This is an initial stab at establishing some guidelines for the construction of a useful open-source theology. As with all material submitted to the site, they are subject to the consensus of participants and open to revision as the project develops.
1. An open-source theology is community driven: it is dependent on the contributions of a wide range of participants and the interaction that takes place between them. We take this approach because we believe that it is an appropriate means of defining an authentic theology for the emerging culture. The success of the project, however, will also depend on the community developing a strong sense of collective identity and purpose. Although this could be done on a global basis, ideally the identity and purpose that gives shape to an open-source theology project should exist in the real world, embodied for example in a local community or organization, carried on not just online but also through seminars, bibles studies, conversations, etc. There could be various types of open-source theology (OST) projects: local open-source theology (LOST), local community open-source theology (LO-COST), academic community open-source theology (ACCOST), group-hosted open-source theology (GHOST)-you get the idea.
2. Open-source theology in itself is only a methodology: it does not define a particular theological commitment or objective. Although we wish to be open to the development of this project in a variety of directions, there should be a consistent endeavour to position ourselves on the boundary between the church and the world. The overriding challenge for the church, for those who wish to identify themselves as disciples of Jesus Christ, is to speak coherently and compellingly to those on the outside. We are not interested, therefore, in promoting further theological in-fighting and polemic. The approach must be respectful and constructive and must be focused primarily on issues relevant to the general goals of the project - in this case, the task of communicating the truth of the gospel in a postmodern environment. The content should reflect a deliberate and persistent dialogue with the world. Contemporary (modernist) theology has been defined largely according to intramural distinctions-in defence of denominational and dogmatic allegiances, in reaction to perceived deviations from sound doctrine, and so on. Our method here must be to apply a basic missiological hermeneutic to the development of a biblically grounded theology: How do we speak about these things to outsiders?
3. Just as an open-source computer program must have integrity and structure in order to function properly, so an open source theology must aim to produce an integrated, functional, user-friendly discourse - the whole package of assumptions, beliefs, arguments, rhetorical methods, idioms, customs, the whole way of thinking and speaking, that characterizes a particular Christian community. The conversation that we pursue in developing this OST must not be aimless or self-indulgent. It must be more than just a discussion board. There must be a usable end-product in view. An open source theology, therefore, must be flexible without being shapeless and entirely indisciplined. Hence these rules in the first place.
4. We should also expect an open-source theology to be modular. This is partly a means of resisting the tendency to systematize doctrine, but it also reflects the inherent difficulty of organizing the sort of material that an open-source theology is likely to generate. Conceivably some sort of loose organizing narrative or framework of ideas could be devised into which different ‘modules’ might be inserted. For example, we could establish a set of fundamental ‘connections’ between God and the world and make these the heart of the OST. They would provide a developmental framework for a range of functional theological arguments, tools, resources, that will equip us to deal with the various theoretical and practical issues that arise in the course of an emerging-culture mission.
God |
connections: narrative |
Emerging culture |
It is the tension that exists between God and the emerging culture which determines these connections and gives them their missiological character. Salvation in its fullest sense consists of the reconnection of God and the world, at both an individual and a collective level. This is the framework within which we must explore these themes. What shape does spirituality take as postmodern people encounter the Spirit of God? What does community mean at the boundary between the receding church and the emerging culture?
5. One necessary guiding principle will be a commitment to an intelligent, critical, and respectful reading of the biblical texts. This could equally be understood as a commitment to restate for ourselves and for the emerging-culture mission the programme which Jesus established for his followers. How do we understand ourselves to be in continuity with the agenda of Jesus? What does it mean to be a disciple? What makes this undertaking authentically Christian?
6. An open-source theology must remain exploratory, open-ended, and in an important sense incomplete. Any attempts we make along to way to formulate summary statements must be clearly marked as provisional; answers may remain tentative, but it is important that we get the questions right. Coherence and clarity must be allowed to emerge from within the project, through a very pragmatic and fluid process of collective arbitration: they should not be superimposed by experts. Open source theology speaks fundamentally through the multifaceted and largely uncontrolled conversation and cannot be encapsulated in precise formulae.
7. We are not here to encourage arrogance and elitism. Open-source theology is not superior to other ways of doing theology. In many respects it is dependent on the more traditional methods and must be willing to listen both to progressive and conservative voices. But it has some important advantages: it makes theological reflection a community activity; it is directly responsive to the circumstances of ordinary believers; it is contextualized; and it fits the emerging-culture grid.
8. A major weakness of current Christian thinking is the lack of communication between academics and ordinary believers. An open-source theology should be integrated not only horizontally, across a community, but also vertically, so that it draws together both informed and uninformed opinion. The key to achieving this integration will be keeping the practical purpose central. Biblical and theological scholarship will have to subordinate itself to the missiological imperative.
