Analysis of Fundamental Theology - Literature review Example

Dermot Lane, an Irish theologist has put down his views regarding Christian reflection, and his magnum opus actually revolves around three things in “The Experience of God”, Experience, God and Theology. He considers this issue as one of the most crucial which is often faced and ignored by the men and women of today’s era. One of the two dimensions on which he emphasizes his focus onto, is the exposure of God and the response of a common person towards it. He stresses upon the need for such imagination, effective for a common catholic so that he can built and enhance his faith on the pillars of human spirit which breaks boundaries, advances knowledge and expands horizons. He argues that a creative imagination is automatically enforced when instructs itself out of the past and not in disregard of history or tradition. According to Dermot Lane: “Theology, from beginning to end, is about the critical unpacking of the revelation of God that takes place in human experience.” (p. 15) Lane’s approach is to identify God, he characterizes by suggesting and examining different techniques that take us to the threshold for proving the existence of God. In dealing with this phenomenon he assembles and judges different approaches, like when he discusses the “proof” approach, he likely discusses the rudiment dilemma with this approach is that “God” is examined critically on behalf of “proofs” and on finding no “proofs”, God is reduced to the extent of a modal status. As far as he talks about the history, he emphasizes upon the particular challenge for the Churches to develop a new imaginative framework which, as Lane puts it, is able to express and hold in existence the reality of a Christian faith that is at least inclusive, historically self-conscious and pluralist. As he suggests in “Experience of God”: “Obviously a real difference exists between claiming that theology is related to human experience and holding that theology is simply an outgrowth of human experience.” (p. 18) There are often conflicts with the multiplication of theologies. Even if their relation is not strictly conflictual, to whatever extent they are calls to reorganize all theology from a particular perspective, they are necessarily in tension with one another. Some people can live in such tension and find it fruitful, but many find it bewildering, and the church as a whole, even when it has goodwill toward the many claims placed upon it, becomes confused about its mission. The multiplication of theologies has been a valuable stage in the church’s thinking, but something more is needed. Unless the vitality and creativity that has been expressed in the theologies make a further breakthrough, the church will revert to the doctrinal approach to theology. It will learn something from what liberationists, women, and others have said, but it will incorporate only what can be assimilated into the mainstream of a relatively unchanged tradition. If that is the church’s destiny, it would be better for us to drop talk of a theology of nature and simply reflect together on how we can contribute to the enrichment of the church’s doctrine of creation. The tendency of Catholic theology was to image grace in a way that suggests external relations between God and the recipient. Protestantism in many ways carried individualism further than Catholicism had. Nevertheless, at this point its Biblicism helped. Grace could not be viewed as something external to God and externally added to the human recipient. Grace came to be understood as the living and effective presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer. Lane also discusses aspects of the historical era when people used to have their own ideas devoid of a supreme authority called “God” and while discussing about the historical events of such era, besides the particular Jewish faith interpretation he visualizes peoples perception of different decades. Some thinks that God arbitrate directly in history in a way that compels faith, while others possess the belief relating to the history of miracles. Dermot Lane’s focus takes him to the simplest approach to feel the existence of not only God but towards the diversity of human creativity and abstraction to understand him. It depends upon the person as to how he builds his faith, on what measures and on what conditions that leads him to the circumstances to make strong what he believes. Tillich’s theological perspective is no different from that of Lane’s to the extent that Tillich emphasizes upon the own human understanding of oneself is the mere understanding of God as in a situation he suggests that even a small prayer is not possible unless the contentment of God’s will, as it is the God whose spirit is living and praying within us, the spirit which we often referred to as “soul”. It is to this experience that he has suggested in different terminologies, in different ways and often in the terms of “abstraction”. The divine Spirit in the light of human experience is the expression of Tillich’s philosophy of God. The Spirit of God answers and resolves the ambiguities of life. The human being as a religious being is an organism in which the dimension of the spirit is dominant. Tillich claims that human life integrates itself in the life of the Spirit in such a way that human beings experiences the Spirit as the unity of power and meaning in life So, it would be wise to say that both possess a single perception in common, to understand oneself is to understand God, to identify one’s approach is to identify God. For those who rejected and idolater the doctrine of God’s existence, they might be seen as those who possess their own ego for not identifying God, but unsceptically God still seems to be with them. I mean we are His creation, whether someone believes it or not, it is the essence of God that makes a person moving. To understand Revelation, we must realize that it is a series of visions, which are notoriously difficult to interpret. Abraham’s vision was straightforward. When it was finished he was able to say to himself, I know what God was telling me. But when Peter’s vision was finished, he had no idea what it meant. But circumstances that happened afterwards helped him understand what God was saying to him through the vision. The book of Revelation communicates truths that are far too great for ordinary language. These truths needed the fantastic images and wild creatures of Revelation. For us this wild imagery comes more or less like a bolt out of the blue. But it did not for John's readers. The book of Revelation fits in with a style of literature that was quite popular in that day called apocalyptic literature. Through these visions to John, Jesus took a popular style of literature in that day and used it to express everlasting truths. Which brings me to my third assumption about understanding Revelation: Today books are not written in the apocalyptic style, but books were written that way in John's day. John's readers knew how to read and interpret apocalyptic language, but we need to learn if we are to understand Revelation correctly. Therefore, when we read Revelation, we need to ask, “What are the usual features of apocalyptic language that would help us understand what God is communicating to us through this book?” Our