Truth

"What is truth?" The question in the famous dialogue between Jesus and Pilate in John's Gospel is still with us.

We need to know what we mean by the concept of truth before we can go very far in finding it, and that may not be as easy as we assume. In a political world truth is often subservient to power and interest. Western philosophical understandings of the idea of truth often struggle to cope with culture as a factor in expressing and understanding truth. For Christians, truth is about meaning as well as event, and ultimate truths are defined by Jesus Christ.

The question of truth in contemporary theology has some similarities to the question "What is an authentic performance of a piece of music by an historical composer?"

Does music have to be played on the same instruments as those known used and specified by the composer in order to be authentic? Is authenticity in terms of how it sounds or the effect it has on the hearer ("dynamic equivalence"?)? How important is the performer / interpreter?

Ralph Kirkpatrick in a discussion on authentic music broadcast in NZ 19 April 2003, believed that "no one instrument exhausts the content" of a composition. There is an "unrealised residue".

Does this provide a model which helps us discuss the importance of different cultures interpreting the Word of God and just like instruments, since no one culture "exhausts the content" of the composition?

Considerations that apply to authentic renditions of music may help us explore parallel issues about being true to the theologies of other generations.

True Confessions? Theology and Culture in the Globalisation and Localisation of Christianity.[i]

Perhaps a paper on True Confessions ought to begin with a few, select, confessions by the author. An earlier title for this paper was “Beyond Contextual Theology” – a desire to work further with the ideas of Robert Schreiter[1] and Stephen Bevans[2] who in their analyses of local theologies also explored criteria for assessing global as well as theological validity. I am also interested in the struggles Western theology appears to be having having coming to terms with the fact that their assumptions about reality do not have universal validity.

Many may be understandably tired of the phrase “contextual theology”. Quite apart from intellectual weariness, history suggests that the words around which academics spin their anxieties change from time to time. It is in the nature of things that we should expect one day there will be something else to talk about. We may be looking forward to that.

However we have not done with contextualisation yet, and if the word changes, the concerns of the future will still resemble age-old problems of the one and the many, the unity and diversity of life and faith. The way to better handle the debates of tomorrow is to sharpen our wits on the debates of today - provided that in the process we do not think the terms of debate that we may engage in today are either universal or timeless.

My personal concern has arisen out of a number of experiences. Andrew Walls draws attention not only to the stunning differences in Christian faith across the centuries but also to the core elements of continuity in relation to worship focusing on Jesus, the use of the Bible, the importance of early Creeds, and the place of Baptism and Eucharist.[3] What has proved itself across time and culture has some claim to authenticity.

Involvement with the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians and the International Association for Mission Studies has been of huge importance for me. Teaching Third World Theology and Third World Christian Studies at the Bible College of New Zealand and being taught by my students I became aware that in those classrooms where we so often came to share remarkable and unexpected insights we were inhabiting a different world from colleagues and fellow students who were wrestling with more classic theological questions elsewhere on the campus. Once those windows on a wider world have been opened they can never be shut again.

Is there a way to bring these world’s together? There are attempts by people whose expertise really lies elsewhere, but at least they realize something needs to happen. The goldmine of missionary writing which has over a long period wrestled with these issues is commonly ignored. Some get involved when world theology literally comes to their doorstep. Otago has certainly shown awareness, but it almost seems forgotten that the Japanese Reformed theologian Kozuke Koyama once taught theology here. There have been two notable, and completely contrasting, conferences in Dunedin which which addressed these issues. We have the Centre for Contextual Theology as a brave ongoing commitment still associated with the School of Ministry at Knox College.

Yet as time goes on, despite living in a more multicultural society than ever, the sense of the vital importance of this enterprise does not appear to me to be widely felt. The implications of the loss of relevance and control by traditional centres of Western theology are by and large still to be discovered. There is still a vast number of publications for whom the only intellectual Christian world considered worthy of attention is that of the West. Church History is Western History.[4] Real Theology is Western Theology. Acknowledging appalling ignorance is considered OK in the media because it provides identification with the audience, but we have yet to move to new bases of authority other than popular taste now that the idea that normative exegesis of the Bible is only provided by those who teach in academies is weakening.[5] Feminist Theology as a theological and exegetical approach which is both global and particular is important not only in its own right, but as a movement strong enough within the Western tradition to challenge it on its home base.

