3 - Contextual Theology

Contextual Theology
By Paul L. Lehmann

THERE is more than one way to "do" systematic theology. But whatever method is followed, it must take with due seriousness the positivistic character of the relationship between the reality which theology seeks to describe and the description of this reality which theology offers. To do otherwise is to ignore the selfdisclosing initiative of God, as the Subject (not the object) of theology, and the intrinsic character of theology as response to God's initiative. The positivistic character of theology expresses the fact that theology and revelation are not identical. Affirmatively stated, the positivistic character of theology expresses the openness of theology to the concreteness, the diversity, and the freedom of God's self-disclosure. So the radically experimental character of systematic theology is intrinsic to the integrity of its response to its subject. Sensitive to every mode of human knowledge and experience, systematic theology seeks to exhibit, in, with, and under the activity of man, the particular activity of God. It is this formative power of God, as he gives shape to the life and doings of man, that provides systematic theology with its specific content. The formative power of God which gives place to man and puts man in his place in a world of God's making also gives to the doing of theology its positivistic occasion and significance.

I

If we ask whether there is a way of doing theology which takes due account of the reality which theology seeks to describe and the description of this reality which theology offers, we come upon a promising possibility. The method by which theology exhibits both its specific content and its positivistic occasion and significance is contextual. As a theological method, contextualism may be said to be that way of doing theology which seeks to explore and exhibit the dialectical relation between the content and the setting of theology. When Schleiermacher suggested that Christian doctrines are to be understood as accounts of Christian religious affections set forth in

4 - Contextual Theology

speech, and that they are limited to a particular time, he was emphasizing the dialectical relation between content and setting in the doing of theology, with special stress upon contemporaneity. When Barth moves from the concrete talk and language about God in the church to the analogy between the word of God and the trinity of God, he is emphasizing the dialectical relation between content and setting in the doing of theology, with special stress upon what is concretely going on (phenomenology). When the Reformers underlined the dynamic interrelation between word, spirit, and community of believers, as both content and setting in the doing of theology, they were emphasizing concrete relationships between both God and man and man and man as the central concerns of theology. In each case, what has gone before us is a lively and liberating sense of the context within which and with reference to which Christian theologians do their work.

A contextual method in theology is, thus, a response to the positivistic occasion and character of theology. It carries the doing of theology beyond the unfruitful dichotomies which have hitherto obtained between dogmatics and apologetics, between revelation and reason, Jesus Christ and history, content and communication, theology and culture, faith and ethics. These dichotomies have arisen when theology has become unsteady about its systematic task. At least thirty years ago, Barth refused to give theological status to the distinction between ein Wort zur Sache (content) and ein Wort zur Lage (situation). He was prophetically and proleptically correct. Prophetically, he knew that the integrity of theology was at stake in its faithful adherence to the dialectical interrelation between the selfdisclosing activity of God and human apprehension and obedience to this activity. Proleptically, he was preparing theology for addressing itself to a situation marked by the collapse of idealism and the rise of cultural positivism. When systematic theology learns to be less ambivalent about its own positivistic character and more sensitive to a contextual way of doing its work, it will know how to deal at one and the same time with its own content and setting and with the ethos and the options posed by the human situation in which systematic theology must work.

II

Theology, if it is to be contextual, means, first and foremost, to be contemporary. Such a method in theology neither follows earlier

5 - Contextual Theology

models of thinking nor is completely novel. It seeks rather to regroup earlier procedures for new purposes. A contextual method for systematic theology concentrates attention upon the dynamic and dialectical relation between the phenomenological and the referential aspects of the theological task.

The phenomenological aspect of the theological task does not refer to philosophical phenomenology. It refers to the seriousness with which theology takes the concrete situation out of which it arises as a discipline of reflection and inquiry. The phenomenology of paramount immediacy and concreteness for the doing of theology is the empirical reality of the Christian community. The Christian community lives always in the present out of its past and fully open to the future. This is why the materials of theology are compounded of tradition and experimentation. It is precisely those elements of tradition which exhibit the greatest openness in their own present to the future which guide theology in the exercise of its own contemporary responsibility.

The referential aspect of a contextual approach safeguards theology against excessive positivistic pressure. It keeps the phenomenological aspect of the theological task from becoming epi-phenomenal, as when Paul van Buren, in The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), leaves no room for "God language." In the special use which it makes of the referential aspect of theology, a contextual approach is intrinsically Protestant. The dialectical interrelation between the referential and the phenomenological aspects of theological reflection correspond with the dialectical interrelation between word, faith (church), and spirit. A contextual way of doing theology presupposes and responds to a dynamic authority which in the catholic tradition, particularly in its Roman form, succumbed to heteronomy. Such a dynamic authority may be described by saying that the criteria of a contextual theology are given by the reciprocity between its method and its findings.

One important consequence of this method for systematic theology is that the gap between the language and the content of theology, which has become so critical in our time, is not disposed of by jettisoning the language of liturgy or tradition. It will be recognized that traditional theological language (confessional, liturgical, doctrinal) has a referential as well as a functional significance. Whether this language is retained or abandoned depends upon the referential clarity and power with which this language functions.

