Is There More Than One Way to Do Theology?
Anthropological comments on the doing of theology
Charles R. Taber, Gospel in Context, Jan 01, 1978, Volume 1:01, pp. 4-18;22-40.
What could an anthropologist and linguist with meager sophistication in the field of theology say to theologians about their discipline? Certainly, he cannot qua anthropologist say anything about the ultimate reality of their essential subject matter; that is a matter of faith for the anthropologist as it is for the theologian, and faith is not a category of anthropological concern.
But the anthropologist and linguist has a right to comment on those aspects of the methodology and techniques of theologians which make use of cultural and linguistic categories, which are precisely within his sphere. The anthropologist can and should make it clear that theology, in its questions, its methods, and its language, is extremely dependent on conceptual resources that belong to the human culture of the theologians.
This duty becomes especially pressing when some theologians, lacking in a cross-cultural perspective that would make clear the cultural contingency of their efforts, are tempted to accord to their discipline and its results the absoluteness which is attributable only to its Subject. Confusing theology with God is one form of idolatry. Failure to recognize the cultural relativity of theology also leads to many problems when the effort is made to transpose bodily a theology from one cultural setting to another. The fact that the Subject of theology is supernatural-absolute-ultimate does not give these properties either to the process or to the findings of theology, any more than mere talk about jokes is itself humorous.
Clearly, what I am saying is not entirely novel. Within the biblical-theological disciplines, there has been, especially since Harnack, a measure, sometimes considerable, of awareness of the cultural-historical contingency of theologizing. This, of course, underlay the work of Bultmann and others in recent decades, and it informs the various approaches that are being made to hermeneutics in our day (see Palmer 1969). Von Allmen (1975) has described the process by which the earliest Christian doctrinal formulations arose in context, and a spate of works is appearing both advocating and exemplifying the doing of theology in relation to contemporary socio-cultural settings (e.g. Beeby 1973; Holth 1968; Khin Maung Din 1976; Koyama 1974; Lee 1974; Mbiti 1970; Nyamiti n.d.; Nyamiti 1973; Widjaja 1973; Anderson 1976; Gutierrez 1972). Among my fellow anthropologists, Charles H. Kraft has been developing for a number of years the concept of ethnotheology (see e.g. Kraft 1972).
However, there is in some circles a considerable reluctance to accept the full implications of the cultural conditioning of theology. It is sometimes objected that this approach undermines the basic integrity and truth of the enterprise, that it denigrates propositional theology, and the like. But to relativize is not to destroy, it is only to spell out the fact that there are after all limits on what human beings can do, even on the basis of inspired Scriptures. So for the bulk of this paper I will offer a number of comments, which I take to be sound from the perspective of my disciplines, and which impinge in one way or another on the doing of theology.
Faith - not theology - comes first
1. Theology follows faith, it does not precede it. That is evident in the New Testament and in the early church, where there was no systematization of doctrine at all until well after the period of the most dynamic growth of the church. It is also true that theology follows faith in the sense that theological formulations developed historically to meet specific needs, whether apologetic, polemical, or pedagogical. The sequence seems to have been as follows:
a. The apostles had a personal encounter with God in the Person of Jesus Christ, which they reflected upon and interpreted against the background of their own experience.
b. They proclaimed a very concrete Gospel, centered on the Person of Jesus Christ and the events in which he manifested the grace of God.
c. People out of a wide variety of backgrounds came to faith in Jesus through this proclamation, and also encountered God personally.
d. Problems arose, both because of the diversity of the converts and because of external attacks; not a few of these problems were brought about by cultural discrepancies between the Palestinian-Hebrew culture of the original witnesses and those of the various people who came to believe.
e. The church made efforts to formulate, to teach, and to defend the faith in these specific circumstances, which required the facing of specific issues, and the use of intelligible and convincing, i.e. culturally conditioned, means. It is also true, no doubt, that the church leaders who did theology under these circumstances would not have thought of different categories to use, even if they had not been primarily concerned to communicate.
It is clear, then, that theology is essentially an attempt to give expression to the experience of an encounter with God in a way which can explain and justify this experience and make it accessible to other persons. I should explain, as a terminological aside, that I use expression as the most general concept available; verbalization is one type of expression among others; and theologizing (as the term is used in the West) is one type of verbalization among others.
I conclude this point by noting (without developing the idea) the great difference in character between our knowledge of persons (including God) and our knowledge of facts about persons or relationships. The first is direct, intuitive, I-thou. The second is indirect and derivative. This distinction parallels that between faith as relationship with, and faith as belief that.