schedules are chaotic: we have places to go and people to meet. If you have children at home you have to coordinate all of their plans and events and doctor's appointments along with your own and your spouse's. Our relationships are chaotic: most of us have family members who live all over the country. Most of us here have been through divorce or have children or siblings who have been through divorce. Divorce cuts across the heart of the most important relationships in our lives and adds tension and pain to our lives and the lives of our children and stepchildren. Some children are growing up with abusive fathers or mothers and have the emotional and physical scars to prove it. Relationships with friends are chaotic. Just when you really start forming a close friendship, they move away. Friends betray us, or we betray friends, and the love ends. Our everyday lives are chaotic. Morning commutes on dangerous roads. Feeling the squeeze between bosses above us and employees for whom we are responsible. Parenting children who sometimes fight and bicker much more than they get along. Injuries and illness and depression push us around. Many people are the victims of crime. Our spiritual lives are chaotic too: we say we want to be close to God, yet spend so little time with him. We ask God for all kinds of things, and complain when our prayers are not answered. But we rarely remember to say thanks for the ways in which God blesses us so richly. In the last three decades, however, extensive reflections have been done on the relationship between Christianity, and by implication, Jesus Christ, on the one hand and non-Christian religions, and especially Judaism, on the other. A new theology of religions has re-assessed the role of Christ as the unique and universal savior and the function of non-Christian religions themselves within God’s plan of salvation. (Peter C. Phan) In a recent work Catholic theologian Paul F. Knitter, who has written extensively on religious pluralism, has helpfully categorized contemporary theologies of religions into four basic types, which he terms “replacement,” “fulfillment,” “mutuality,” and “acceptance”. 1. Replacement affirms that Christianity is the only one true religion and that it will replace, totally or partially, all other religions, which are considered as basically humanity’s sinful attempts at self-salvation. 2. Fulfillment, while affirming Christianity as the one true religion, acknowledges the presence of elements of truth and grace in other religions and advocates a mutual, though not equal, complementarily between Christianity and other religions through dialogue. 3. Mutuality holds that there are many true religions, none necessarily superior to the others, which are all called to dialogue and collaborate with each other, especially in projects of liberation, in order to realize their true nature. 4. Acceptance stresses the diversity of religions from one another and refuses to seek a common ground among them; rather it urges each religion to foster its own aims and practices. Each of these four theologies of religions views the role of Christ as a universal savior and the three adjectives characterizing it very differently and in a unique manner. The first model takes literally the New Testament affirmations that Jesus is the only and exclusive revealer, mediator, and savior of humankind and that an explicit faith in Jesus is absolutely necessary for salvation. The fourth model also professes that Jesus is the unique, universal, and absolute savior, as traditionally confessed by the Christian faith, but leaves the possibility of other “saving figures” and “ways of salvation” neither affirmed nor denied; about the latter it simply pleads ignorance. (Peter C. Phan). The third model takes the New Testament passages cited above and the three adjectives describing Jesus the savior not as literal, rational prose but as poetry affirming Jesus’ special ness but not exclusivity. In other words, Jesus is totus Deus wholly God, insofar as he fully responded to God’s love in the Spirit but not totum Dei the whole of God or divine, understood in the metaphysical sense.   Before attempting a theology of Jesus as savior that is consonant with the Roman Catholic tradition and at the same time recognizes that the redemptive power of God is at work in the Jewish tradition, it is necessary to recall, albeit briefly, the teaching of declaration Dominus. Jesus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on Jesus as savior Concerned that religious pluralism may lead to relativism, the declaration re-affirms certain Christian doctrines, which it alleges to have been denied by pluralists, such as the “fullness and definitiveness of the revelation of Jesus Christ,” the unity between the saving work of the incarnate Word and that of the Holy Spirit, the “unicity and universality of the salvific mystery of Jesus Christ,” the “unicity and unity of the church,” and the unity between the reign of God and the church. Of interest to our theme are the declaration’s statements on Jesus as the unique and universal savior and on the relation between Christianity and other religions. With regard to Jesus as revealer, Dominus Iesus affirms that “in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God ... the full revelation of divine truth is given” and rejects the “theory of the limited, incomplete, or imperfect character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, which would be complementary to that found in other religions”. Concerning Jesus as savior, Dominus Iesus states that “Jesus Christ has a significance and value for the human race and its history, which are unique and singular, proper to him alone, exclusive, universal, and absolute”. As to the relationship between Christianity and other religions, Dominus Iesus condemns the view that the church is “one way of salvation alongside those constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or substantially equivalent to her, even if these are said to be converting with the Church toward the eschatological kingdom of God ”. Hence, it says that even though “the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation”. A major concern of the Christian as Christian is to find truth, and this often leads to sharp divergence from dominant ideas and inherited opinions. (John B. Cobb, Jr). On the other hand, there is also an important place for reflection that is geared to expressing the emerging consensus within the church, the sort of reflection that goes into the making of creeds and confessions. Between these there is a place for reflection that seeks ways of influencing the church, guiding its response to changing conditions and situations. This is badly needed now. How can ideas that have arisen at the private pioneering end of the spectrum be brought into fruitful relation to the pre-existing consensus of the church? References Dermot A. Lane, (2003), The Experience of God: An Invitation to Do Theology. 2nd revised edition. New York: Paulist. John B. Cobb, Jr, The Role of Theology of Nature in the Church. Available from http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2316 Peter C. Phan, Georgetown University. A Roman Catholic Perspective Tillich, Paul. (1956), The Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper and Brothers Read More