6 - Contextual Theology

Thus systematic theology is free to make referential use or disuse of the language which the concrete life of the Christian community makes available to it. Systematic theology exercises this freedom in a twofold way. First, it takes up the language and the conceptualization which belong to the dynamic relation between tradition and its referent (that to which the tradition is a response). So the formative elements of orthodoxy function as conceptual instruments of theological clarification. Whereas Paul Tillich, for example, and in a curiously similar way also Paul van Buren, affirm the intrinsic significance of the Christ symbol for systematic theology, contextual theology opens the way for the whole of orthodoxy in such a way as to exhibit the theological appropriateness and meaning of every formative element of the tradition, not simply of Christology.

In the second place, systematic theology based on a contextual model always engages in the translation of its language. Under this rubric, dogmatics and ethics become distinguishable perspectives upon a single task, not separate sections of a systematic whole. The single task is the task of translating the language and conceptions of the tradition into their human reality and meaning. A theology which fails in this enterprise of humanization has defaulted both upon its content and its setting. Such a humanization of theology is to be distinguished from the imperialism by which the theologian presumes to speak with authority in matters pertaining to other disciplines and arts. It is equally to be distinguished from the theologization of the human which is unable to distinguish between what God does to shape and to interpret what is human and what man, even at the highest levels of creativity, makes of himself and his world. Contextual theology aims at the humanization of theology in the sense of being open to every human enterprise while continuing to speak its own piece.

III

The contextual method for systematic theology exhibits at least three characteristic marks or criteria. First, such a method exposes the confessional character of theology. Here theological positivism is sharply at variance with all other forms of positivism. The line is a thin one, but upon its faithful observance the integrity of theology depends. Theological positivism is involved from the first in a commitment to the truth and life-giving power of the referent to

7 - Contextual Theology

which its context points. Such theology confesses what it knows; it does not confess where it does not know. Other forms of positivism derive their integrity from being uncommitted and seek by tentativeness to push back the frontier of ignorance. Non-theological positivism is rooted in a commitment to being uncommitted. Theological positivism is committed to that which in concreto elicits its response; that is, it is confessional.

Second, the contextual method for systematic theology exposes the dialogical character of theology. It belongs to the dialogical character of theology to express and to explicate the Christian referent to which it is committed, in an openness to and confrontation with other perspectives and referents. There is a confessional theology which is non-dialogical. Such confessionalism seeks to perpetuate the language of theology without sufficient regard to its original context and thus also with insufficient regard to subsequent contexts in which theology must be done. Consequently the dynamic and dialectical interrelation between the referent and the phenomenology of the Christian community is ignored and the humanizing task of theology is violated. A dialogical confessionalism, however, recognizes that the ultimate test of its humanizing responsibility may well be its hospitality to what it can learn about the genuinely human from other perspectives which do not claim to be what they are not (that is, which do not claim to be theological). The hidden premise of such a dialogical confessionalism is the activity and power of the Holy Spirit.

Third, the contextual method for systematic theology exposes the catalytic character of theology. The catalytic character of theology is expressed in its critical function whereby in pressing, in a dialogical way, its own confessional occasion and integrity, it calls into the open the limits of other perspectives in understanding and identifying what is genuinely human, that is, what is the truth and the life. In this way, a catalytic theology becomes the "guardian of the human," to adapt a suggestion of T. S. Eliot, because it refuses either to subordinate the human to its own confession or to exclude from any identification of the human, the self-disclosing initiative of the particular referent which has shaped its own content and settingTheological criticism and theological self-criticism are thus inseparable. To this extent, a catalytic theology is a prophetic theology whose function is and remains that of a creative iconoclasm. A

8 - Contextual Theology

creative iconoclasm in the doing of theology is always prepared for the collapse of its own idols as it exhibits the idolatry in other perspectives.

IV

The promise of such a contextual theology may be that as it seeks to, be faithful to its confessional, dialogical, and catalytic character, it may become the bearer in our human situation today of the answer to man's profoundest need and question. As W. H. Auden has put it: "How can man's knowledge protect his desire for truth from illusion? How can he wait without idols to worship?" A contextual theology may restore theology to its true office, which is to describe and to invite all men to share the power by which man can "wait without idols," and in this waiting to express his genuine humanity. In so doing, a contextual theology exhibits the order by which goodness is the fruit of truth and forges a creative link between confession and responsibility, between the concern for dogma and the concern about ethics.

This editorial is a shortened and revised version of an earlier essay prepared originally for the World Presbyterian Alliance at Hoechst/Odenwald, West Germany, July, 1965. A more expanded edition subsequently appeared as "On Doing Theology: A Contextual Possibility," in Prospect for Theology: Essays in Honour of H. H. Farmer, edited by F. G Healey, James Nisbet & Co. Ltd., Welwyn, Herts., 1966.