2. Therefore, theology, especially when it is truly dynamic and valid, is bound to be culturally conditioned in the questions it raises and answers and in the methodology and terminology it uses. This is true, on the one hand, because of the prior enculturation of the persons doing theology, which to a great extent unfits them for the use of (hypothetical, and I would say, non-existent) culture-independent means. It is true, on the other hand, because of the need to communicate the message to people who are themselves enculturated and unable to understand and accept allegedly culture-independent communications.
I cannot over-emphasize the fact that the very act of communication in its essence automatically and necessarily belongs to a culture, that there are no non-cultural media, and that there is no such thing as a knowable and communicable message apart from whatever means are used to express it in each particular context, i.e. language and other symbolic cultural forms. News is by definition a communication, and there is no communication without specific formulation.
Philosophy and law shape western theology
3. This fact is clear from the history of theology in the West. For a variety of reasons, the particular idiom into which the concrete apostolic Gospel was translated for theological discourse was that of philosophy and law, i.e. a technical idiom. Consequently, the entire history of theology in the West can be studied in the light of the successive philosophical schools of thought of the western world: neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, scholasticism in its various forms, on down to contemporary existentialism, phenomenology, process philosophy, and linguistic philosophy. The church fathers who did theology happened to be philosophers, and they therefore used the intellectual tools which they were most familiar with and with which they could most effectively work. Because of this history, theology in the West is a kind of game (I mean no disparagement) in which the counters are highly abstract cognitive concepts covered by verbal labels of the technical subspecies. Disagreements between theologians center for the most part on two sorts of differences: (a) the conceptual content of labels, and (b) the specific rules of the game.
Now the properties of technical language include the following, at least in intention if not always in fact: (a) precision in conceptual content, as distinct from the frequent vagueness of ordinary language or the multi-layered evocativeness of poetic language; (b) abstractness, in contrast with the frequent concreteness of ordinary and poetic languages; (c) sharp cognitive focus, as distinct from the affective loading of ordinary and poetic languages; and (d) esotericism. Each of these properties has important consequences for our topic.
Precision is a highly desirable attribute of technical discourse between specialists. But when one transposes into technical language a communication (such as the biblical texts) which is overwhelmingly couched in either ordinary or in poetic language, one runs the danger of reading into the original text a degree of precision which it will not bear. I have the feeling, as a spectator, that theologians from time to time fall into this trap, and that at least some of their disputes stem from an attempt to find a spurious precision in the Bible. It is as if, in interpreting the ordinary expression "there were dozens of people there," one argued whether there were precisely 24, or 36, or 48, or some other multiple of 12.
Abstractness is a valuable tool for generalizing from the concrete and particular; but it loses greatly in the dimension of dynamic impact on persons, especially non-specialists. The same problem arises from the naked cognitiveness of technical language, which fails to arouse and motivate people.
Esotericism results from the other properties. It plays a significant role in establishing a person's claim to be a competent practitioner of some discipline or other, in proving that he is "in"; but it plays hob with the potential for communicating with outsiders. And in the case of theology, the category of outsiders includes not only the non-Christian world, whether western or non-western, but an increasing proportion of even educated Christians.
This may be the place to plug into the ongoing debate among scholars concerning such terms as conceptual, cognitive, symbolic, word, and so forth, which generate so much heat and so little light. I confess that I do not know what a word is, except that I am reasonably sure that if such an entity exists it belongs to the most superficial part of the surface structure of language and so is of little interest here. Symbol is also used so diversely that it is not helpful. So I propose to borrow quite simple-mindedly two notions from Wallace Chafe (1970:73-82) and define them for my use. I think they have interesting resonances for our discussion. The two terms are concept and mental image; what I have in mind can be seen from the following table of properties:
Concept Mental image
Abstract Concrete General/universal Specific/particular Analytical Holistic/Gestalt Linear Multi-dimensional Rational Affective Evokes cognitive knowledge Evokes intuitive knowledge Sharply narrowing focus Broadly evocative focus Univocal Multiple layers of meaning
It will be seen that concept relates closely to what I have said about technical language; it is very powerful for analysis, but extremely weak in affective impact. Image, on the other hand, is much more specific but much less precise. Its boundaries are vague. Whereas a concept is, by virtue of its generalization, everyone's, an image is peculiarly my own, and therefore closely bound up with my attitudes and my motivations. The difference can be clearly seen by contrasting the concept "dog" in English, which is defined in terms of sufficient and necessary components of meaning, and the image I have in my brain of MY dog.
