419 - Theological Geography

Theological Geography

Maps are among the indispensable tools of the geographer. With the use of maps, geographers can express and study enormously intricate material and cultural relationships. By locating where something is in relation to something else (or, better, where many things are in relation to many other things), maps can reveal patterns and connections that otherwise remain hidden. The results are often not only fascinating; they can be beautiful. Maps can be studied. They can also be contemplated and enjoyed.

There are all kinds of maps, of course. Topographical, climate, and vegetation maps reveal the physical geography of an area. Political maps articulate the way the world has been divided up by human beings into countries, states, cities, boroughs, and other governance units into an unending array of public and private property. Stack some of these up from different historical periods and ponder what agreements, negotiations, arguments, and wars have caused the lines and dots and names to shift. Population or census maps chart how many of us there are of whatever kind in the various places of the earth. Name some characteristic of human being (ethnic identity, religious affiliation, reproduction rate, death rate, consumption rate of this or that product, use your imagination): a map can be made, and probably has been, to make vivid the densities of our commonalities and differences. Road maps trace the pathways we may travel if we want to make use of the trail blazing and engineering that has been done with the hope of getting us more or less efficiently from one place to another. Maps of the seas and the skies help us plot our courses and keep our bearings in places where, to the casual eye, every place looks like every other and there is nothing distinctive to lead us forward.

Maps are human constructions, human graphings of things and their relations. Every map involves selection. Not everything can be mapped at once. Every map involves abstraction. A dot with a star around it is not a capital city; it just represents one. And every map involves distortion. No map can accurately portray, for example, both the size and shape of landmass at the same time. When a cartographer chooses the relations he or she wants to try to represent, a choice is made automatically to distort the relations of almost everything else.

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But we all love and use maps anyway. For all their limitations, they generate real insight into the nature of the world and the configurations of human affairs. And when we use good maps for their intended purposes, they can provide direction.

I

Theology has to do, at least in part, with the charting of relations between realities. It, too, involves selection, abstraction, and distortion, a making of maps that reveal something of the topographical, political, and cultural relationships of human life in the cosmos Dei gratia. The realities and relations theologians attend to may be somewhat different from those that other geographers do, but perhaps we can conceive of theology as a kind of geography anyway. Call it theological geography.

What is the subject matter of theological geography and what kinds of maps would be appropriate to it if theological cartographers made them? One rather popular way of doing theological geography these days involves charting the relations of various theologies to one another. We sometimes take our cues from a kind of political geography that identifies theologies with their political/cultural locale. We have Latin American, Asian, North American, and European (or first-world, second-world, and third-world) theologies, among others. Theological geographers who work with these kinds of maps ask what differences and similarities there are between theologies that emerge from the cultura , political, and economic conditions that prevail in these places and what relations and patterns of influence there may be among them.

Related to these but marked with different keys, scales, and grids are the maps of the historical theological geographers. Appearing on these maps are the theologians and theological schools of various historical periods: early church, medieval, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, nineteenth century, contemporary. The periods are divided differently by different geographers and the names, events, and places that appear on their maps vary considerably. Some try to provide world-historical maps that take in everything, with the consequent increase of selection, abstraction, and distortion that entails. Others focus more microscopically, trading local detail for the larger picture that frames it. Again, you can't have everything on one map.

Theological population maps have gained ascendancy in recent years. Gender and ethnic identity are now key symbols in the legends of' theological cartography. We can also do our censuses (and graph them on maps) on the basis of ideological and methodological affiliations and. allegiances. Hence, we have not only Marxist and capitalist theologies,, but also narrative, hermeneutical, and even deconstructionist theologies. In addition, there are theologies that grow out of allegiances and, affiliations to churches, denominations, and traditions: Roman Catholic,, Russian Orthodox, Reformed, Lutheran, Radical Reformation, and so on.

Admittedly, this all gets very complex. The various categories cross

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and the topographical, historical, and population foci cannot be kept entirely separate from one another in theological geography any more than it can in other geographical disciplines. Still, the effort is often illuminating and sometimes useful for finding our way. We seem, in any case, to engage ourselves in the task with considerable frequency. The maps of these kinds that professional theological cartographers make receive attention and, often enough, generate argument and refinement, at least among other professional theological cartographers.

II

But this is not the only way to do theological geography. More interesting, illuminating, useful, and beautiful are the mappings of the realities and relations of human existence that theologians provide within their theologies. It is one thing to map various theologies in relation to one another. It is another to map the exigencies of human existence theologically.

A complaint is often heard these days that contemporary theology is too much stuck in theological prolegomena, discourse about theological method. Geographers certainly spend a good deal of time discussing how to make better maps and what kinds of maps to make for what purposes. But the maps they finally do create are not maps of how various geographers are related to one another. They are maps of something else, some more common human or natural reality to which geographical methods are applied. Such are the mappings that really make a difference and draw the attention of the geographical laity.

