Contemporary Theology

We had a terrific speaker for one of our Adult Education classes at church this morning.  She's a professor at a local college and joined us to give an introductory presentation on Contemporary Theology in general and Liberation Theology in particular.  Not topics with which I'm more than vaguely familiar, but I thought I'd share what I learned.  

The overarching theme of contemporary theology is the need to be accountable to human experience, and it breaks down into three general subthemes.  First, in a shift in theological perspective that has taken place over the last century, the primacy of doctrine and church authority take second place to experience.  Second, hermeneutics -- interpretation -- is given a pivotal role, as the Enlightenment idea that there is one normative human experience is being discarded.  And third, history is of vital importance.  The early Christian church was profoundly influenced by Hellenistic ideas of absolutism, but has in the last century begin to respond to the need to accomodate the revolution wrought by Darwinism and by the development of process theology: the idea that God is at once both absolute and in process.  

Contemporary theology can be broken down into several subgroups -- areas like ecological theology and feminist theology -- and seen as part of the spectrum of Christian theology, from neorthodoxy, which attempts to uphold the sources and norms of the Christian tradition, to revisionist theology, which tres to recover the tradition while making peace with contemporary culture, to liberal theology which is anthropomorphic in vision, to radical theology, which tries to transcend the sources and norms of the tradition.  

Contemporary theologians view revelation as something both objective and subjective, something that takes place in history and is in process, and something that recognizes that God is mystery and that our experience of God is always a mediated one.  

Essential to contemporary theology is an awareness of its tentativeness, of the need to listen and to be open to other voices -- otherwise we are tempted to make God into what we want God to be (a process otherwise known as idolatry).  

OK,  that was a bit dense  - as I said, the talk was only a brief introduction.  I hope I've done it justice, and I'll add a bit on Liberation Theology later. 

In the meantime, books to read:  

Blessed Rage for Order by David Tracy

Introduction to Contemporary Theology by Neil Ormerod

Modern Theologians by David Ford

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Walked 3 miles.