On the whole, it is fair to say, the Bible deals in images rather than in concepts, especially in describing the ineffable. Note, for instance, the large number of metaphors and anthropomorphisms by which the Bible invites us quite naively to visualize and to feel and to respond to God; and how relatively few are the theological abstract terms by which he is described (Taber 1975). Note also the open-endedness of Jesus' parabolic teaching; he invited the active existential involvement of his hearers by not closing with cut and dried analytical explications, but leaving it to them to figure out and to apply his meaning.
Potential for alternate forms of theology
4. I suggest that there was no inevitability in the philosophical direction theology took in the West; in the first few centuries of our era, it was no doubt the most probable option, given the penchant of the Greek philosophers to use their discipline in the discussion of religious matters. But some other approach might have been selected; and in fact the Eastern churches opted for the most part to give expression to their faith via other types of symbols: liturgical language and ritual, iconic objects, and the like. And if one goes further afield, there is no reason to assume that, if Christianity had arisen and first become dominant in an Asian or an African setting, Christian theology would have taken the philosophical road at all. Certainly, a theology developed in the non-western world would not have been so nakedly intellectual, so deficient in affective impact, as ours commonly is. There would probably have been more room for the involvement of emotions and the imagination, for reliance on poetic rather than technical metaphors; in fact, there would probably have been a more mythological approach altogether. Are we perfectly sure that the Church universal would have been greatly impoverished by such an alternative methodology?
But we do not need to go abroad into non-western settings to raise seriously the question of the most appropriate framework in which to cast the expression of our Christian faith. As I mentioned above, the esotericism of technical theology makes it increasingly unintelligible and uninteresting even to educated lay-people in the pews of our churches, let alone to the masses who live in the so-called post-Christian world. There is, it seems to me, a vicious circle. As theology becomes more technically powerful but more esoteric, it tends to lose its twin purposes of expression and communication, to become an end in itself. This process can only aggravate the deplorable tendency to make theology a product, neat and complete, closed and self-contained, rather than a dynamic process of communication. Not that it is always or necessarily so; but it clearly has a strong bias towards such a degeneration. Isn't it time we took a long look at the whole game, and asked ourselves if the way we are playing it serves as usefully as it should the purposes of the Kingdom of God? Isn't it time we returned once again and raised the question, How can this biblical message live for men and women today and transform their lives? (Wink 1973:2, 63).
I am not proposing a naive biblicism which pretends that there are no hermeneutical problems. Rather, I am suggesting that we need to look precisely to our hermeneutics, so as to see how to handle the Scriptures responsibly, and from them to derive a formulation of our faith which is at once true to the deepest intentions of the inspired writers, and which is also deeply relevant and compelling for people in today's vastly different worlds.
5. We must therefore ask the question, What is the purpose of theologizing, and specifically of hermeneutics? What do we expect to get as a result of our efforts? A set of abstract propositions to be believed? A set of rules to be obeyed? The Bible itself, as a matter of empirical observation, majors on three types of materials: (a) concrete information about persons and events, most importantly the "mighty acts of God"; (b) poetic-lyrical-metaphoric passages expressing the responses of people to their encounter with God; and (c) commands and instructions. Ever since the Christological controversies of the early centuries, as we have seen, the effort has been made to transpose all of this into a quite different mode, adopted from philosophy, of abstract propositions to be believed; as a result, orthodoxy of verbal formulation has often been taken as the test par excellence of the validity of faith. But since the Bible itself hardly ever used this form of discourse, one must wonder whether it ought to be the chief end of biblical studies. This represents, in a very real sense, one form of demythologizing: the substitution of abstract, narrow-focus discourse for concrete and symbolic language. Ought such an enterprise, assuming its basic validity, to absorb so much of our attention?
A two-way hermeneutical task
6. Any effort to arrive at a view of the relevance of Scripture to a specific society and culture involves a two-directional task of hermeneutical translation: the human mediator of the message must understand the Scripture itself and translate it into appropriate terms in the receptor culture, and also understand the culture (a hermeneutical task) and translate it back into categories which he can compare with Scripture.
