Back to the Garden

As part of the requirements for my MA, I had to write a paper on theological method. What follows is a portion from that paper as I attempt to articulate how I currently understand the work of theology. Many people have asked me how theology has effected my relationship with God - I hope that this short piece can serve as a gentle correction of the form of that question and show that theology is an inextricable part of the Christian relationship with the God who chose to reveal Godself as Father, Son, and Spirit. I take theology to be the task of helping the Church say no more or less than must be said about God and our relationship to God. The second part of that task, articulating “our relationship to God,” is the easier of the two, as it is simply the exercise of working out how all of human knowledge inheres in Christ. Theology is the great “Queen of the Sciences” insofar as it is, far from being its own unique sectioned off form of discourse, a master discourse that attempts ...

Hauerwas has often insisted that if we need a theory of truth to know Jesus, we should worship that theory. Jonathan Tran, a follower of Hauerwas' approach to theology, here provides us with a theory of truth that is at once both a "theory" and yet not - it is but an observation arising out of our ordinary forms of life: "The contexts which grant meaning to what we say go before us, necessitating “I mean what we all mean when I say something we all understand,” making speech at once an act of agency  and  participation. Yet agreement also incurs estrangement because while I  must  mean what we all mean when I say something, I sometimes  don't mean what we all mean by it. The same facts of language that gather us, that norm us, can also estrange us from one another, make us abnormal to one another. In the second sense, conventions are not unnatural intrusions on human life but rather indicative of and appropriate to what it is to be human, to be able to carry o...