Jason wrote in a helpful comment
Jim. I think the answer must include the kinds of words you note, but must extend further less the theological conversation and attendant ‘discoveries’ or, better yet ‘revelations’ become reduced to no more than a life-sapping circularity in which the belief and practises of the particular community are only ever affirmed and never really challenged – leaving that local body unreformable and closed off to the prophetic and corrective word of Scripture and unaccountable to the wider body whose tradition and future it shares. Great challenges though, and worthy of life-long pursuit for any community of faith.
I’ve taken a few days to respond to Jason’s comment because I think what he is saying is an important caution against the wrong kind of theological community reflection, growing out of the exaggerated sense of a community’s own importance. I mean such community sins as spiritual introspection, intellectual self-indulgence, theological myopia, intentional ignorance of wider traditions, relational exclusion of those who differ, all of these and other communal expressions of that inward curving, self concerned overconfidence in our own insights that William Temple called ‘our original sin’.
Of course these dangerous distorions are the potential dark side of any community that makes ‘community’ ‘our community’, and ‘our community’ more important than that which calls us together, Christ, by the Spirit, in the name of the Father. When I talk of the reciprocal relationship of community theologian and community of theologians, I am thinking of Paul’s stupendous prayer ( in Ephesians 3.14-21), which is ontologically definitive for Christian community, and theologically definitive for that community’s way of doing theology together. The sheer scale and scope of Paul’s thought annihilates any pretensions that Christian community can ever be other than graced into being, called to God’s purpose, nourished and sustained by God’s love, part of a purpose eternal yet to be lived here and now, limited by human finitude yet touched by holiness infinite in both demand and gift. ( The image is of the Eagle Nebulae – my favourite Hubble photo – vast as it is, incomparably superceded by the breadth, length, height and depth of the love of Christ).
Ephesians 3.14-21 is one of those prayerful aspirations that act as a doxological corrective to self-fascination, but also acts positively by exulting in the incalculable possibilities of discovering together the transforming presence of Christ, inwardly and outwardly. The anchorage isn’t ‘the community’ but its rootedness and groundedness in the love that calls it into existence and sustains it. And what we seek to comprehend together is the impossible possibility of knowing the love of Christ that passes knowledge, though we will be lifelong learners determined to go on trying. And while a community can degenerate into a self-preserving, self-promoting, and yes self-destructive circle of self-loving, and become too full of itself, the antidote to all of this is to know the love of Christ and be filled with all the fullness of God.
And yes I know. That is ‘all very well in theory’. But for me an insistence on practice and pragmatism can never take priority over ontological truths which define what we practice, and how and why, with reference to the One of whom all our theology seeks to speak – humbly, but not without confidence. Practical theology is the practice of what we believe – and what we believe is truly discovered, tested and adjusted by practice – but Paul is right. Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith is bedrock truth, and practical theology is Christology understood as transformative living truth embodied in discipleship, expressed in community in the Body of Christ, and exalted in doxology.
So I suppose what I am arguing is that the community theologian is one who accompanies, facilitates, shares the mystery, encourages the seeking – but in a community centred not on itself but on Christ; founded not on its own values but rooted and grounded in redeeming, reconciling, mystifying and transformative Love. Paul has little time for the singular ‘you’ – and in this prayer he uses the inclusive you plural – this is indeed a community of theologians – true theologians are those who pray, and those who pray are true theologians. I’m still thinking about all this…….
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