The relation between these two processes is dialectical. The crucial black box is the mind of the translator, and the crucial problem is what form the comparison between Scripture and culture should take. In a sense, this is a problem analogous to that of the artificial intermediate language used in some efforts at computer translation. The issue is, at what point and in what form does the Bible confront human cultural reality validly and fairly?
Another potentially fruitful analogy is that of the difference between the surface and deep structures of language: the surface structure is an empirically available manifestation, complexly related to the underlying deep structure of meaning. Commonly, one finds either spurious confrontation or syncretism because the surface of Scripture (i.e. the accidental socio-cultural clothing it wears) is confronted with the surface of the receptor culture, rather than confronting the respective deep structures. A frequent fruit of this misguided approach is legalism, which is typically an out to avoid the really demanding, deep implications of the biblical message.
One important aspect of the non-commensurability of languages and cultures is the lack of congruence between the meanings of words in two languages. This exists not only in the obvious cases where one culture exhibits features absent from another, but in the much more deceptive cases where there is seeming or partial congruence. Thus, for instance, each society derives the meanings of its kin terms from its own social system; there is no supracultural system of kin relationships, hence there is no supracultural set of kin terms. Even as apparently universal a category as father (of obvious importance to theology from its metaphoric use in reference to God) turns out to have quite diverse meanings depending on a number of factors: is the society bilineal like ours, patrilineal like those of Bible times, or matrilineal like a number of contemporary societies? Is the father regarded as a remote, forbidding authority figure, or is he close and indulgent? Is the adult male authority figure for a child his biological father, or his mother's brother? And so on.
A number of clashes of views in the internal history of Christianity and in the history of contacts between Christians and non-Christians seem to a linguist to have stemmed at least in part from the use of the "same" terms with different meanings. Might this not be one aspect of the division between Christians who said that Mary was theotokos and those who denied it? Or of the controversy over the filioque clause? (In the latter case, the misunderstanding would have been over the meaning of "proceeds from.") Finally, when Christians affirm that "Jesus is the Son of God" and Muslims say "He is not," is it not highly probable that they mean quite different things by the phrase?
The meanings of linguistic forms, then, are not inherent and immutable; they are not a property of words and sentences in splendid isolation. Rather, they are socially attributed; understanding is possible between persons who attribute closely similar meanings to words, it is obscured between persons who, knowingly or unknowingly, attribute different meanings to words.
Whose hermeneutic is "orthodox"?
7. I also wonder about the relationship of our whole approach to hermeneutics to other, also culturally conditioned views. For instance, the New Testament writers used a hermeneutic in relation to many Old Testament citations which was derived from rabbinic interpretation but was at the opposite pole from what we would consider legitimate today. In our terms, some of the Old Testament passages cited are clearly taken out of context, so that "X is the fulfillment of Y" may seem to us to mean scarcely more than "X reminds me of Y." In other words, we today radically reject rabbinical hermeneutics of the first century; on what grounds? I am aware of various attempts to get around this uncomfortable fact: that those writers were inspired, so that they could get away with associations of ideas that we would not permit in our students today; that there are two or more applications of these passages; and so on. But the fact of the matter is that what they considered proper hermeneutics was part and parcel of their cultural heritage, while what we consider proper hermeneutics and exegesis is part of our western cultural heritage. I leave it to people who know the details to say how closely biblical hermeneutics in our day is related to contemporary modes of literary criticism, and to what extent it is peculiar to biblical studies.
When we begin to consider the potential use and/or abuse of Scripture in a host of different non-western societies, a really disturbing question suggests itself: If we can do this - i.e. adopt a style of hermeneutics which differs radically from that used by biblical writers in their time - why can't people in other cultures do the same thing? Cognitive anthropology, studies in mythology, and other types of anthropological studies are beginning to highlight the fact of quite divergent hermeneutical modes in different cultures. What is to prevent Africans, Asians, and others from using their culturally conditioned methodologies in the interpretation of the biblical texts, just as we do? If we want to insist that our approach is universal, we must justify the claim: what is it that might give our particular style transcultural validity? Why should we be in a privileged position?
As I have said, this is a thorny problem, which must be attacked with great caution; it is part of the bigger question of cultural relativity. But it must be faced in our struggle for an appropriate and legitimate contextualization. I do not out of hand deny that our approach may in fact turn out to be universal; but I do strenuously deny that it can be taken for granted as universal; it must face and answer seriously all claims to the contrary.