The maps are no less complex for the fact that they are maps of something else than the discipline itself. And reading them intelligently often requires a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the symbols used in them and the purposes for which they are constructed. But because they are maps of something else besides geography itself, the education required for understanding, interpreting, and using them can be worth the effort involved for non-geographers. This is one reason why geography is still taught to children in schools.

These ruminations on theological geography were stimulated, in fact, by a "back-to-school night" visit I made recently to the institution of secondary education that my sons attend. My high school senior is taking a geography course, and my wife and I went to meet his geography teacher, among others, and to hear about the course. This particular teacher seems to be an especially wise and good one. An assignment he gives early in the course is for the students to draw a map of their neighborhood. He does not define "neighborhood" for them, and this creates some anxiety in the students. They sense that if they do not know what their neighborhood is, they will not be able to know if they are drawing their maps "right." But he encourages them and tells them just to go and try it.

When the maps are finished, they are hung on the classroom wall. Then the teacher begins to tell them what he has learned from their

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maps. They are fascinated, because he can tell from most of them which house the map maker lives in, even when the house is not labelled as such. Quite frequently, the student's own home is in the center of the map. Even if it isn't, the vivid details around a particular home (shrubbery, driveways, sidewalks, the coloration) provide the clue. From some maps, the teacher can tell where special friends live or what places are most regularly visited and mostly highly valued by the map maker.

The teacher knows that we all make maps, in our heads if nowhere else. We operate from day to day on the basis of the mental maps of our imaginations. When we sketch them out on paper, we can see from them what we pay most attention to, what we value, what our own personal neighborhoods, our effective worlds, consist of. It is also interesting to note, when such sketches are shared, how different they are-even when they sketch the same basic environment. As one elementary geography text puts it, "Mental maps are individual views of the world and the things in it. No one has had your unique experiences, and so no one's mental map is precisely like yours." The exchange of mental maps is often more illuminating of the mappers than it is of what is being mapped, but it is a very important form of discourse nonetheless.

The point of my son's course, however, is to enlarge and complexify the students' mental maps. It is to bring more of the world, the realities in it and the relations among them, into the effective world of the students' consciousness. The maps that cartographers make, and the cultural, historical, political, and physical realities and relationships they lift up, are used by the teacher to expand and alter the range of what his students think about and the ways they think about them. Professional map makers work hard to make their maps refer to something beyond their own subjectivities, to realities the human community can have in common and attend to together. And knowing that their maps will always select, abstract, and distort to some extent, they try to say out loud and in print what those selections, abstractions, and distortions are and why they were chosen. All of this makes the maps they create of inestimable value to the teacher and his students.

III

Theology, at its best, is like that. Moving beyond method and the mapping of the various theologies in relation to one another, it engages its highest powers in the exercise of mapping theologically the terrain of' human existence in relation to God. It does this in order to enrich, deepen, expand, alter the theological mental maps that still reside in the imaginations of most people. Or, where such mental maps do not exist in human consciousness, to stimulate them through a demonstration of' their efficacy and value.

Theology can do this, though, only when the symbols (the metaphors, the concepts, the figures of speech) it employs in making its maps have some discernible reference to the conditions human beings actually face and to the mental maps they might already have in their heads. Lack of'

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reference renders maps useless, however lovely and fascinating they might be.

Lack of reference can occur under two conditions. Road maps are rendered virtually useless when all the road signs planted on the highways to which the maps refer have been torn down or turned in the wrong direction. Something similar can happen in theology, and this may be why some theologies of tremendous influence in other eras have ceased to function well now. The maps have stayed the same, while the road signs have been altered drastically.

Likewise, lack of reference prevails when maps are created that have no real points of reference in the first place, or when the symbols of reference used on the map simply cannot be figured out. Whether or not this condition prevails generally in theology today, it is true of at least a few of the maps we are making.

Lack of contemporary reference can be ameliorated in several ways. One, surely, is to make better maps, ones congruent with present reality. Another is to change the reality to fit the map. Maps can affect reality as well as reflect it. Sometimes maps can be created which envision a reality so clearly and forcefully that builders and engineers are drawn to the possibilities inherent in them and enabled to bring into being what otherwise could not exist. It seems possible that theologians and others in religious communities may occasionally work together in analogous ways. Perhaps they have in the past. Perhaps they are doing so now. If they are, the maps had better be ones worth building from.

Theological geography is more difficult than geography of any other kind. The range of what it must take into account is vast. And, though certain breakthroughs in technology (photogrammetry, for instance, the art of making maps from photographs taken from the air or high in space; or the ability of high-speed computers to assemble and correlate enormous amounts of data) have made it possible for other forms of geography to move rapidly ahead, it is not clear at all that new technologies are able to assist theological geography in any corresponding way. Theological geography is an ancient science, the basic tools of which, though certainly modified from time to time, remain those used for many centuries. Yet, the stakes involved in doing it well are as high as they have ever been. For what it is up against is the frightening prospect of a people who are, to borrow a title from Walker Percy, "lost in the cosmos."

Craig Dykstra