User talk:RobertC/Atonement

From Feast upon the Word (http://feastupontheword.org). Copyright, Feast upon the Word.

Just a brief word, Robert. I know we've hashed out this systematic theology thing a good deal, but the way you phrased things in your addition here today made me realize something about my view that I hadn't quite put my finger on before. Perhaps it is because of how you phrased it and the fact that I have been reading Hegel within the last hour. Anyway...

Hegel offers the model "thesis, antithesis, synthesis," put quite broadly, right (or least, in Marxist terms)? The idea is that one thinks a concept of things (a theory, in your language here), and then that concept reveals its reductive nature, which leads the thinker to reconcile the reduction with what is excluded by the reduction in order to form a better concept. That concept is likewise a reduction that reveals its reductive nature, etc. This is the logic of the dialectic: my thesis (theory), its antithesis (what my theory excludes in its reduction), and synthesis of the two (my theory rethought according to what is excluded by the reduction entailed in my theory). All clear, right? Well, the only problem I can really bring up against Hegel is that he thinks this eventually culminates in absolute knowledge. If one concedes the impossibility of absolute knowledge, then this process can be a wonderful thing. Systematic theology is a perfectly glorious thing, if it is a process of understanding God better all the time (or, at least, differently all the time): every theory opens itself to its own reductiveness and so to its impending revision, and every theory and revision of theory (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) is a work of praise, of seeking God in love, never demanding that He be any one of these theories.

Does this open the possibility for a worshipful systematic theology? Is this an iconic theology? To think the atonement all the time, offering theories only to have them refuted joyfully, is that not a good and glorious thing? Some thoughts. --Joe Spencer 23:14, 17 Oct 2006 (UTC)

Yes, theory as a word but not the word, and meditation and scripture study as a dialectical march—I like it. I started reading an essay by Levinas in The Post-Modern Reader (or something, I'm up with the baby and don't have it handy) where he talks about rabbinical writings in a way that seems similar, at least roughly. That is, the Talmudic exegesis of the exegesis is a way of elucidating the possibilities of the text, and that the text lives—fulfills, even magnifies, its purpose—in such a searching process. The danger of course is mis-taking a word (our word) about the scripture as The Word, which I think is what the danger of idolatry is. I think this is also the very nature of the covenant with death—instead of letting the word live in us by pondering and exploring possible meanings, the temptation is to become stuck thinking only one theory and assigning only one, dead meaning to the scriptures, effectively relegating the scriptures to an inert, static, non-relational meaning.... --RobertC 09:17, 18 Oct 2006 (UTC)