significance, either regarding ontological realities or an ultimate concern, is to that extent a theological topic.

Tillich argued that the material criteria for theology come from historical religious revelations. For him as a Christian theologian, the central revelation was the New Being in Jesus the Christ.⁷ Theology as symbolic engagement generalizes this point to say that the symbols in various religious traditions that have engaged the ultima...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright