[Music] hello friends and paul as local theologian this is a video lecture entitled models of contextual theology as you might guess from the title we are going to engage steven bevin's work on models of contextual theology and what i hope to do is just spend a few moments outlining some of the introductory matters in his book uh models of contextual theology and then spend some time talking through each of these models again the purpose of these lectures on local theology is to give us a sort of a wide range of information a variety of possible
tools in our toolbox that we can use in reading and thinking about paul's letters and about the nature of paul as a theologian so i think that bevin's work is going to seem some seem somewhat similar to schreider's work that we've talked about earlier in class but i think it also has some distinctive elements that will be helpful as we move forward i want to start with what i would say is the opening of bevin's work and that is the definition and rationale for contextual theology and as far as the definition goes bevans says that
contextual theology is a way of doing theology that takes into account four inter-related items and these four are very important for our purposes the first is the spirit and message of the gospel the second is the tradition or traditions of christian people the third is the culture in which one is theologizing and the fourth is social change within that culture so that culture is not static right and i think that's an important insight culture is not static for bevens but even in a moment of time when one is doing theology in a particular time or
place there is the reality of social change that is always happening in that myth so it's a much more dynamic process than we might otherwise imagine so again those four things are gospel tradition culture and social change we want to keep those four ideas in mind as we think about contextual or local theology the next thing i want to say by way of introduction is that bevins much like schreider before him emphasizes that doing theology contextually is not an option it is rather a theological imperative he says this doing theology is not an option the
contextualization of theology the attempt to understand christian faith in terms of a particular context is really a theological imperative he says that in the very first page of the book so it's a theological imperative and growing out of that bevens says that contextual theology as he's arguing for it in his book is both new and old it is it is both novel and traditional so he starts with what is new about it what is what is a novel about contextual theology and really the the first place to start is with the the role of human
experience as a source for theological reflection he says on page two that contextual theology is unabashedly subjective it starts with human experience or at least it takes human experience very seriously in comparison with what he might call classical theology which seems to suggest that there are only two sources for theological reflection scripture and tradition and that both of these sources are sort of assumed to be above culture and ahistorical in their nature so if if the emphasis on human experience is new or novel bevins does remind us as readers however that it is old he
insists in fact that every authentic theology is rooted in a particular theology or a particular context i'm arguing in this class that that is true of paul and paul's letters but that's certainly true of later theologians whether we think of irenaeus in the second century or carl bart in the 20th century bevins goes on to say that even uh the so the sort of very uh suspect theological work of carl bark carl bart is is very suspicious of of human experience of of human systems right uh and yet even all of that emphasis in carl
bart's theological work what he creates is a highly contextualized theology of the word of god so even carl bart is best understood as a contextual theologian of some form or fashion on pages 4 and 5 bevin's comes to this conclusion that there is no theologia perennius there is no perennial theology there is no permanent or fixed theology we might say instead there is only a theology that makes sense at a certain time and place and i think that again that's a place where we want to come to paul and we want to see what was
paul doing to formulate a theology that made sense in that time and in that place and if we recognize that about paul then does that open up some engagement with him can we can we be a little bit more uh playful in our reading and application of paul's letters can we be more empathetic in our reading and interpretation of paul's letters when we understand that paul is doing this contextual work as a theologian finally i i think that bevins points out that there are a number of classic and important theological factors or theological rationales for
doing contextual theology again some of these will sound like a review the first is the incarnational of christianity because jesus became a historical person in a particular time in a particular place because of that incarnational reality because jesus was actually human and not not only seemed to be human we must take seriously our own incarnational our own particular embedded and lived experience the second rationale is the sacramental nature of theology that god is known or made known or is revealed through concrete reality and concrete things one of my images for this that i would share
with you is is that of moses at the burning bush right what happens in that moment in exodus is is god uses something concrete tangible and this worldly to communicate something extra worldly something out of this world something transcendent and that is the sacramental nature of reality that it god is in the business of taking that which is ordinary and common and using it for supernatural purposes and so that i think is the second rationale that bevans holds out and then the third is that revelation the experience of god or the coming to know god
