Couple of questions that have bugged me since I got here.
1. How Biblical should our faith be? How should it structure our thought? Should our theology always be couched in Biblical language? If not, how do we keep in touch with the history of our faith?
2. What binds Christians in the Body of Christ? Do we believe in Jesus in name only, with each having her or his personal Jesus? What is the Gospel? Is it that Jesus died for our sins? Or that we should help the needy? Or both?
3. Is the apostle Paul a faithful disciple of Christ or did he "create" a religion that Jesus did not intend? If he is a faithful disciple how do we reconcile Pauline theology with that we find in the Gospel narratives?
4. Is the statement, "Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life," the Truth or a truth? What is wrong with claiming an ultimate revelation in Christ that is exculsive? Is there not an exclusivist train of thought in the Bible that runs along side inclusivist thought?
5. What does it mean to "believe" in something? This word above all has become very confusing for me in seminary. Some begining question. Feel free to post your honest thoughts.
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2 comments:
Thanks for putting this up, Mark. And good questions to start us off with. I'll try "Exclusivism" for 200...
One thing I enjoyed about Newbigin's "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society" is his excellent illumination of the fact that everyone brings an assumed and unquestioned frame of reference to every discussion or argument. I think he calls it a "plausibility structure" (not to say that this is a new concept or original to Newbigin -- simply that he explains it quite well to this reader).
Along those lines, I am often bemused by the charge of "exclusivism" with regard to Jesus' Truth claims. Such a charge, to me, seems only to have any weight if one approaches Jesus' claims already having made one's mind up that no claim to Truth can be legitimate. If one begins with that assumption, then one is not honestly evaluating Jesus' claim -- one is simply dismissing it without any critical thought at all because it doesn't fit one's predetermined notions about the nature of Truth. And with regards to "exclusivism," that word (in most current conversations) seems to carry not only the denotation of "not admitting of something else" but also the connotation of "bad." Yet isn't my claim that I am the eldest child of Brad and Norvell Keyes just as exclusivist as Jesus' claim that He is the Truth? If so, then why don't people get upset when I tell them that?
I would suggest that exclusivist statements, in and of themselves, are not "bad" or negative in any way (we use them ALL the time: "George Bush is the President of the United States" (for better or for worse - let's not go there...); "She was the first person to graduate from Peoria High School with a 4.0 GPA"; "The Tuskegee Airmen were the Army Air Forces' only escort group that did not lose a bomber to enemy planes"; etc.) Basically, almost any time you combine the definite article "the" and the linking verb "to be" in a sentence, you'll wind up with an exclusivist claim. But very rarely do people get upset by the overwhelming majority of these statements.
So I would submit that people's discomfort with Jesus' claim to be The Truth has little to do with its linguistic FORM as an exclusivist statement, and most everything to do with the CONTENT of the statement -- i.e., they disagree with the substance of the claim. And I would agree that that's certainly "fair game" for discussion. But I think all the excitement about it being formally "exclusivist" is really immaterial, and only serves to lead us down an unprofitable rabbit trail. Rather, let me humbly suggest that Jesus' claim provokes two legitimate questions: 1) Does one accept, as a premise of discussion, the possibility of a universal existential Truth? If not, then it's pretty silly to spend any more time debating the validity or plausibility of Jesus' claim, since one's, ahem, exclusivist plausibility structure simply does not allow for any meaningful dialogue. If so, on the other hand, 2) Is Jesus It? And why or why not?
Wow -- did I goof up.
Don't know why I called Mike Mark. Sorry about that.
And apologies also to Will for not seeing that it was his byline, not Mike's, at the bottom of the post I responded to. I'll try to be more observant next time.
--Brint-who's-kind-of-new-to-this-blogging-thing...
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