MetaCatholic

I want to come back to the relationship between exegesis, systematic theology and ecclesial and individual Christian praxis. In an earlier post I picked up on a debate between Mike Bird and Ben Myers. Now Phil Sumpter has found one of his many choice quotes from Childs. This too stresses the inseparability of exegesis and theology,

I continue to register a concern that talking of this relationship easily slips into discussing the relationship simply of academic disciplines. The whole web of reading scripture, and developing coherent and systematic reflections is indeed a dialectic, but it is not really the case that these activities are the only or even the primary factors involved. Both occur not only at the desk, but in the world as the church lives out its mission and engages in worship.

At the risk of a gross over-simplification, I want to suggest that what we might call “primary” theology takes two forms: what the church “says” to God in worship, and what the church “says” about God in mission. I put “says” in inverted commas because I intend it to include non-verbal “saying”: the attitudes, space, gesture, ritual and music of worship also speak, as do the acts of charity, outreach, and engagement in mission, along with the living out of the gospel in ordinary.

By designating this primary theology, I am speaking of it as part of the raw stuff of our speech to and about God. It includes traditional readings of scripture, images, inherited ways of thinking and the patterns of intellectual and practical organisation. But it also generates new expressions, as new prayers are uttered, new hymns written, and fresh circumstances and contexts are encountered. There are obvious historical examples. One early one is the way in which the worship of Christ was entwined with the thinking that led to the affirmation of his full and co-eternal divinity. (It is, I think, no accident that the one possible place in the Pauline corpus where Paul may refer to Jesus as God comes in an expression of praise.) A little later, and in the West, the development of the doctrine of original sin, for better or worse, is tied up with the baptismal practice of the Church. More recently, until pulled back by Vatican II, it was mariological devotion leading mariological doctrine within the RC Church. Even more recently, not least under the praxis of liberation, the Lucan text of Jesus setting out his mission at the start of its ministry has displaced the Great Commission as the foundation text of Christian mission.

The more “academic” disciplines (though they may also take place in non-academic contexts) of exegesis and systematics may also be expressions of this primary theology. Certainly, they are invaluable and essential practices of “secondary” theology. That is, they may themselves generate fresh speech about God, but they equally (perhaps essentially) need to be concerned with asking whether the new ways of speaking about God that appear in worship and mission are, actually, true to the story of Jesus. The exegete reflects on the readings of scripture prompted by these fresh expressions and draws them into relationship with the historical meaning and context, the theologian teases out their implications for the whole corpus of Christian teaching, seeking out either coherence or inconsistency. Are the implications helpful or harmful, provoking new appreciations of truth, or generating serious conflict with older appreciations? Do these new ways of speaking fit the biblical and gospel story, or squeeze it out of shape?

This secondary theology may in turn become primary, as on the basis of the more developed reflections, fresh apprehensions of God are grasped, new ways of speaking opened up, and a clearer vision of the work of the Spirit in the contemporary world obtained. But it is never only a dialectic between biblical exegesis and systematic theology, but an ongoing engagement with the whole life of the scripture-reading and theologically-reflecting church in its worship and mission. This is, I think, what we mean by a living tradition: it is never simply the repetition of what has been received, but its creative, worshipful and missionary restatement.