Reading through different chapters of The Modern Theologians, has been most refreshing. It’s a great book for overviews which is the way I tend to operate before going into details. While scanning through the book earlier, I jumped straight to the epilogue which lists down a series of questions about "the health of the discipline of theology". It’s not exhaustive but here they are:
- How to attest in truth to God and to all else in relation to God?
- How can theology distribute its efforts so as to be thoughtfully responsible in many spheres?
- Will the academy be a place of genuine theology?
- Will churches be communities genuinely informed by theology?
- Who does theology?
- How to celebrate the millennium?
Of course, what drew my attention was the 12 theses David Ford offers without commentary which fires up my imagination a little bit more. Enjoy and engage ,,,
- God is the One who blesses and loves in wisdom.
- Theology is done for the sake of God and the Kingdom of God.
- The cry of prayer is the beginning, accompaniment, and end of theology: Come, Holy Spirit! Hallelujah! and Maranatha!
- Study of Scripture is at the heart of theology.
- Describing reality in the light of God is a basic theological discipline.
- Theology hopes in and seeks God’s purposes while immersed in the contingencies, complexities, and ambiguities of creation and history.
- Theological wisdom seeks to do justice to many contexts, levels, voices, moods, genres, systems, and responsibilities.
- Theology is practiced collegially, in conversation and, best of all, in friendship; and, through the communion of saints, it is simultaneously premodern, modern, and postmodern.
- Theology is a broker of the arts, humanities, sciences, and common senses for the sake of a wisdom that affirms, critiques, and transforms each of them.
- Our religious and secular world needs theology with religious studies in its schools and universities.
- Conversation around scriptures is at the heart of interfaith relations.
- Theology is for all who desire to think about God and about the reality in relation to God.
6 and 8 are cool (of course they all are, but…)
9 is fantastic (a ‘broker’!)…but 10 will be a challenge, no?
alwyn – though institutionally I think 9-10 this is going to be a long shot, but perhaps there can be informal attempts and experiments which make this happen. I think RoH Malaysia is one such attempt.