Tony Jones Discussion
Last night after worshiping with the Open Door we had some great discussion with Emergent coordinator Tony Jones. Post in the comments what you thought!
posted by Emergent Pittsburgh @ 8:32 AM
Monday, October 17, 2005
About Me
- Name: Emergent Pittsburgh
- Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Previous Posts
- Discussion with Tony Jones Sunday Oct. 16th
- First Pittsburgh Missional Cohort
- Doug Pagitt's Relevant Magazine Article
- September 28, 2005
8 Comments:
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bj, john, abraham and the open door community - thanks for hosting us last night. awesome to worship our great God together, fantastic food and dialoguing with tony was sweet. let's keep the conversation going - join us on october 26.
Tony made a comment to the effect that one unqiue aspect of Christianity is that we believe that truth is a person.
What impact does this understanding of truth have on how we do theology and think about notions of "truth" and "Truth" or "absolute truth"?
I am working on a poem about the contrast of propsitional truth and incarnational truth right now. Maybe I will post it in a few days?
My thoughts... Truth is discovered in relationship with and to Jesus Christ. Truth is on the move. Truth cannot be limited to propositions and doctrine. Truth is discerned and discovered realationally and communnally. Truth is truth and need not be qualified as absolute. My good friend Jake Wobbruck preached a great sermon on Relational Truth, from proposition to person, a few months back at the Open Door. I commend it to you all, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jrock/, click on soapbox on his site and you will find it.
Brin it would be great if you joined us on October 26th up at Crestfield.
BJ -
Two comments
First of all, whether intentionally or not I hear echos from Karl Barth's CD III.4 on ethics where, in a brilliant move in my opinion, he comes out and says that in the area of ethics what we can do is develop a certain ethical framework from which we can think about ethics in order to help us discern the Living Word of God speaking. So while we derive our ethical framework from scripture so to speak, we are not governed my proof texting, but rather discerning. In other words, according to Barth, scriptures helps shape our thinking about matters of ethics so we correctly discern the command of the living Word of God. I think you're dead on with the emphasis on communally and relationally, as they are invaluable to discerning the Living Word of God's command.
But, let us play devil's advocate for a minute. Kate Lockard (PTS Class of 2005) posted a brief blog entry on issues of gender in India. (http://indiakate.blogspot.com/2005/10/on-gender.html) If one googles either "honor killings" or "bride burning" one will find extremely disturbing stories of the mistreatment of women throughout the world.
Now, if truth is strictly limited to the community, how can we advocate for causes outside our community? If we say that there are some principles of the Gospel message that are univeral regardless of context, then we've essentially created a metanarrative (such as the intrinsic value of all human beings) If we say that truth is limited strictly to the community, then I wonder how we can in anyway speak out against those things happening outside our community, even if we are generous and define our community as the whole of the Western World.
As for the 26th, I would love to but Wednesdays are jam packed for me with class and church activities.
On a side note... I own two of Tony's books, "Postmodern Youth Ministry" and "Soul Shaper" and I would recommend both. Postmodern Youth Ministry, while it is specific to Youth Ministry, was helpful in reshaping how I do ministry with everyone, not just youth. Soul Shaper, and its cousin "The Sacred Way" is a wonderful collection of spiritual disciplines with complete historical, theological, and practical information on each discipline. Soul Shaper is basically the same content with specific application for youth ministry.
I'm not sure that we can separate propositional and relational truth. They seem to go hand in hand. We use propositions as we relate to one another; and as we interact, we arrive at other propositions. Most of this conversation contains propositional statements (i.e. "Truth is a person", "truth is discovered..."). I don't think we can avoid propositions. And propositions are fine in building certain constructs so we can understand and move around in our world. But let us hold them with an open hand. Because at the same time, we need community to continually shape our understanding of reality and our current context.
It seems to me that when Jesus said he is the "truth," he is using language to convey to us an idea about who he is as a person. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus says that he is the “truth,” it’s a metaphor for something more complex and more relational—like the metaphors of bread, light, gate, shepherd, resurrection, way, life, and vine. He is “the way, the truth, and the life”—in other words, Jesus is the revealer of how to get to God, the author of life.
Now with that said, what about "objective truth?" Isn’t our modernist desire to believe in “Truth” (as in an objective, rationally arrived at “truth” that is “out there” to be discovered), really idolatry? Where in Jesus’ words do we hear that in order to “know truth,” we must objectively use the rules of reason?
Jesus simply says that he is the truth. And elsewhere Jesus also says that if you are one of his disciples, you “will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What kind of "knowledge" was Jesus talking about? Was he saying that the knowledge that comes through Reason will set you free, or something else?
The point is this: Jesus is calling us not into knowledge through a modern epistemology (that seeks a scientific understanding in which we objectively learn "truth" verifiable through the rules of reason and science). He is calling us into a knowledge that has a premodern and a postmodern epistemology. It is premodern in that it is a “knowledge” that resembles the Hebrew word yada—the intimate kind of knowledge between persons. It is postmodern in that it is a knowledge not of propositions legitimated by Reason but a knowledge of a person that speaks and we are to listen.
And it is Christian in that we place our faith in the truth of the person of Christ, not in the truth of a philosophy of Reason (one is called “faith;” the other is called “idolatry.”)
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