Not too long
ago, a friend said to me, “That’s real cool that you’re getting a seminary
education, even though I know the Holy Spirit is really our teacher.” I thought
to myself, “Thanks for attempting both to pretend to compliment my efforts and
to undermine them in one fell swoop.” That’s not what I said. I don’t really
remember how I responded, and I have no intention of this little blog becoming
an extended rant or a disburdening of stored up resentment or a thorough defense
of theological education. However, such comments have caused me to think a bit
about what it would mean and look like for the Spirit to speak to cultured
creatures such as humans. What follows is a smattering of thoughts concerning
the Spirit, culture, and (church) tradition as they intersect.
What it looks
like for the Spirit to be our teacher takes form in ways that are intelligible
to us, and therefore what it looks like for the Spirit to be our teacher takes form
in ways that are dusty, dusty with our local dust. The Spirit contextualizes
for our benefit. Put colloquially, God meets us where we are. But this complexifies
the matter rather than simplifies it. Discerning the Spirit of God acting in
our midst takes a lot of work not merely by individuals but by communities in
dialogue with other communities.
Recently, I have
been reading some bits about African peoples’ struggle to discern what the Christian
gospel looks like for Africans in Africa in contrast with the Anglo gospel they
received from modern missionary movements that disregarded African culture.
Attempts now have been made to better understand the Christian gospel in
African garb. In 1973 Manas Buthelezi, a Lutheran bishop in South Africa,
explained,
“The
Black Man must be enabled through the interpretation and application of the
Gospel to realize that blackness, like whiteness, is a good natural face cream
from God and not some cosmological curse. Here lies the contribution of Black
theology’s methodological technique. Black Theology challenges established
Christianity to engage in a dialogue with the black people who feel that
somehow theology has not taken them into consideration. It cautions the
preacher and minister to stop preaching ‘pie in the sky’ religion, but instead
to come down and toil with the black man spiritually and existentially in the
sweat and dust of daily life.”
In order to
discern the Spirit’s voice speaking to us in and through our cultural foibles while
recognizing our own theology as contextual theology (whether it be Latin
American, Black, Womanist, Anglo-American, Anglo-European, Feminist, Minjung,
Mujerista, etc.), we must dialogue with the communities of the past as well as
the present being ever-open to conversion while maintaining serious commitment
to whatever tradition we happen to belong.
It may be
supposed with a vague sense of sophistication that we need not be committed to
any particular (church) tradition. However, to ignore our own tradition is both
presumptuous and naïve. I would suggest that refraining from being rooted
concretely in a tradition sterilizes any particularity we may have in our
voices. Without tradition we have only generic gesticulations that will make
little if any contribution to ecumenical conversations; furthermore,
inter-traditional dialogue and translation is impossible unless we acknowledge our own particular dialect. In
order to speak and to listen well, we must locate ourselves in a particular
tradition, lest we suppose that we can speak and listen with “language” that is
not particular but is somehow a-cultural.
Moreover, unless
we think the Spirit of God has been ever silent for the past two thousand years
of the Church’s life, we would do well to listen to our friends who have lived
as members of the listening community, listening ever attentively to the Word
of God. Unless we think that God has been silent until speaking to us today, we
would do well to listen for the Spirit’s voice that has spoken to our friends
through the ages. I would agree with the Eastern Orthodox theologian John
Zizioulas as he has asserted that the charismatic life constitutes, rather than
being derived from, the church’s being (in Being
as Communion). The very being of the Church through the ages evidences the workings
of the Spirit. It then goes without saying that we should glean insights from
the Church’s past in order to understand our present since the Church through
history is the activity of the Spirit.
Having
recognized our own dialects and affirmed the voice of the Spirit as the life of
the Church through the ages, as we speak from a particular tradition in
dialogue with traditions different from our own, we may very well find that the
same divine wind that stirred in that house on Pentecost has stirred the dust of
churches through the ages and continues to stir the dust around us today. However,
our inattention to the past and refusal to be concretely rooted in a tradition
may leave us feeling that God remains ever silent or that God has finally
spoken authentically for the first time only to us today.
The Spirit has
been speaking in the past, and because we are cultured creatures in order to
hear the Spirit’s voice in the past we must identify our own cultural foibles
in order to discern the Spirit’s voice speaking to those in the past according
to whom we discern the Spirit’s voice today. This involves acknowledging
discontinuities and identifying potential continuities.
I would like to
thank friends who have caused me to reflect on various dimensions of theology’s
task. Many questions have come to mind. Why in the world would I spend days,
weeks, months, years, and even a lifetime studying the past in dialogue with
the present? Why do I spend so much time with biblical languages? Why do I
grapple with matters of moral discernment and holistic hermeneutics? Why do I
stay up into the early hours of the morning and then rise early in order to study
theologians from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America? Why do
I get so excited and read insatiably? Because I believe that indeed the Spirit
has been speaking and continues to do so. Because I believe that indeed the
Spirit is our teacher and that our teacher speaks amidst our dusty culture.
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