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Conclusion: When Theology Stands in History
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Conclusion: When Theology Stands in History With regard to the relation between theology and other forms of cognitive inquiry, I proposed that the correlation between theology and the contemporary intellectual conditions should not be a one-direction track. A correlation wherein postmodernity asks the questions and theology provides the satisfactory appealing answers is insufficient. I also argued against any correlation that aims to make theology alone raise the questions, and the postmodern discourses alone provide appealing and conforming answers to those questions—as if postmodernity is from beginning to end contextualized according to a theological condition. I tried to show that my chief concern lies with the latter option, without understating the seriousness and the danger of the former. In response to those among today’s theologians who are eager to show that postmodernity is in itself “a theological condition,” I tried to echo what Ingolf Dalferth very eloquently and bravely says to challenge this attitude: Theology is not important because it is able to say something about all possible topics by employing all possible methodologies currently in vogue, but rather because it possesses its own theme. Only because of this theme itself do theology’s contributions to the themes of other disciplines deserve to be heard.1 It is not the task of theology to offer a theological explanation and hermeneutics for every nontheological, or even religiously masqueraded, issue—nor ought theology to gain a distinctive position by doing so. It is incorrect, as Dalferth rightly affirms, to expect this from theology or to force theology to be the serving executor of such an expectation. Further than just preventing it from being a dependent field of knowledge, this denies theology its uniqueness and difference from other disciplines, and it turns theology inevitably into one trendy discourse among many others through an imitation of certain dominant hermeneutical methods.2 1. Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Time for God’s Presence,” in The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann, ed. M. Volf, C. Krieg, and T. Kucharz (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996), 140. 303 On the basis of a conviction similar to Ingolf Dalferth’s, I pointed out a theological proposal that represents, in my opinion, a two-direction track of correlation. It is a correlation where both theology and postmodernity ask questions and offer answers in a way that pinpoints areas wherein each can uniquely contribute to the development of the other, without each losing its own distinction and unique identity. From this model of correlation, it is valid to argue that postmodernity needs some theological conditioning, without necessarily implying that the next step is to transform every postmodern discourse into a theological proclamation. From the same model of correlation, one can accept the theologians’ use of postmodern discourse about notions like language, plurality, relativism, “différance,” and so on, without this directly making theology subject to all the assumptions of these concepts or the rules of such discourse. The accurate relation between theology and history lies not in theology’s proclaimed and evident sensitivity and expressiveness of its surrounding intellectual and human situation, but in its evident and proclaimed sensitivity and expressiveness of God’s presence and action here and now in the face of this situation. The core issue here is that theology avoids misunderstanding itself as a mere sociological, anthropological, or contextual science. Theology is, as Dalferth says, “neither an empirical nor a historical science.” It is, rather, as he continues, a guiding critical knowledge of the triune God, and more specifically, knowledge of God “in His multifarious presence in the varied contexts of our own world and of all possible worlds that owe their existence to his presence.”3 Only a correlation of “unity-in-self-differentiation,” such as the one Pannenberg offers, between theology and other disciplines can demonstrate this particular identity of theology. Such a correlation avoids the two extremes of subordination and domination. It allows theology to be up to the duty of clarifying what is distinctively theological in its accounts of personhood and relationality, or any other notions. It also enables theology to succeed in finding the right criterion for what is to be deemed authentically Christian and what is not in the theological conception of any human idea or condition.4 This is exactly what causes Christian theology to claim that God is, by default, the subject matter of theology, and not any notions or conceptions of God. The validity of this claim is decided according to a...