Theology And Recent Philosophies

What is truth?

Wittgenstein

• logical positivists demanded, “How can we design a scientific experiment to test whether or not God exists?
• later writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, they have recognized how many different ways language can be used meaningfully.
• Language has also been a preoccupation for French philosophers like Jacques Derrida and François Lyotard, and theologians have recently used their ideas to develop a “postmodern” theology

deconstruction

• Two world wars, the Holocaust, and increasing globalization make such “modern” views impossible to hold in a postmodern world.
• Derrida advocated the need for a postmodern “ deconstruction ” of knowledge

Understanding the Cosmos

Process theology

• “process theology,” has developed here under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead.
• Process theology describes a God who is perfect in that he is perfectly related to everything, who lures actions by love rather than forcing them by power. “He is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness."

Hope & Eschatology

• a reaction to Bultmann asked about the place of the Old Testament for Christian theology
• particularly does the traditional relegation of the Hebrew Scriptures to be simply an anticipation of the New Covenant amount to a rejection of the Jewish origins of Christianity?
• Schweitzer & others have shown the importance of eschatology for understanding New Testament
• Pannenberg: Christian theology must understand itself in the world we actually live in
• Dorothy Sölle: role of suffering in theology

God's actions in the world

Theology and Freedom

Liberating the oppressed

• Africa, Latin America: experience of being oppressed
• 1960's "black liberation" in US: parallels between Israel's slavery in Egypt & slavery in modern world
• MLK Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail" cp. "Barmen Declaration"
• James Cone: "being black is not a matter of skin color"
• Women's liberation:
• Recognizing that both oppressed and oppressor need "liberating"

Liberation Theology

• That very emphasis—liberating the captives—names the most important field of theology in the last half-century.
• Liberation theology first drew wide attention in the United States in connection with “black liberation.”
• James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power, published in 1969, made the blacks' liberation from their white oppressors its central theological theme and addressed whites with warnings rather than pleas for help.

Feminist criticism / liberation

• Looking beyond that, Rosemary Radford Ruether (a prolific theologian committed both to feminism and to Christianity) has written,

All theologies of liberation, whether done in a black or a feminist or a Third World perspective, will be abortive of the liberation they seek, unless they finally go beyond the … model of the oppressor and the oppressed. (p. 271)

Theology And The Secular

• theology engaging: sciences, biology, anthropology, arts,
• "Big enough God"
• Harvey Cox at Harvard saw a need for Christianity to engagement with secular disciplines as a real opportunity
• related to Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity"?
• theology for church vs. for the secular world
• John Polkinghorne
• Ian Barbour
• Theology: image of "wheel" vs. "matrix"
• Harvey Cox: value in engaging the secular world (cf. Bonhoeffer)

World of many religions

• "syncretism":¹ "the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought" –; Christianity itself syncretistic?
• pluralism: truth in other religions? (John Hick)
• Raimundo Pannikar –; center of Christian theology moving south?

Theology And The Religions

• “Yes, I am a syncretist. But so are you. I know that I am a syncretist, but you don't know you are a syncretist because you have hegemonic power. (Korean theologian (p. 272)
• Other theologians of pluralism have been less insistent that multiple religions are different ways of saying the same thing.
• A Roman Catholic priest named Raimundo Pannikar, for example, born in Spain to a Hindu father and a Spanish mother, advocates a more strictly comparative approach. (p. 272)

Bibliography

Bibliography

• [p.nHistory2013] Placher & Nelson, A History of Christian Theology, Second Edition: An Introduction, Westminster John Knox Press (2013).