The Craft of Innovative Theology. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119601562
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of the issues, objections, questions, and concerns usually brought against the vision of pluralistic theology I have championed. I understand that for many, what I have suggested will strike them somewhere on the continuum between uncomfortable and preposterous. What, they ask, would motivate the “average” creedal, churchgoing, tradition-respecting Christian to follow such a strange and potentially “dangerous” program? Should we not worry about appropriating an other’s religious form of life? Does countenancing the possible value of an other’s religious tradition negate or weaken one’s own? These and other possible objections might be laid at the door of the erstwhile pluralistic theologian and a proper response to them would necessitate a volume of its own. What I propose to do instead is to particularize and personalize my responses to a few significant issues as an invitation to the conversation I hope this chapter will evince.

       Box 1.9

      The author makes this exercise manageable by dividing the objections into three major concerns. Notice the elegant way they are organized, each one is a “question.”

       Box 1.10

      The author knows that there are other questions the reader might have. Given he has written extensively on this approach to theology, he uses footnote 36 to acknowledge that there are outstanding questions and invite the reader to look at an essay where he focuses on this objection.

      Before moving to the question of the possibility, it should escape no one that at the very center of Christian theology lies the great hybrid, God-man. The Incarnation represents the grossest impurity imaginable in the Semitic context: a being who is fully God and fully human. Christ is the paradigmatic hybrid, through whom human beings are understood to be redeemed, transformed, and sanctified. Any concerns about purity must be put aside if we are to fully understand and appreciate this doctrine.