The Starting Point of Theology?

[Matt]

When speaking of God, where do we begin?  Consider this quote from Barth's Church Dogmatics (II/2):

Theology must begin with Jesus Christ, and not with general principles, however better, or, at any rate, more relevant and illuminating, they may appear to be: as though He were a continuation of the knowledge and Word of God, and not its root and origin, not indeed the very Word of God itself.

Well - is Barth right?  Is Christ where we should start when daring to speak of God?  Or is the starting point elsewhere?  (Or is there no starting point - should we simply be silent?...) 

 

[Jason]

We were discussing theology?

James Gibbons said:

Yeah. Actually, as I think about it, the “community” in which I was raised talked about Jesus all the time. What Jesus would do… what Jesus would think…what Jesus would say… even that Jesus died for MY sins. I believed it, because it was in the community and I wanted to believe it. But I always had this question in the back of my mind…Jesus who? What Jesus are you talking about?

Spent a coupla decadent decades away from the Lord and from “my community” and wandered into another community that also talked a lot about Jesus. So, I said, this seems vaguely familiar, but like I said… what Jesus? Jesus who? They pointed at the Bible and said…This Jesus. I said, “OOOOOOh. THAT Jesus.” That I understood.

Were they the same Jesus? Probably. But where was the proof? Now, I am definitely taking the thread off track. Please return to your previously scheduled theological discussion.

[James Gibbons]

Yeah. And fishing. We were talking about fishing and theology. And whittlin’.

[Jason]

Kibbles, Whittles, and Phits.

[Phil James]

Jason said: In the end, we're not all shaped so much by our communities as we tend to think. Some of us break out and learn from many different sources and are shaped by them.

Hmmm: if there were no community, then…

There would be no me…

There would be no Western Civilization for me to inherit,

There would be no Georgia (or Louisiana) to shape my childhood,

There would be no USA,

There would be no church,

There would be no Reformation with its emphases and lessons,

There would be no Bible,

There would be no English language,

There would be no alphabet,

There would be no one there to teach me how to understand the world,

There would be no one to teach me how to read,

There would be no one to teach me how to rightly understand the English Bible,

There would be no Presbyterian Community to nurture, employee and preserve a Hodge or a Warfield in the Westminster tradition, Etc, etc, etc

So even if I washed up on a desert island with a bible (what communal enterprise brought me into the sea- trade, exploration, evangelism; and what inherited technology put me on an island in the middle of the sea?), ‘Me’ and ‘Bible’ are just shorthand for communial inheritance and gift.

There is no question that we can be influenced by many communities or that we can purposefully place ourselves under the instruction of a new one. This is why you reference Warfield and not John R Rice, Hodge and not Jack Hyles or Peter Ruckman.

What you haven’t done in your journey is escape from a trusting commitment to a community and its traditions. The claim that we can independently take a Bible and form ourselves is that of the hyper-fundamentalist tradition you are resisting, but we both know that despite all the claims of independence, there has never been a group of people who were less likely to have an independent thought.

Tradition and communal inheritance are unavoidable for humans made in the image of the god who exists in community. Nothing comes of denying that- except the loss of the opportunity to examine those things that have formed us.

[Phil James]

By the way, you don't let me down.

I too, was born into your tradition, part of the motivation for leaving was less than charitable. It seems you haven't left, but are committed to staying as close as possible to serve that tradition- despite being fully aware of the silliness. That's very cool and admirable, and I'm sure very costly on all sorts of levels.

[Jason]

I wasn't denying the influence of community. I was trying to say that there is the possibility of widening it, or stepping outside of the influence of one and embracing another paradigm. There's also the possibility of reaching beyond community lines to learn from those who aren't in our community.

The Phit formerly known as Bod said:

Jason said: In the end, we're not all shaped so much by our communities as we tend to think. Some of us break out and learn from many different sources and are shaped by them.

Hmmm: if there were no community, then…

There would be no me…

There would be no Western Civilization for me to inherit,

There would be no Georgia (or Louisiana) to shape my childhood,

There would be no USA,

There would be no church,

There would be no Reformation with its emphases and lessons,

There would be no Bible,

There would be no English language,

There would be no alphabet,

There would be no one there to teach me how to understand the world,

There would be no one to teach me how to read,

There would be no one to teach me how to rightly understand the English Bible,

There would be no Presbyterian Community to nurture, employee and preserve a Hodge or a Warfield in the Westminster tradition, Etc, etc, etc

So even if I washed up on a desert island with a bible (what communal enterprise brought me into the sea- trade, exploration, evangelism; and what inherited technology put me on an island in the middle of the sea?), ‘Me’ and ‘Bible’ are just shorthand for communial inheritance and gift.

There is no question that we can be influenced by many communities or that we can purposefully place ourselves under the instruction of a new one. This is why you reference Warfield and not John R Rice, Hodge and not Jack Hyles or Peter Ruckman.

What you haven’t done in your journey is escape from a trusting commitment to a community and its traditions. The claim that we can independently take a Bible and form ourselves is that of the hyper-fundamentalist tradition you are resisting, but we both know that despite all the claims of independence, there has never been a group of people who were less likely to have an independent thought.

Tradition and communal inheritance are unavoidable for humans made in the image of the god who exists in community. Nothing comes of denying that- except the loss of the opportunity to examine those things that have formed us.

[Jason]

I've been blessed in my community. I'm a leader in our local association of churches, am respected by a number of younger ministers who seek my counsel on some issues. I also am used as a writer of Sunday School literature.

That being said, there are others who have separated and burned their bridges behind them. Others look at me as quite dangerous, and others just think me odd.

I think the latter may be closer to being correct.

