{"id":797,"date":"2009-04-27T12:50:27","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T19:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=795"},"modified":"2009-04-27T12:50:27","modified_gmt":"2009-04-27T19:50:27","slug":"faith-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2009\/04\/27\/faith-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is Part I of my review of Faith Thinking:  The Dynamics of Christian Theology<\/a> by Trevor Hart.  This was the first book assigned in my Missional Theology<\/a> I course at BTS<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

Trevor Hart\u2019s Faith Thinking is a prolegomena to Christian theology in the tradition of \u201cfaith seeking understanding.\u201d  In essence, Hart seeks to envision Christian theology as the extension of a MacIntyreian tradition, utilizing the epistemological resources of \u201ccritical realism.\u201d <\/p>\n

In his introduction, Hart outlines his project and discusses the contours of \u201cfaith\u201d and \u201ctheology.\u201d \u201cFaith,\u201d he notes, \u201cwill always seek to enter into a fuller and deeper knowledge and understanding of that which matters most to it.\u201d   This means that, although faith is situated within a tradition, it is not merely a rote repetition of that tradition.  Faith is concerned both with the \u201cinternal coherence\u201d of contemporary expressions of the tradition and the \u201cexternal reference\u201d of those expressions to other sources and facets of knowledge.   Faith is integrative.  It must \u201cseek .  .  . to come to terms with the problems and the possibilities of integrating our faith in its various aspects into a wider picture of things entertained by society; thereby inhabiting a more or less integrated world, a universe rather than a multiverse.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cTheology\u201d is an attempt to understand the object and place of faith.   Theology, then, is an effort to understand reality \u2013 the universe \u2013 from a stance of faith.  Christian theology, in particular, tries to \u201csketch an intellectual contour of reality as it appears from within the stance of a living and active faith in Christ . . . .\u201d   If all Christians are called to seek after God\u2019s purposes, then all Christians to some degree or another are engaged in the theological task. <\/p>\n

Although Hart does not say so directly, his project clearly is an effort to view Christian theology from the perspective of critical realism.  \u201cCritical realism\u201d is an epistemological position that is both realist and critical.   It is \u201crealist\u201d in that, as with Enlightenment empiricists and rationalists, it affirms that human beings are capable of true knowledge of a real world that is not merely constructed.  It is \u201ccritical\u201d in that, as with contemporary postmodernists, it recognizes that all human knowledge is constrained, situated, incomplete, and provisional.   In contemporary theology, critical realism is represented in the thinking of Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, Leslie Newbiggin, N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and others, many of them referred to by Hart throughout the book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is Part I of my review of Faith Thinking:  The Dynamics of Christian Theology by Trevor Hart.  This was the first book assigned in my Missional Theology I course at BTS.  Trevor Hart\u2019s Faith Thinking is a prolegomena to Christian theology in the tradition of \u201cfaith seeking understanding.\u201d  In essence, Hart seeks to envision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-seminary","category-epistemology","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-cR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}