My inauguarl address at the School of Ministry in February 2000 on “Chaos, Order and Democratisation: The Holy Spirit and the Laity in the Church” had some parallel concerns. Where plurality is seen as chaotic, and chaos as seen as a feature of “Babylon” then the solutions the church looks tend to be those to do with uniformity, law and order. Where plurality is seen as the divinely inspired chaos of Pentecost, then the solutions to the problems of diversity are seen to do with harmony, balance, connectedness, with theological biodiversity as a strength, a good we discover by embracing the chaos, not by denying it or suppressing it.

This is something the Reformed tradition has often found difficult. Reformed structures and instincts are modern in their intellectual values, rational, exclusive, and a form of democracy where historically the “winner takes all”. This may be linked to its slowness of engagement in cross-cultural mission, and the difficulty the Reformed tradition still has embracing contextual theology as valid in its concerns, methods, and forms of expression. This is evident in the strength of the tradition in challenging a particular culture in the name of Christ, but its weakness lies in recognizing that in other circumstances than those pertaining in the 1930s, and in multi-cultural contexts, there need to be other models for relating Christ and Culture laid alongside the one critically important at that time, that all of life is under the judgment of God and the Lordship of Christ.

Dunedin has had some experience of these debates. In 1991 the Faculty of Theology hosted a conference on Christ and Context. It stirred controversy. Looking back, one speaker apart, the learned line up was suggestive of Western theological heavyweights agonizing about giving themselves intellectual permission, or in some cases withholding it, to explore a world in which they were actually out of their depth. People whom one might properly hold in awe for so much, seemed strained, uncertain, and nervous about jumping in to a river of dubious currents with few and unfamiliar landmarks along its banks.

In 1996, one of the last events organised by the Faculty of Theology in Otago was a conference on the theme of "Doing Theology in Oceania.[6]" It was in some contrast. It was not particularly controversial. The presenters were not on the whole high powered; they were not luminaries of the Western theological tradition, though Chris Nichol’s paper, accompanied by a band, on “The Church and the Blues”, would stand up in any context. Many were students from Pacific Theological College in Fiji. It seemed that “just do it” had become the motto of contextual theology and if at the time at least the worlds of North and South, the West and the Rest, did not at first seem to meet beyond a haze of affirmation they did later in Clive Pearson’s careful editorial and postscript paper to the published proceedings.[7] In further reflection on the issues raised there was some important writing by him and others in the festschrift for Ian Breward.[8]

The concept of Truth is itself a cultural construct, and while postmodernism has introduced changes which are unlikely to reverse, we can expect the pendulum to swing back towards placing a value on reliable metanarrative. What will we need to do differently from what we did before if we are to talk about not only “true theologies” but also “true theology”? How much along the way does Bevans' Models of Contextual theology take us? Will we be back to having one culture’s theology trying to establish a hegemony. There are certain things which need to be set in place.

The original working title of this paper was “Beyond Contextualisation” and had as its concern what do we do out the other side of contextual theology. This is driven by several things. First of all there is always something out the other side of whatever the current fashion happens to be, whether it is in clothing, church growth, spiritual warfare or theology. We need to remember the importance of historical perspective on whatever it is which happens to be hot at the moment, whether it is leadership, or healthy congregations, or spiritual mapping. Some things are on the agenda for the moment, and yes, we do need to “seize the day” (Dead Poets Society) but we must also look beyond the day towards tomorrow. It is memory of the past which reminds us that failure to do that is a kind of earthly perspective which cannot see that under God we live in history and need to be prepared for what is to come as well as meet the responsibilities, intellectual and spiritual, of the moment.