ATWHATCOST?
Hello Andrew, Thanks for an amazing website. Are you constructing A Theology With High Aspirations Towards Community Open Source Theology? An ATWHATCOST? What about a Mustard-seed Open Source Theology? That is, a MOST based on Mark 4:31-32.
If you turn your chart on end, God is the “ground” or “source of being.” The “connections” you list are the branches sprouting from the roots (God’s infinte love, of course). You know, the way a shrub, like a mustard bush, produces several branches right where it emerges from the ground rather than a single trunk like a tree. The “Emerging Culture” is the “community” of “birds of the air” that come to take shelter in the shade and make their nests in the supporting branches.
A shrub is an organism (therefore organised, in a manner of speaking), it has systems (roots, branches, stems, leaves, fruits(?) and seeds, not to mention inhabitants). A mustard bush grows at an amazingly fast rate, even under drought conditions, producing millions of additional seeds from that first speck. (What a great metaphor…Was it Scott Peck who used this analogy in “The Mustard Seed Conspiracy”?) In effect, in Jesus’ parable, it creates an ecosystem. A tiny thing like faith, not really even planted, but just tossed out on the bare ground, takes root, and voila…you have structure and shelter.
Maybe in the “shrub” system academicians help identifiy some stories and passages in scripture, along the line of a the Anglican Lectionary, say, to correspond with each of the connections branches. Perhaps they also identify some important points of certain stories. This divides the “connections” branches into smaller branches, which in turn support “stems, leaves, fruits, etc.” which represent specific interpretations, opinions, articles by academicians and scholars. The laity are the birds which come and take shelter in the shade, feed off the fruits and seeds. They may begin to bring their own twigs and pieces of bark,in the forms of stories, perceptions,ideas to the places in the tree that would seem to support them. After awhile nests would surely form that would support “families” of lay builders.
This “plan” obviously is not original, and is straight forward, but it does sort of capture the “both/and,” both structured and open-ended, concept. I think your point (5.) that there should “…be a commitment to intelligent, critical, and respectful reading of the biblical texts” is well-made. It makes sense to acknowldge roots in tradition, in order to feed the new branches that may grow from them. Come to think of it, isn’t that what OST is already accomplishing? May we all grow in God’s great love and mercy.
Peace, JRN
Rules of engagement
“Good on ya” as they say. I’m glad of your effort. My computer-whiz son has been in on the development of Linux, so I grasp somewhat of how it can work — certainly better than the West’s “ownership” of “christian” theology these many centuries.
I naturally have questions (meant to move things forward, not detract):
1. There is now a company in the US claiming rights to some of Linux code and suing others. It is far more complicated than I can understand, but as I understand it, you have also in this case the two possible extremes of nothing proprietory = little to no value/participation, and completely proprietory = well, we’ve had a thousand years of that. So, what is the weight/value hoped for? What is the end/product desired?
2. How is the participation related to value? In other words, say, only first-worlders or English speakers participate. Would product be essentially any different than what already exists? Shall a “quota” of participants be established based upon population figures? Who’s to keep this “forum” from being sabotaged or taken over by a particular group with an agenda? And to the extent every participant has their pre-suppositions isn’t “open source” relegated to being merely a reflection of human participation? At best maybe a Westminster Standards kind of product (some might say that is too lofty).
3. “Open source” is a known tag, but what does it mean in this case? For example, what role does God play? What role do the “engagement rules” give to him? What does he say in Scripture about “Source” of theology? Is this re-inventing Magesterium or do we have a solidly biblical perspicacity statement that ought (I hate the word “ought”) to be in the rules of engagement?
Danvporter
Moving things forward
Dan, thanks for helping to ‘move things forward’. I suppose the main thing to say in response is that the ‘open source’ metaphor obviously has limitations when applied to the practice of theology and that it is just as important to recognize these limitations as to grasp the positive, instructive force of the metaphor. Having said that, your particular points are worth pursuing further in some detail.
I think the proper outcome of the open source theology process should not be anything that is contained as such in the site itself but a way of thinking theologically, a mindset, a general theological discourse, in the church at large that will effectively inform and sustain the mission of God in Christ for the foreseeable future in the West. Open source theology is simply one instrument among many by which this emerging mindset will be generated. Its particular value, I think, lies in the recognition that this goal is best reached not through the work of authorized scholars but through an open conversation that engages a range of different voices - including those of the scholars.
We need a theology that is responsive - both to the ongoing development of knowledge and understanding (we simply cannot read the Bible the same way that we did 50 years ago) and to changes in the social and cultural context in which theology is done. Traditional evangelical theology (the same is true for other over-cautious theologies) has become frozen with fear - so anxious not to lose its identity that it has become unresponsive to changes in its environment. It made the mistake of looking back at the collapse of Christendom and has been transformed into a pillar of salt. Theology should be a living thing - truth that finds life in community.
