Listening Theology as Via Media (cont.)

The last post unpacked how a listening theology avoids the blunders of modernism. But for thoughtful Christians postmodernism also has its problems. How might a listening theology address these?

The term postmodernism is used in several ways, but here I mean a cluster of philosophical emphases held together by a tendency toward conceptual relativism and linguistic constructivism. Conceptual relativists argue that, because we use our communally-devised conceptual resources to investigate reality, we are encased in them and do not have access to the world in itself but only the world as our concepts allow us to see it. Our knowledge is merely relative to our conceptualizations of things. This commitment may be wedded to linguistic constructivism, the belief that our linguistic constructs actually construct the world around us. This is to move away from metaphysical realism, belief in mind-independent reality. These emphases, though not adopted uncritically by them, have found a place in the works of Stanley Grenz and John Franke. Grenz and Franke have several beneficial things to say about the task of theology (e.g., it must be done in and for the body of Christ, it is not enshrined in any one systematic presentation and so must be ongoing), but I have concern about their openness to conceptual relativism and linguistic constructivism (even if they would prefer not to speak in those terms when describing their approach to theology).

A listening theology differs in a couple of ways. First, it affirms that we can in fact listen to reality and the canonical exposition of it without our use of concepts automatically distorting it as it comes before our minds. We can 1) have some pre-conceptual experience and knowledge (the epistemological distinction between belief de re and belief de dicto is helpful here) and/or 2) in virtue of the God-givenness of our noetic equipment faithfully conceptualize things as we experience them. With respect to (2), we of course have great intellectual limitations as finite creatures who have plunged into sin, but our Creator desires for us to obtain genuine knowledge of the way things are. In sum, we listen and reply to reality and what God has to say about it; we don’t necessarily do conceptual violence to it every time we seek to understand it.

Second, a listening theology rejects the idea that our conceptual-linguistic construals construct reality. (The exception would be the case of performative speech, speech by which we do bring into being certain states of affairs. A classic example is the case of a minister pronouncing a couple to be husband and wife. This state of affairs does not obtain before the minister says so.) A listening theology gives more weight to the fact that there is already an objective world created by God, a world which he describes in the canon of Scripture. We listen to God speaking and, in turn, do not presume that our theological statements in themselves actually create things. Rather, if they are faithful to God’s self-communication, they help us see who God is and what he is up to and help us properly to engage reality and join in the drama of redemption. This is less a matter of creating reality and more a matter of finding our place in it as creatures of the living God. Having said this, we should always remember that, while our use of language does not create the world around us, Christian leaders still have the joyful responsibility to describe and illumine the contours of reality such that the church is prodded to go out and serve others with the result that the world does look different for the glory of God.