is more often than not interpersonal rather than propositional that is to say most people come to know god through a relationship through a religious experience not through reading a textbook or or or even working their way through a confession of faith and here my example for this would be the practice of lectio divina if you if you know this practice of of prayer reading or prayed reading of scripture this is an example of where where people come to radically different understandings of what god is saying to them through the scriptures even though they're reading the
same scripture and the same person might read that scripture in a couple months or a couple years and come up with a very different message of what it means again that emphasis on interpersonal rather than propositional i think is important a final note just about the role again of the professional or the trained theologian because again i think if we're thinking about paul it's right for us to think of him as somewhat trained or somewhat equipped or at least called by these communities to exercise a more professional or trained role however we think about it
and bevin's in his work says that the trained theologian functions like a midwife and i love that image that like a midwife a trained theologian quote helps people give birth to a theology that is truly rooted in a culture and a moment of history that i think is again that this role of accompaniment of of helping a community articulate discern um navigate what is going on i think is a is a beautiful picture for our purposes as practitioners in churches and in other faith contexts but certainly i think offers us something to think about when
we're reading paul's letters and thinking about him as a theologian i want to move now in this final portion of the lecture into the the models that bevens provides and i'm just going to give us a snapshot of those models based on my reading of his book as well as the the short article by pairs that that deals with bevin's work and i want to start with what what is a model right why do we use models models are um are really a schema or a heuristic they are there's something imposed from the outside in
order to help us understand in order for us to see patterns or or commonalities you might think that for bevin's models are essentially baskets that that he's created for sorting different types of theologies or theologians um and so what bevins thinks about models is that they they provide a map for navigating what might otherwise be an overwhelming array of contextual theologies so it's important that we regard these as as models as as created things as heuristics as uh so that we we're not we're not limited by them or we're not confined by them in a
in an uh unhelpful manner really for bevins these models uh come they they sort of emerge from how theologians combine those four elements that i mentioned at the beginning of the lecture how they combine the gospel tradition culture and social change and that this the the resulting combinations of these four factors result in these different models again that bevens has identified bevins creates these models uh he identifies them and he describes them so a theologian that bevans puts in one of these baskets or one of these models may not necessarily know that language or even
agree with that language again this is all uh bevin's own work to make sense of this array of diverse theologians i want to put up this map from his book where it provides the the different models that he discusses let me say that the map that i'm providing is from the earlier edition of his book and so his later edition his second edition of the book adds an additional model that i'll be discussing that is not on this map but the map is still helpful so on the very left side of the map you'll see
that uh there is an emphasis on two factors on culture and social change on the right side there is an emphasis on the other two factors the gospel and tradition and we can sort of think about this as a spectrum right that we're moving from the most conservative at least as it relates to the gospel and tradition to the most radical again in regard to the gospel and tradition so the first model on the far right side of this map is what bevens calls the translation model the translation model is again the most conservative on
this spectrum the emphasis is on fidelity to the content of scripture into the form of tradition it says that the idea here is that both the gospel and the meaning of the gospel need to be and can adequately be translated into a culturally appropriate way so the idea here is again stripping the gospel of any of its cultural sort of shell in order to get to the nugget on the inside and then once you have that nugget to translate it to another culture this model that really assumes that there is a singular core and unchanging
gospel what bevens calls a supracultural or supercontextual gospel and really this does place a priority of the gospel or the articulation of the gospel over culture but there is a tendency or at least the danger of reducing the gospel to a very short minimal message and when we think about paul's letters uh one of the struggles is what is that what would be that core gospel for paul and and would it would it be true of all 13 of the letters that are attributed to him or is there a particular uh instantiation of the gospel
