la nouvelle théologie: Timid, Theoretical Radicals
Certainly RO is writing to academics in a jargon specific to a very limited, elite social class — far from the ecclesial basis that they claim to speak for and from.
I often feel this , and at times, even at the receiving end of being blindsided by something I haven’t thought of, nor been exposed to, in all of my theological past. If someone like me has “missed all this”, I think it behooves some to realize that there are people who seriously attempt to call into question “the principalities and powers” , and as Walter Wink put it, seek to Name those powers and to enable and disocver ways for communities to grow a pocket of resistance to said powers— and that these “seekers” may yet do that, and even come to the same conclusions that RO has been “mapping” for us. But some of these studies are not so easy to come by, or to even lend themselves to accessibility at a moment’s notice to the mind of one who may need space to take this in, and may well be “fruitful ground” in which insights such as that which RO has offered can blossom and bear fruit. But oh yes, that FRUIT.
Yet the Jappery article is also correct. Sometimes I wonder if any of these authors have engaged in a work of mercy; I wonder if they have let themselves be immersed in Scriptures; I wonder if their theological analysis of Eucharist is a cognitive game or really a Eucharistic offering of thanksgiving. I wonder if their thought slips into neo-Platonic emanations rather than rejoicing in the Incarnation, and if the church is not just a cool way to resist global capitalism by a nostalgic nod to socialism, rather than a live context for the sanctification of human life into the fulness of the image of God in which all were created.
The FRUITS are the true telos; it’s AIM. It really is more than ” just a cool way to resist global capitalism”, although I see how that way of being cool seems to be enough to smoothe over our unfruitfulness. We live vicariously. I have djne that in such a big way over almost 30 years. I’ve give money to this and that, and done oh so few things that really provide any lasting relief outside my own little family world. I was exposed to the influence of The Church of the Saviour in 1976, and was captured by the story of that people, and have felt like I’ve been looking for something lost to most of the church world in America ever since. I’ve worked on staff of churches, and was not bold enough to sasy the things I really thought needed being said, or would find resistance to the usual expectation of church as a therapeutic session and a “boost” to help us through the week. The radical noti ons of discipleship, and the idea of intense “detoxification” from the noti ons of “Success” in the world is rarely explored. And then in those rarified times when it is, no structural implementations follow, and we slip back into the grind, becuase we haven’t seen our true purpose in the light of the community.
The forces of the “dictatorship of relativism” remain so strong within the institutions of the Western world that perhaps here there is an intellectual opening that provides some space at one level that will empower the witness of the saints at another level.
That’s exactly why I keep reading. Naming those powers and indentifying their intellectual and spiritual currents is an invaluable defense.
