In his impressive book Bound to Sin, Alistair McFadyen makes an appeal against ‘Post-It™ label theology’, which, he explains, is when God is ‘stuck on’ to secular analyses and descriptions of the world. For it to carry explanatory force, theology must add something significant to our level of explanation and understanding of the world. As McFadyen puts it with regard to his study of sin:
If God is the most basic reality and explanation of the world, then it must be the case that the world cannot adequately be explained, understood, lived in, without reference to God in our fundamental means both of discernment and action.
Which means that theology ought to be more attentive to its own way speaking and to its own concepts than to concepts drawn from elsewhere.
(Alistair I. McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine; 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p.12. )
4 comments:
I couldn't agree more! If theology works at establishing it's own theory we then have something to offer to the practices of our own and other cultures.
I was chatting this morning to a friend interested in mission in Japan and we were saying that it's often the fact that missionaries have mildly syncretised their theology that has caused them to fight the wrong battles eg focusing on changing cultural practices rather than the theology behind those.
The gospel will never stand a hope of being fully integrated into our (or other's) cultures unless we are fiercely protecting our understanding of the distinctiveness of the acultural, "supernatural" theology at it's core.
What a challenge.
Yeah, (with some noble exceptions) I cringe most times I hear a bishop comment on politics in Australia--not because I think they shouldn't, but because is just so darn easy to play "guess the politics 101 theory to which the name 'Jesus' has been attached to this time."
Wow, stumbled across this article quite by accident, McFadyen is my lecturer and dissertation supervisor - didn't realise his work had spread so far.
As an extension of his own work, have you read any work on Radical Orthodoxy, the permiation of theology (wrong term? Theology is perhaps the basis rather than an external force...), therein described as a meta-narrative, at all levels of society is central to the theory, in my opinion.
Benjamin O'Brien
University of Leeds
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