Whatever we generate here will not be definitive for the church as a whole, the church in the West, or even for the emerging church. I hope it will be suggestive and provocative; I hope it will provide some provisional and useful answers; I hope it will help to create a more appropriate theological language; I hope too that it will provide a paradigm for the development of similar ‘theologies’ in other, perhaps more localized, contexts. Theology should be community-based; and communities should be, in the broadest sense, theologically-minded.
I don’t see it as a serious problem, though, that the conversation arises from a limited socio-cultural grouping - that seems more or less inevitable. It will be different from ‘what already exists’ at least to the extent that the current cultural environment in the West is different from the environment that produced modern evangelicalism. That difference may include a willingness to listen to voices from outside our immediate religious and social environment, even if those voices don’t directly participate in the conversation. Of course, we all bring our presuppositions to the discussion, but hasn’t that always been the case? It’s just that now one of our favourite presuppositions, learnt from postmodernism, is that truth is a highly complex and elusive category of thought.
The simple answer to that at the moment is me. I have occasionally had to remove material or suggest to contributors that they need to look more closely at the objectives of the site. It ought, of course, to be more of a community process. Perhaps that needs to be given more thought. I would stress, however, that ‘open source’ does not mean that the project lacks parameters or discipline. An open source computer programme both has an overriding purpose and is managed towards that end, otherwise it would be useless. An open source theology may also have a purpose - in this case, roughly, to develop a responsible theology for the emerging church. Something has to be done to ensure that it moves in the direction of that goal without compromising certain basic epistemological and methodological commitments, which brings me to your third point:
These are good questions. I think there is a consensus that in the most general terms the theology represented on this site must take very seriously both God, as Father, Son and Spirit, and scripture as the record of the story of the people of God. These are at least implicit in the rules of engagement set out above. Whether they should be explicit is an interesting question. I wonder to what extent not needing to specify such things is central to the ethos of an emerging theology. At the moment, a lot of people are very resistant to being told the answer before they’ve barely had a chance to articulate the question. What ought to distinguish an open source theology is the way in which we take these these things seriously - the methodology, the epistemology, the way in which we handle questions of truth and meaning, the way in which as a community we negotiate understanding, etc.
Seeking a new way forward
Andrew’s fifth rule particularly resonated with me. Intentionally borrowing phrases from that, I believe that to the extent possible our mission today ought to be: to restate for ourselves, and for those outside, the Life which Jesus established for His followers; to demonstrate that Life by living it more than by words; to be in continuity with the priorities of Jesus; to be disciples of Jesus and of none other; and to be authentically in, of and about Jesus.
Personally I feel that evangelicalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, at least here in the United States where I live, left the priorities of Jesus when it embraced a moral and political agenda and aligned itself with the dominant political party. Today, I feel much of American evangelicalism has abandoned its original purpose in favor of militant culture war.
Because of this I believe that any new way forward, if it is to be credible and sustainable, must either confront those realities, or else disengage completely and instead return to the simple gospel and the New Testament prototype, centered in the life and teachings of Jesus and demanding a personal relationship with Him, relearning who we are and who we were meant to be as His disciples. A new/old first century way of living, about Jesus and His life in us and centering our lives around His teachings. If I were to suggest Acts 2 as a possible starting point, would it be thought naive and simplistic?
If I am speaking the wrong language here, please tell me, because I am very new to this movement and am still exploring whether I belong here. I am a bit ambivalent about the apparent emphasis on church planting in the emerging movement. It would seem to me we need to first get our theology straight and work out exactly what it is we’re planting before we plant it. I also think in today’s culture of church shopping in the ever-expanding suburbia, a new movement needs to be able to clearly declare not only “we are this”, but also “we are not that”.
Reinvent an ancient world?
But would this not have to include, to be meaningful, a reinvention of the worldview of the time? We so not have that. The point about some of these sectarians or say Jehovah’s Witnesses is that they have reinvented the world view of that time as best they can, the result of which means they are cut off from culture in general for which the world is naturalistic and we have a technical view of solutions to problems. We no longer live in a world of supernatural interventions. Only mad satellite TV preachers will say that the devastation of New Orleans has anything to do with an external supernatural agency. We all know in our culture that it is the weather and low lying land near the sea. Jesus would have seen it as supernatural in a very activist way as the world was like that.
http://www.pluralist.co.uk
Reinvent an ancient world?
I agree it’s impossible now to recreate the culture and context of the New Testament era, but at the same time I don’t think it’s necessary. That would mean that the model of the church we see in the book of Acts was only valid for that culture and time. I think it transcends both.