There is an interesting connection between this thread and the certainty/evidence/proof conversation taking place elsewhere on the website.

The comments in response to Andrew’s initial post seem to have moved away from his main points - which I take to be the need for a better basis in theological practice to underpin a better way of being the church. The discussion has both theoretical and practical interests.

With regard to the modern/post modern discussion: I wonder whether we may need to explore the possibility that modernism and post modernism have a continuing co-existence, albeit as uneasy bedfellows. Our tendency is to assume that the one will replace or supersede the other. I’m not sure it works like that - especially as post modernism is more a critique of modernism than a stable self-supporting philosophical position in itself.

The reformulating of historical theology by Tom Wright relies heavily on the ‘modern’ insights and methodology of historical criticism. The narrative framework he provides as a perspective on the historical Jesus is being taken as a key to a ‘post modern’ theology - as outlined by Andrew above.

In this process, critical realism is a friend rather than enemy (as implied by Ric above) of biblical understanding.

The discussion on ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’ uncannily echoes the discussion on evidence and certainty taking place elsewhere on the site. Somehow we are constantly being jostled towards one of two extremes: either we can (philosophically) have no basis for certainty in knowledge about anything, or (theologically) we feel (perhaps with some underlying panic) there must be some things which are taken as dogmatically certain, otherwise we have no firm basis for belief in anything.

In the discussion taking place elsewhere, it feels as if this kind of polarisation is diminishing useful and productive thinking. The historicity of the resurrection, for instance, is a ‘given’ as far as Christianity is concerned - even though nothing (not even the resurrection) can be historically proved with absolute certainty. But in everyday life, we don’t approach ‘certainty’ quite like that - we acccept things on the basis of all the data which is available. In this case, the data is pretty unassailable.

In the current modern/post modern dialogue, philosophy shows an undesirable tendency to assume that its most recent insights invalidate all previous insights - as if there were some evolutionary process whereby more ‘primitive’ thinking merely provided steps on the way to the most up-to-date thinking, and that ‘primitive’ thinking can be discarded as a kind of ‘vestigial’ organ in the human body - an unnecessary relic of a by-gone era.

(This ‘evolutionary’ approach to thinking is itself very ‘modern’, and pressed to its limits undermines the usefulness of biblical studies itself as a basis for contemporary belief and living).

In the same way, we can assume that the insights of ‘modernism’ must now give way ever increasingly to the insights of post modernism.

This line of thinking is severely challenged in the area of knowledge, evidence and certainty. We can if we wish undertake the imaginative exercise of living in Don Cupitt’s cave, assuming there is no contact with the outside world, telling each other stories to pass the time, but this is very far from the assumptions of the majority on how life is lived. It is also far from how the bible itself presents reality, with the assumptions that God speaks and we can hear His voice, and also that God works through history - and knowing about His workings in history is basic to belief in Him now.

This isn’t to say that we should take on a naive positivism about how we perceive things. But it does assume that things can be perceived, and that in the end language is our servant rather than our master, and there is some degree of balance between the weighting of objective and subjective realities.

This is also not to say that there does not need to be some, maybe radical, overhauling of the way truth is presented and packaged in the light of shifting cultural realities. But we should be careful about what we are jettisoning in the process. Andrew implies that the scholarly positioning of critical realism is a better basis for progress than church tradition (for instance), which will tend to impose an unhealthy dogmatism on theological discussion. Whilst I for one reject dogmatism, it seems to me that the faith community, the church as lived in everyday life throughout history, is the place where theology is tried and tested, rather than the detached world of the theological academy. The faith community is the place where wisdom is imparted by the workings of the Holy Spirit - and whilst this should be subject to critique from other ways of receiving insights, it should not be dismissed in too wholesale a fashion.

I’m all for the ethos of this website, which I assume is to explore the kind of ideas which lie at the top of this thread. The site is providing a ‘critique’ of theology (just as post modernism critiques modernism). But I’m already one step ahead, and feel that the critique itself needs, in turn, to be critiqued. Not that we should revert to by-gone dogma, but that the new steps being proposed should not in their turn become the new dogma.