The Depths of God

Abstract

ion and dimensions of religious life correct one another, and are modified in turn by their own corrections. Theology proper is the deliberate following out of this dialectic between speculative representations of how to keep the important things together and the piecemeal appreciation and assessment of the many divine dimensions of things. This is what the Church Fathers of the early councils were doing when they This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Thu, 26 May 2016 05:51:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Neville: Depths of God 7 employed the speculative habits of Greek philosophy to relate and set priorities for elements of Christian life, scripture, and belief. This sense of theology has fallen upon evil days during the modem period because of our penchant for certainty and what is now fashionably called foundationalism. Theology is indeed about foundations, but it is only hypothetical and provisional, and by virtue, of that public (Neville, 1982:11-24). Though hypothetical, a theology can be made highly plausible; indeed, the more a theological concept makes itself vulnerable to correction the more it is to be trusted. The importance of the trust is that theology is enormously practical: it guides our life in its most important dimensions. To neglect explicit and disciplined theology, or its cultural equivalents in other traditions, is to leave one's community in an arbitrary and indefensible position regarding its responses to the variety of dimensions of the divine in local experience. Of course, theology is always incomplete and ready to be revised; in this sense even the best theology is arbitrary. But good theology limits arbitrariness to the residue after careful judgments have opened the best vision possible under the circumstances. To illustrate this conception of the theological task-indeed, to get on with theology itself-I want to sketch a speculative hypothesis about God and divine things and to suggest how it might order many of the important manifestations of the divine so as to provide an archaeologically deep interpretant. The speculative hypothesis has two parts, an ontology and a Primary Cosmology.