There are a number of possibilities and theories that might guide us there. Swings and roundabouts is a bit crude, but it has an element of truth. In the past we had a very unitary view of truth dominated by the idea that the Western scientific and historicist model must have been what Jesus had in mind when he said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. We have moved into a very cynical, some would say realistic, view of truth as being related to the particularity of cultural and political situation, the needs of groups to define themselves in ways which ensure their power and dominance, and the variety of local understandings which exist about God as they do about everything else. Formally, if not always in practice, we have grown skeptical about claiming too much, about overarching theories of everything and universal meta-narratives. We may take comfort in whatever it may be possible to say about the deconstructed particular. However we might expect that as time moves on, there will be a return of the desire for some global explanations to help make sense of our own particular experiences. We can expect that people will want to be able to say something meaningful which rises above the valley of their own experience to the viewpoint of region, nation, and the global village. A new paradigm is always about to be born and in the church in particular we acknowledge that we never quite lose the old ones even if sometimes we try to go back to them without appreciating how much has shifted along the way.

When that happens however it will not simply be going back to the old. Any new paradigm needs to take account of the fact that what was often portrayed as universal in the past was particular to either a place or a time in history. We will maintain a concern to see that universals are not particulars seeking power for themselves. We will need a diversity of particulars and greater equality of powers to be able to have the conversations out of which truth can be proclaimed as standing over against all cultures.

For this to happen more progress needs to be made than has been the case in giving due weight to Third world theologies and the missionary experience of the church as sources for theological understanding and formation. Hence we need to look at what we understand to be true theologies.

In John’s Gospel the exchange between Pilate and Jesus Pilate asks Jesus a series of questions “Are you the King of the Jews?” “Are you a king then?” and Jesus replies “You say that I am a king. I was born and came into the world for this one purpose, to speak about the truth. Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me.” “And what is truth? Pilate asked. (John 18:33-38)

Truth and Truthfulness. Truth is about the relationship between a statement and the reality it refers to. Truthfulness is about the character of a person - ? particularly in relation to consistency between word and deed, belief and behaviour. “Truth is the fit or correspondence between reality and understanding” “Truthfulness consists in the fit or correspondence between what is said and the person who says it.”[9]

Truth in relation to theology has both these dimensions. The plurality of theologies is confusing to some. It is a feature of recent decades that theology has become plural. This plurality exists in several dimensions.

2) Theology is plural because the subject-matter of theology is manifold (theology of the church, theology of mission, Christology, sacraments, humankind etc)

3) But theology is also plural because attempts to unify the theology behind the theologies have failed. Part of the assessment of this needs to be along the lines how much of a failure this is, in fact is it a failure and does it matter? Does it apply equally to all sorts of theological statements that relate God to something else, or does it only relate to some of these. And are some of these more important than others, and if so how would we know.

Can we have any guidance from other areas of life and it use of language, for instance in relation to the law. There are some areas where the use of language is required and expected to be unambiguous. There are others where the expectations and intentions are different. The problem is not in admitting that there are types of writing in Christian Scriptures and Faith where the intentions are not necessarily towards givenness, external truth, it is where they are and knowing which is which. Music also provides a model. What constitutes an authentic performance of an original composition. Can it be played on instruments which were not in existence at the time the composer lived?

Hermeneutics was meant to deliver some principled basis of finding out what the text was meant to mean. There are any who have been convinced that learning Hebrew or Greek would grant them access to this level of certainty, and the church certainly needs more people with those linguistic skills, but they are not going to deliver this in general. Hermeneutics must now content with the reader and the context and not just the text, its writer and its context.

There is something which might be referred to as being absolute truth, but our perception of it will always be something less than absolute. It may be adequate, it may point in the right direction, but it is unlikely to be complete. The significance of this lies in the basis of claims to adequacy, rather than the issue of incompleteness.

Concern for absolute truth collapsing into relativity without too much in the way of guidelines for assessing the relative merit of different truth claims. Mono-cultural theologies having to cope with the existence of other cultures whose view of truth about God challenges other understandings. This is related to but more than other religions.

The idea of one truth about God and Jesus is a modernist value in a world of competing fundamentalisms. We may see that this is inadequate, but we need to be careful about what we put in its place.

Why did the medieval debate nominalism and realism as a debate cause such a stir and why is it still relevant? Sum up what the debate was about. The issue was that if you were a nominalist then sin was not real, it was just a name. The church was not a thing in itself but just a way of describing a phenomenon.