in romans and maybe in galatians that's different in first thessalonians or first corinthians i want us to sit with that because i think that that's a really important concept for us to keep in mind is the degree to which we think as later interpreters that paul had this sort of core idea that he's able to deliver uh in different contexts on the far left side of the map is the anthropological model and this one is as i said the most radical it's the most uh emphasis on cultural identity and relevance uh rather than scripture and
tradition it's it's going to put a higher premium on social change and on culture it's much more person centered rather than gospel or tradition centered and it puts a very high premium on human experience so that scripture and tradition and human experience are seen standing alongside of each other not necessarily subjected not human experience subjected to scripture and tradition but maybe like three legs on a chair holding up what it what would be known as theology and the one of the dangers that bevins points out about this model is is a potential to romanticize culture
uh to sort of fetishize it would be another way of putting it the third model is the praxis model of contextual theology and here the focus is on the importance or the need for social change and it's in it's important that that this form of contextual theology emerges from a context in which social change is a concern or a focus so that when we talk about praxis we're signaling the idea that god is present in culture and that god is present among people history and action that's an important idea about praxis contextual theology the emphasis
here is that it's not just about expression or about articulating the gospel but it's also emphasizing action it's movement it's doing something in order to respond to that need for social change and we see in this praxis model again this this action and reflection that i've talked about in a previous lecture that rather than thinking of theology as something concrete or permanent and printed theology is conceived of more in terms of an activity a process and a way of life and i think in a previous lecture i've pointed out the degree to which praxis theology
is is originates with certain philosophical and political commitments of the of modernity and and and so that with that reality i still think that the praxis model opens up some things for us to think about paul that that if we think about theology primarily through the lens of praxis of through action then that makes potentially that makes a lot of sense of what paul is doing in his letters if we can identify the the social change that is needed or the concern right that is prompting paul to write these letters then we can might think
about how action and reflection are related to one another the fourth model is the synthetic model and in theory the synthetic model tries to combine all four of those those factors in theology tries to keep them all in balance bevins calls this the middle of the road model and in order to keep these in balance it's really an ongoing theological movement uh there there might be a stress on one factor over the other at one moment in history but then you would return to it later in this continuous movement in order to rebalance those four
factors the next is uh the transcendental model and here the the the focus is not really on action or on articulating the gospel or translating the gospel rather the focus is on the person who is doing the articulating it's a focus on the theologian it's a focus on the one who does the work of theology um so there is an emphasis on uh the personally the person being authentic and uh one's faith and one's being in the world becomes sort of central in reflection it starts off by trying to understand first what it means to
be human and then going to do the sort of work of theology as as paris points out in her chapter introducing contextual theology there is a tendency in this model to assume a sort of basic or fundamental human experience or human cognition which again sort of presses against the particularity and locatedness of human and and of theology the final model which as i mentioned was added in the the later edition of the book models of contextual theology is the counter cultural or prophetic model of of contextual theology this is a radically contextual model um but
as pair explains it's based firmly in history and human experience and committed to social change while at the same time adapting what we would call a hermeneutic of suspicion towards the role of context and towards context itself so it is focused on context it is emerging from context and yet it is suspicious of context we might even say it's critical of context i believe that paris talks about it as being almost anti-cultural um or anti-contextual um so again the gospel is the driving force and specifically the sort of centrality of the revelation of christ that
that act not a content not a not a propositional statement but the act of revelation in jesus christ is sort of uh definitive and therefore uh navigates or or or possibly negates or certainly qualifies any other sort of contextual reflection uh i think bevins is is largely critical or suspicious of this approach um and we can see contemporary examples of this approach in new beginning harewas and milbank what i hope that i've done with this lecture and with the assigning the chapter from pairs and the first chapter from the book by bevins is to give
you a sense of the whole of that book at least the summary of the major impacts of that book certainly you can read the rest of the book and it it would benefit you greatly to do so but i hope that this overview is sufficient again to give us a few more tools for our toolbox as we think about local theology and as we continue to think about or prepare to think about paul and paul's letters thank you so much for your time and your attention [Music]
