The Matter of Theology: The Consequences of Art for Theological Method

Abstract

The problem of is the problem of all work: we are imprisoned within the forms and structures of our language. It should not be necessary to prove the assertion that theology's great and honorable achievements were made in a language that had nourished thought for twenty-five hundred years. Yet that language was generated out of assumptions about man's place in the world, which the work of the last one hundred years has finally dissolved. Words and the orderly structure of words no longer seem to us to account for reality as they once did. Our senses no longer seem to give us the precise and accurate information about reality that once was the foundation of our thought. Yet even the radical theologians who would repudiate the conclusion of the ancient enterprise do so with an imprisoned obedience to the logic, to the structural patterns of the enterprise they are repudiating. It would be difficult for them to do otherwise, for no other language is available. The inherited structures were generated out of a great revolution, the Hebrew-Greek enterprise, that emancipated man from nature and from myth into the work of intelligence that could divide experience into its parts and order those parts into intelligible structures. But the work is done now; the languages that were once the cause of liberation have become a prison. Therefore, the matter of theology is, for us, the engendering out of the new ordering of experience that structure of thought which will serve to make manifest who we are in the Cristian ordering of things. To escape from the imprisonment, we must, therefore, determine the role of languages in our life. To do that we must first look beneath the basic assumptions of the Hebrew-Greek enterprise to the even more basic assumptions that are found there. Here we go back to the roots of the human enterprise itself, for'the absolutely basic assumption is the division of the world into the self and the not-self. This is what