Where are we now with this old debate. I think that the nominalists have won to this extent, that it is very difficult to do other than see language as a convention which agrees to give the same work to comparable phenomena, without regard to the reality of what is named. However the conclusion of conceding this that some key elements of essential Christian faith, such as sin, the Trinity, perhaps even mission, are suddenly done away with.

Classic debate with postmodernists. PM cannot be true because they are inconsistent in that they do not believe in metanarratives yet that belief is itself a metanarrative. To the modernist that is the end of the argument. PM are show to be deeply inconsistent. The answer from the PMist is simple. “So what?”

The question we must ask is how truth claims function in life and the life of the church.

Do not yet have a situation where people are learning that much from the different worlds making claims. Still at the end of the day saying that one system, mine, is the defining truth.

Have not got an overarching framework for relating to different local theologies. We are not sure how they answer within our own worlds.

Our concepts of truth are ones which we bring with us from our cultures and into our reading of the texts of our traditions. We have to determine what we mean by ourselves asking Pilate’s question, before we can deal with the place of Jesus in the answer. Like defining what the bible tells us about mission, we cannot know what the answer is until we know what our question is.

Are there some theological principles which have proved themselves out of the particularities of our experience and which bear a good relationship to the experience of others?

What does our church really want theology and theologians to do for us? What good are theologians. Are they like economists so that if all the theologians in the world were laid end to end they would never reach a conclusion?

The need of today is help with process. Information is available. We do not have to remember too much, we do have to discern. We do need skills.

1) The job of theologians is to give us language about God we can understand. They are to help keep English spiritually alive. That is a responsibility for all of us, but they have a special role. The sort of Dewan Pustaka dan Bahasia

2) They are to clarify what that language about God and the Christian life ought to mean. They cannot stop us using words however we want to use them to whatever effect we are prepared to risk, but they should be working with us to get the language clear.

3) They are to help us to assess the worth of our beliefs, their consistency with scripture and the traditions of the church in general and our own church in particular. It is not that we cannot ever depart from what our particular tradition has handed down, it is that we must at least know what it is that we are doing.

4) They are to put into language truths about God that we find difficult to do for ourselves.

6) They should be willing to engage with the religious and ethical questions which bother us even if they do not think all of those questions to be terribly important.

1) They should not be inviting us to join in their crusades against other theologians

2) They should not be using the need for technical language to work with language which is more esoteric than it needs to be.

3) They should not tell us that buying their books will save us, the church, and the world

We may wish to add other names and identify those who take seriously both a concern for truth, and openness to the ability of cultures other than their own to help us read the Scriptures and discern what God is saying to us in our time.

[1] Robert J Schreiter, The New Catholicity. Theology between the Global and the Local, Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 1997.

[2] Stephen B Bevans. Models of Contextual Theology, Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 1992.

[3] “The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture” in Andrew F. Walls. The Missionary Movement in Christian History. Studies in the Transmission of Faith, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996, 3-15.

[4] James E Bradley and Richard A Muller, Church History. An Introduction to Research, Reference Works, and Methods, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1995, assumes Church History is European and North American. A more global approach is being provided by Dale T Irvin. See his Christian Histories, Christian Traditioning, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998, and forthcoming with Scott W Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement.

[5] R G Sugirtharajah, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism. Contesting the Interpretations, Marknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998. Gerald West, ed., Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995. Teresa Okure, ed. To cast fire upon the earth. Bible and mission collaboratin in today’s multicultural global context. Pietermaritzburg, 2000.

[6] Clive Pearson, ed. Proceedings of Theology in Oceania Conference, Centre for Contextual Theology, Dunedin, 2000.

[7] Ibid., 4-8, 103-112.

[8] Susan and William W Emilsen, eds., Mapping the Landscape. Essays in Australian and New Zealand Christianity, Festschrift in Honour of Professor Ian Breward, New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2000. See especially the Introduction, and the chapters by Christiaan Mostert, Peter Matheson, Ruth Page and Clive Pearson.

[9] Margareta Pintos, “Truthfulness” in Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, eds., Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996, p.305.