Theology: Has it become too Propositional?

Think about what theology is or how it is taught: we read texts — Bible, Creeds, Augustine, Luther, Barth — and then we arrive at conclusions and we articulate that theology and then what do we do? We seek to get church people to conform to the ideas. I don’t think this is a simplification. Luke Timothy Johnson, in his new book, The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art, doesn’t either. He thinks theology moved from Spirit to letter but now also must move from letter to Spirit. This is one of his many similar expressions:

In short, we do not find in these theologians either a sustained interest in particular and embodied human experience, or an indication that such particular and embodied human experience can disclose the presence and power of the Living God in the world today. I do not think that I am alone when I confess that, in reading these eminent theologians, even those from whom, like Rahner, I have learned so much, I sometimes have had the sense that theology remains a discipline concerned above all with texts and propositions based in the past, rather than the discernment of the work of the Living God in the present. Perhaps others have sensed, as I have, that the introduction of a specific and particular human experience into this academic conversation would be something of an embarrassment (14-15).

That last sentence is where this book goes — a theology shaped by experience in the body that seeks to redress the imbalance of a theology that is too word-y and therefore wood-en. One at times hears echoes of a Lockean epistemology in this book, but it would take some history of philosophy experts to tease those out. But the idea that human experience is set within experience is at least an echo of Locke. These are the leitmotifs of The Revelatory Body:

Two simple convictions animate this exercise in theology. The first is that the human body is the preeminent arena for God’s revelation in the world, the medium through which God’s Holy Spirit is most clearly expressed. God’s self-disclosure in the world is thus continuous and constant. The second conviction is that the task of theology is the discernment of God’s self-disclosure in the world through the medium of the body. Therefore, theology is necessarily an inductive art rather than a deductive science  (1).

Theology then is action, discernment, articulation of action. Action then is the arena for authentic faith.

An even simpler premise underlies these convictions: authentic faith is more than a matter of right belief; it is the response of human beings in trust and obedience to the one whom Scripture designates as the Living God, in contrast to the dead idols that are constructed by humans as projections of their own desires (1).

Theology that is too word-y moves into idolatry of words.

Theology tends toward idolatry because of the way words can seduce us into thinking that they adequately express and represent reality (1).

In this essay I seek to enliven theological language by challenging the sufficiency of abstract propositions for the discernment of God’s work in the world (2).

Yes, yes, yes, one can hear the the hands rising since so many are asking about the dangers of this approach, the same questions asked from Barth on about the Schleiermacherian tradition of rooting theology in that sense of dependence upon God. What are the dangers? Johnson himself lists three:

The first danger is that the language of Scripture and the creeds might not only be declared insufficient, it might be abandoned altogether (3).

The second danger expands on the first: it views human experience as dangerously erratic, all too susceptible to delusion and sin. Human expe rience needs to be disciplined and transformed by the words of Scripture and the teachings of the church.  To privilege experience as a source for theology is, in effect, to reject the formative importance of the tradition.

The third danger is a variation of the first two: attention to the ever-shifting, always unstable realm of human bodily existence means abandoning the scientific character of theology, which traditionally has been able to claim status as scientia (science) precisely because it is based on a secure body of knowledge located in Scripture and creed, from which further corollaries might be developed through deductive reasoning. Indeed, theology so conceived can even claim to have a “systematic” character. … (4).

There is also, to be sure, an element of political self-interest in the third objection. If theology is a deductive science based in Scripture and creed, then it is primarily an academic exercise controlled by experts in ancient language, philosophical idiom, and the history of ideas. Experts in these areas have an assumed authority over the content, meaning, and application of God’s revelation. Theology begins in language and ends in action, with power over the movement in the hands, not of pastoral practitioners, but of scholarly theorists (5).

Johnson’s claim is to get experience back in the balance. Thus,

My project in this essay is not to overthrow all precedent or to replace Scripture and creeds; rather, it is very much an effort to restore a balance. A turn to human experience, I argue, actually opens Scripture to what it was intended to address in the first place; likewise, an attention to the ever-active self-disclosure of God in the world actually supports the statements of the creeds (5).

What do you think?