"Lay" vs. "professional" theologies
8. Another question we must face is that of the relation between "official" and "non-official" theologizing. In other words, what counts as "the doctrine believed by church X"? Is it what a few seminary professors write in their books addressed to each other? Is it what bishops or other ecclesiastical authorities adopt at a policy meeting? Is it historical creeds? Or is it what the vast majority of lay members actually believe and live by? I suspect that empirical investigation would demonstrate that any denomination (not just those already studied along these lines) has at least three theologies: the one promulgated by the power structures, the one or ones taught in the seminaries, and the one or ones which is/are unformulated but which tacitly inform(s) the lives of lay-people.
The types of syncretisms involved in these three theologies will vary. For instance, Bultmann's remythologizing (I do mean "re-") was in terms of intellectual gnats and camels of a certain class of intellectuals; I doubt that it really corresponded to the worldview of any substantial number of people outside his own circle. It certainly didn't make much of a dent on intellectuals in other circles, especially those who knew where the philosophy of science was really going, let alone on the non-intellectuals who constitute the vast majority of Christians and non-Christians.
Among American laypeople, on the other hand, the most typical syncretisms involve naive equations between misunderstood biblical teachings and beliefs about "the American way of life." One form of this syncretism is the strange relationship between a certain type of fundamentalism and American jingoism. It is difficult (at least for me) to see how some people can insist that the whole world is going to hell and there is no use trying to straighten it out, while affirming with equal vehemence that in its conflicts with other nations the United States is virtually the Kingdom of God. This goes along with a wildly ahistorical view of the Founding Fathers as "our kind of Christians" who formulated documents second only to the Bible in their divine inspiration. Ethnocentrism can be benign; but when it is given divine blessing, it becomes yet another form of idolatry.
As for the ecclesiastical powers, their tendency is to find the least common denominator formulation that will validate things as they are and avoid rocking the boat. I am not being snide or cynical, just realistic; and I recognize that to their glory, there are many people in all three groups - intellectuals, laypeople, and leaders - who to the best of their ability struggle against these tendencies in themselves. But the tendencies are there.
Third world theologies: western replays?
9. To turn now to the non-western scene: there is much talk today of an African theology (or theologies), of an Asian theology (or theologies). But one gets the impression that the implications of what we have been saying are not really getting through. Too often it seems to be expected that such theologies will merely substitute African/Asian categories as counters in the same western-style word game. But in the process these categories often are distorted and denatured; they become abstract-technical instead of remaining, as they usually are in their native setting, concrete-metaphorical; they become metaphysical rather than mythological. Such a theology might give certain intellectuals on both sides of the cultural fence the illusion of understanding; but it would say nothing to the masses of uninitiated Africans or Asians.
What is needed now is for Africans and Asians to start afresh, beginning with the direct interaction of their cultures with the Scriptures rather than tagging along at the tail end of the long history of western embroidery, and to restate the Christian faith in answer to Asian/African questions, with Asian/ African methologies and terminologies. I am not pleading for a second-rate effort trimmed to the alleged incapacities of "primitive mentality," but rather for taking seriously the intellectual and emotional integrity of indigenous hermeneutics. It is not a matter of capacity or ability, but of contextual appropriateness.
There is a great need for some people on both sides of each cultural boundary to understand reasonably well the "other" theology so as to act as "brokers." In other words, I am emphatically not suggesting that Christians all over the world work out their theologies in isolation from the Church universal; that would be ridiculous. But I am suggesting that there is no reason to assume the automatic superiority, much less normativeness, of western approaches, nor the right of western theologians, even those of the fourth century, to exercise perpetual tutelage over Christian thinkers of other societies. There is need for continual cross-fertilization and mutual correction; and I expect that a genuinely Asian or African theology will develop insights unavailable to unaided western theology, but which can in varying degrees be communicated to westerners to their spiritual enrichment.
In summary, my main points are these: any theology, any hermeneutic, is and must be profoundly conditioned by the culture in which it arises; it is, because those who develop their diverse expressions of faith are themselves conditioned by their own enculturation; it must be, because it must speak to other persons also profoundly enculturated so as to motivate and transform them. The West has the longest history of effort in this direction, but the results are mixed, ranging from the fully successful to the abysmally defective. And in relation to people of non-western societies, there is no a priori reason to suppose that the philosophically oriented western approach to theologizing is the best approach for everyone; rather, approaches should be developed by these people themselves that take with great seriousness and make full use of their problems, their categories, and their methodologies. And all theologies, western or non-western, must be continually brought into subjection to the inspired Scriptures, responsibly interpreted.
