hermeneutics

(This was originally a comment attached to the ‘Why the historical Jesus matters’ post.)

The question of whether by historically contextualizing the Gospel story we make Jesus largely irrelevant to the church and the world today has been a recurrent one - indeed, for me something of a thorn in the flesh. It was recently posed rather articulately and forcefully by samlcarr and shiert on the ‘New creation and the kingdom of God’ thread. I realize that I appear to belabour the point far too much, and the impression is easily given that I think that Jesus is of no more than antiquarian interest to us today. That is not the case, and I will try again to explain, too briefly, what I’m getting at and why, because I think we have a lot more to gain than lose by learning to trust the narrative shape of our theology.

Andrew,

You describe your Cracks in the Pavement post as ‘a narrative eschatology.’

as a storyteller, i am interested in understanding the use of this literary term (narrative) in the context of theology.

I have been fascinated to note that there are a number of contributors to OST who argue for some special significance being assigned to the views/writings of the Church Fathers especially when we look to try to understand the bible. The matter crops up in various discussions here and there, but I just thought that I would ask the question regarding formative-emerging theology:

It is through this limited port hole of Jesus that this approach to the unknowable, removed God-as-Source can be attained. We believe God IS immanent through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while remaining transcendant from the limits of human perception. The limits of knowing the one true God of Israel, growing out of that tradition.

Andrew,

Thank you for your careful and thoughtful comments. Because I’m jumping into this conversation mid-stream, and don’t know all the background behind your comments, it’s somewhat difficult for me to understand what you are saying. So let me try to understand before proceeding to my reponse: You want to develop a “method” for doing emerging theology. By “method” I take it you mean rules of engagement. Yet you don’t want your rules of engagement to predetermine the content (or outcome) of the theologizing itself, kind of like the constitutions of philosophical liberalism (Locke, Rawls et al). Let’s provide the platform on which to speak, but let’s not predetermine the outcome. So when I speak of a “divinely-conferred authority,” you are concerned about this pre-determining our outcome, which you have called a “pre-judgment.”