Julie commented on this post saying:
Seems like were gravitating toward pluralism out of the same kind of exhaustion moderns feel toward the limits of science, philosophical/religious truth and uncritical trust in the institutions of society. Pluralism and complexity are overwhelming. One way to deal is to abdicate judgment (more than to cultivate tolerance, empathy, understanding).
So I like your thinking. Will be interesting to see where you take it with the emergent conversation. I suppose one disappointment I have in that movement is that there seems to be a need to come to the discussion of faith with theological presuppositions… Perhaps that is desired or even necessary. I found it limiting when I was trying to unravel my faith. I didnt know why I should "stop" examining just because there was a specific doctrine that someone else held to be one that should be trusted without challenge.
What do you think?
Presuppositions are necessary only in so far as we cannot come to any knowledge without them. However, they are not necessary to maintain and I would argue that if we want to expand and clarify the nature of truth as a correspondence between our minds and reality, that our presuppositions must be challenged and reconfigured. In fact our presuppositions do change and reconfigure whether we like it or not. This is as true for a unitarian universalist as it is for a fundamentalist.
Some will accept that change is inevitable, while others will, abdicate judgment. This is why pluralism has two powerful religious effects: liberal relativism and dogmatic fundamentalism. Neither of these positions approaches theology, much less the social structures that regulate theological construction, with very much critical judgment since the former is acceptance of everything into a system (which is only a system to the individual) and the latter is a rejection of anything outside of a preconceived system (to which a group of individuals gives consent).
I have argued before that all doctrine, including those that we read in the bible, are socially and therefore cognitively mutable. Jesus makes this clear with his relationship to the religious and political authorities of his social frame by breaking apart those assumed systems and radically reinterpreting them. Part of his revelation is a continuation of the biblical notion of human frailty compared to the durability of the Kingdom of God. All human institutions are imperfect and demand that we adapt them to a continuing revelation – not a revelation that stopped when the bible was politically canonized. Otherwise, God is truly dead and all we have is a book of myth and history. Jesus may as well have never risen from the dead at all.
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Man, if this is what you write when dizzy, foggy and lyme-brained, I shudder to imagine you at full strength and acuity! Love this:
"This is why pluralism has two powerful religious effects: liberal relativism and dogmatic fundamentalism. Neither of these positions approaches theology, much less the social structures that regulate theological construction, with very much critical judgment since the former is acceptance of everything into a system (which is only a system to the individual) and the latter is a rejection of anything outside of a preconceived system (to which a group of individuals gives consent)."
This can be further explained this way: One side drinks to get drunk and the other is afraid of communion wine.
Man, if this is what you write when dizzy, foggy and lyme-brained, I shudder to imagine you at full strength and acuity! Love this:
"This is why pluralism has two powerful religious effects: liberal relativism and dogmatic fundamentalism. Neither of these positions approaches theology, much less the social structures that regulate theological construction, with very much critical judgment since the former is acceptance of everything into a system (which is only a system to the individual) and the latter is a rejection of anything outside of a preconceived system (to which a group of individuals gives consent)."
This can be further explained this way: One side drinks to get drunk and the other is afraid of communion wine.