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1 - Values informing conceptions of theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2009

David G. Kamitsuka
Affiliation:
Oberlin College, Ohio
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Summary

In analyzing revisionary, postliberal and liberation conceptions of theology, we enter into the midst of intermovement polemics. This might well be expected since conceptions of theology are informed by a host of complex theological judgments and values which take shape in relation to the wide-ranging intellectual, ecclesial and socio-political exigencies confronting theology in contemporary culture. Inevitably, theologians will read those demands differently, placing greater or lesser stress on various concerns and agendas which, in turn, affects the way they orient their theologies. The opportunities for differences and disputes abound. For example, Ogden believes that any adequate conception of theology today must value theology's task of assessing critically any and all Christian claims and, to do this fully, theology must have sufficient independence from the Christian witness on which it reflects. Without this value, theology is reduced to propaganda. The academic theological guild has fought long and hard to secure its freedom from being forced to be an arm of any group's imposition of belief, and this value would promote that intellectual freedom for theology. Frei's conception of theology values theology's ecclesial function of redescribing Christian communal attempts to render a habitable scriptural world. Without this value, theology is too easily absorbed into other semiotic systems with no distinctly Christian theological perspective to offer an increasingly secular, biblically illiterate and fragmented society. For Gutiérrez, theology adequately conceived must come to terms with the call for solidarity with the oppressed by responding to their material needs and attending to their spiritual wisdom.

Type
Chapter
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Theology and Contemporary Culture
Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives
, pp. 12 - 45
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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