Much of the price has been paid in the last ten years. I do think there's more to come due to an entrenched legalistic and anti-intellectual climate.

The Phit formerly known as Bod said:

By the way, you don't let me down.

I too, was born into your tradition, part of the motivation for leaving was less than charitable. It seems you haven't left, but are committed to staying as close as possible to serve that tradition- despite being fully aware of the silliness. That's very cool and admirable, and I'm sure very costly on all sorts of levels.

[joanne guarnieri]

Okay, this is a synthesis of having read through everyone's comments (thought about trying to link everyone's name to the part that I was synthesiszing, but...seemed like work, so gave it up).

 

Starting with what I do know in scripture, Paul the apostle pointed out that we can know something of God from nature, which is why, really, nobody has an excuse for claiming atheism (I'm not making this up, or being judgmental or prejudiced, or anything like that.  This is what he said, in Romans 1).

 

So, according to the apostle Paul, we start with nature.  Except I happen to know that because of scripture.  Egg, chicken, whatever.

 

To start with Jesus, then, is apparently not scriptural, though it does sound totally politically incorrect to say such a thing, even to my ears. 

 

What Paul said, then, since he was talking about such things as origins of knowledge of God, is that nature tells us enough to know something of God's "eternal power and divine nature."  In fact, the apostle Paul said these things are "clearly seen" in nature.  I take him at his word, but then I would, since I don't think the Bible has mistakes in it.

 

The kicker, Paul claimed, is that people just don't like it.  People ignore what they know, they refuse to acknowledge it.  That starts this process in the mind that Paul called "darkening."  Everything about life, spirituality and all the rest gets all messed up after that.

 

So we can start with nature, evidently, but it doesn't help us much if we have to get the rest of the way on our own. Fortunately, we don't have to.  Enter: the Bible.  And the Bible starts with Genesis.  And Genesis starts with God.

 

James brings up the key that unlocks everything, the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, Person of the Godhead. Without His critical enabling, we get absolutely nowhere with the Bible.  We get really smart people saying awesomely smart things about the Bible that, in the end, are, to string along all the adjectives that Paul used in Romans 1, the product of fools with darkened thinking who have exchanged truth for lies.

 

That is a really harsh assessment.  I, personally, would never have put it that starkly. But he did.

 

Which means that really, the sequence for -right- theology is, if I have this right (and I'm thinking 'out loud,' so to speak, so am very curious to find out what you all think), nature (can't avoid that), the Holy SPirit (Spirit of Christ), scripture (in whatever form, be it paraphrased in a mother's mouth, or written within the pages of a Bible, or anywhere in between, including the appearance of God Himself in a vision, as millions are currently experiencing overseas).

[Phil James]

Jason said: That being said, there are others who have separated and burned their bridges behind them. Others look at me as quite dangerous, and others just think me odd.

I'm afraid that we are kindred spirits. :-)

[Phil James]

Joanne, St. Paul doesn’t say start with nature. He says that something of God can be glimpsed in nature.

It maybe that this is the only contact a person may have with the divine, but the same is (thankfully) not true of those who follow Jesus.

There is nothing wrong with considering Natural Theology or God as revealed in times past, but there is something wrong with preferring the trailer to the movie , or insisting that the movie conform to the expectations created by the trailer.

Some people see the trailer first, and the depicted scenes look different once the movie opens. Others never pay attention to the trailer. Either way when the feature film arrives, it doesn’t open with the trailer.

Both Nature and the Old Covenant must be read through the lens of God’s final (and only in comparision, according to John) Word

[joanne guarnieri]

Phil, I didn't mean that Paul was saying we must start with nature, I think he's saying we do start with nature. As you pointed out, there are many whose only revelation comes through nature.

 

I don't think Genesis is the trailer!  Although that was an interesting analogy, and I had to think for a minute what you meant.  Here's how I see Genesis.  It's Star Wars 1.  Yeah, the first movie actually was Star Wars 3, and we loved it!!  It was enough to make a whole generation Han Solo fangirls.  But there wouldn't have been a Star Wars 3 without a Star Wars 1; sort of like you saying there wouldn't have been a Bible without a community.

 

Theology is not God, it's the study of God.  And in the study of God it makes sense to me to start where He appears to have started in the revelation of Himself. And I am not being culturally ignorant by saying, "Well it's the first book in the Bible!"  Wiser heads than mine placed it there millennia ago, and before them, orally, these stories were the revelation of God.

 

When John went back to Genesis to begin his gospel, what he did was add a dimension to what was there, so that now we would see Christ revealed, even before the beginning of all that we know, of all that is.  I think that's why one of the evangelical habits right now is to superimpose Jesus and the gospel on every page of the old testament.  Probably that would not go down well with the whol narrative theology thing, huh?

[Phil James]

Dang it; the analogy wasn't the best. You caught me being inconsistent with a point I've tried to make many times before: we shouldn't treat scripture primarily as revelation. Jesus is the culmination of Israel's story, but I'm happy you picked up on the category confusion. :-)

I've often thought that discussions about how authority ought to be triaged are often idealistic 'on the ground.' In All Creatures Great and Small James Herriot talks about the first calf he delivered. He comments on the textbooks depiction of smiling Vets in white coats and happy hefers, and how it contrasted with where he found himself- lying in ***, straw in hair, middle of the night, cold wind blowing, arm up an angry and hurting cow's nether regions. I think the way we come to our convictions are much like that- with scripture, experience, tradition, reason all coming together in ways the text books don't really suggest. The textbooks are true in a manner of speaking, but none of us 'begin' where the textbook says we ought, and there's all that *** and stuff, and a cow to deliver....

That being said, it seems to me that we should look to the place that God finally and fully revealed himself, and tweak all the complimentary revelation from there.