Brian Hamilton-Vise

I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. —James Baldwin

Struggling with Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is beautiful, when it means striving to praise God rightly, striving to avoid dishonor or carelessness in our speech about and to God. I want to affirm this concern for speaking well that underlies the whole history of systematic theological reflection, and I want to agree that we cannot preach the gospel without knowing whom it is we preach–so doctrine is only a way of naming those conclusions we have reached over centuries of careful reflection. But why do you make it so difficult to affirm, labeling any divergence or serious questioning as wacky and ludicrous? If we lose the profound sense of struggle that went into the development of doctrine, if we somehow begin to imagine that these conclusions are self-evident rather than the result of years of questioning, then we have lost the very spirit at the root of all Christian theology: a spirit of humility and prayer.

21 December 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags:

[RSS for this post]

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

Brian Hamilton-Vise is a Ph.D. student in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, where his research is in the history of Christian political and economic thought. His side interests are in the development of negative theology and in recent political theory. Email him at bdhamilton@gmail.com.

[Subscribe to RSS Feed]  Subscribe to my RSS feed

Recent bookmarks