If you were off somewhere living the good life on this holiday weekend Sunday, you missed a great time. It turns out that, regardless of what anyone else may think, the person taking charge in the wake of Joe and Laura’s departure? Clare Bates, age 3.
Thanks to BC’s intervention, however, we did manage to have some discussion Sunday on theology and N.T. Wright. (By the way, Clare keeps saying, “the park was closed. That’s just rude!” which has got to be her quoting BC.)
Since we knew a bunch of people were OOT, I didn’t want to cover new material. So I thought it might be good to pause and talk about what we’ve covered so far. But it’s also been a couple weeks since our last Wright class, so I knew we would need some other way to get back into it. I figured it might work to talk a bit about systematic theology, what I like about what I do, and what that has to do with N.T. Wright. It was maybe a good idea, but we didn’t really get to the Wright stuff. (I had a hard time focusing on what I was doing with all the toddlerish whining and shrieking and everything.)
So here’s a quick sketch of what we did cover in our brief discussion:
definitions for theology: theos=God, ology=study of; God-talk (a sort of literal definition, one of my favorites); and the classic St. Anselm, “faith seeking understanding.”
But what is “systematic theology?” Systematic theology focuses on the connections between doctrines–looks at Christian faith as a “system” in which everything is interconnected.
JTB's quick and dirty systematic theology chart
What you see above is a little sketch I made of the seven traditional loci of theological reflection. The -ologies translate into God, Christ, Holy Spirit, Humanity, Church, Salvation, and “end-times” (in quotes because I hate this phrase, hijacked as it is by the Left Behinders). What’s important about the chart are the connections between the loci–although, I’d like to point out, there are more connections to be made, and your lines of connection might be different than mine. It might be fun to make your own (and if you want to use the nifty bubble chart like I did, you can go to bubble.us for a free online concept mapping tool).
So the point is, what we believe about, say, the church (ecclesiology), connects to our notions of salvation (soteriology) and to our beliefs about Christ (Christology). And what we say about Christ–at the core of the Christian faith–has implications for everything else: our ideas about who God is, how the Spirit works, what human beings are/should be, what/how salvation does, what the church is and what the church should be doing, and what God intends as the end (in both senses, end of time and end-as-purpose) of the world.
So this is what I do all day. Contemplate how these ideas interact, and how changing our God-talk on one point impacts our faith on some other point, or possibly all other points. (Specifically, what happens when “cyborg” becomes part of our God-talk? But I’ll not pursue this now…:) If it sounds lonely, well, it kindof is. If it sounds boring, well, I don’t think so, but then again, this is my own weird vocation, and I prefer concepts to people anyhow. (Except for CCfB people. Of course.)
As I said yesterday, we’re a curious bunch so I don’t have to make a case for using our brains in church or thinking about faith or the value of asking hard questions. We’re sort of all about that. And because that’s true we also know that you can never stop with just one hard question. Instead that first hard question—if you’re really serious about it—is like your brain’s gateway drug into the hard core addiction of systematic theology. And it doesn’t matter what exactly that first question is, whether it’s “does God really exist” or “why do bad things happen” or “are they just BSing me with this Intelligent Design thing because evolution actually seems sort of reasonable” or whatever. All questions lead to all other questions.
So how does this lead back to our discussion of N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope? Well, the subtitle of the book is: “Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.” What Wright is doing, at least in part, is following the lines of connection between specific doctrines that give us this peculiar Christian notion of hope. What is heaven? That’s an eschatological question, but it’s answered best, in Wright’s opinion, but going to soteriology–the doctrine of resurrection. So Wright follows the systematic connections from this after-life, end-times question to a question about what does it mean to be saved, to be resurrected? And there, he talks about the importance of bodily resurrection–following the lines of connection further, to theological anthropology, arguing that part of what it means to be human is to be embodied. So there is a connection between heaven/hell and our ideas of afterlife and endtimes to our notions of salvation and resurrection, and these notions also tell us what it means to have been created human by God. (This is about where we’re at in our study.) And finally, Wright will move to what I like to call the “so-what” question: what does this mean for us right now, for how we live our lives individually and communally, as the church? So a final connection is made, to a doctrine of the church’s mission (ecclesiology).
If you’re feeling a little dizzy…that’s quite a lot of ground to cover, really. And skipping from one doctrine to another can be disconcerting, if the lines of connection aren’t clear pathways to follow. So my hope was that if we could map some of this out, we could more easily follow along with Wright as he moves from a consideration of resurrection, to what it means to be human, to Christ’s person and work, to a re-worked notion of heaven and afterlife, to a so-what notion of the nature and mission of the church in this world.
