I could not get this image onto the blog in html but screen caps are so helpful.Yes, here we go again. Always constrained by the categories of the particular silly quiz, of course. In this one, as with so many, there were questions where I strongly felt "BOTH" or "NEITHER."
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What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com |
| You scored as Emergent/Postmodern You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.
Emergent/Postmodern |
| 86% | Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan |
| 79% | Roman Catholic |
| 71% | Neo orthodox |
| 68% | Modern Liberal |
| 64% | Classical Liberal |
| 43% | Charismatic/Pentecostal |
| 32% | Reformed Evangelical |
| 11% | Fundamentalist |
| 0% |
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[chortle]
Now let's compare this rejection of tradition with these results, shall we?
Another version of my beliefs yielded these top results:
#1 Eastern Orthodox Church
Why people think all liberals are secular humanists is beyond me.
Oh, that's right; they are taught this is the case by ignorant demagogues. Pity.
#2 Episcopal/Anglican Church
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home
#3 Evangelical Lutheran Church
They keep telling me we're in communion with each other
#4 Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Bit of a surprise on this, I dare say
#5 Methodist/Wesleyan Church I do have a strong affectional side to me
#6 Roman Catholic Church This might be higher if I didn't spit in the pope's eye so often
#7 Liberal QuakerismVery good peopleChristian Denomination Selector is
here.
UPDATE:
As I was going to bed last night, I thought to myself: "Postmodern Orthodox--now that sounds right to me." I also think Anglicanism as I have experienced it (note that important qualifier) is a good place for a Postmodern Orthodox person. To me it is very significant that before I was confirmed
(1) I had read every page (including the lectionary and tables of finding dates) of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and all the Prayer Book Studies leading toward the 1979 BCP, which had its first adoption in 1976, the year after I was confirmed;
(2) I had read every page of the Constitution and Canons; and
(3) I was a student of Church history with an emphasis on the early and mediaeval periods, so that I knew what the early councils were about, how doctrine developed/evolved, and the issues reflected in the creeds.
You clever readers will have noted that my interest in Church history wanes in the modern era. I did study Reformation history but I find it challenging to get excited about modern history. As always, theology is framed in the imagery and structure of the rest of our thought. The emergence of the nation-state and rise of the bourgeoisie yielded more legal and transactional ways of thinking. These are essential but they have tended to dominate much of popular theology in a way that mystics and poets find, well, "challenging" (to go back to where this paragraph began).
The narrowing of atonement to penal substitutionary imagery, for one thing, seems too reliant on some passages in the Bible while ignoring many others. In Baptist seminary I was forced to look at the variety of ways in which biblical authors tried to communicate their experience of God through Christ as well as the variety of ways in which that has been pondered, debated, expanded, and communicated across the centuries. As various understandings have lost their force through shifts in cultural imagery and philosophical approaches, new understandings have emerged or old ones have been viewed from different angles. Anselm and AbƩlard will be ever with us in the tension of objective and subjective approaches. Either/or thinking demands that we pit them against each other. Yin/yang thinking sees complementarity giving rise to a greater whole, but that is not the way we are trained to think in the West.
To me, much of the current unpleasantness in Anglicanism arises from the attempt to force a modern (and I use that term somewhat narrowly in the sense of pre-modern, modern, post-modern) model of theology onto a larger scope of Christian experience and thought. This frames debate in rationalist categories, whether one is a Reasserter or Jack Spong, and by this I mean they are both caught up in the Enlightenment, for both good and ill. Their arguments seem outdated in a world of quantum physics, just as they would have seemed utterly bizarre to Christians in the first millennium.
Whether I am feeling very early+mediaeval or very post-modern, that sort of debate "seems so yesterday" to me. It is simply not cogent or relevant to how I am experiencing God in the world and in the community of faith today. When the framework of debate seems questionable, it is difficult to get caught up into the debate. When I read Anglicans who sound like 19th century Baptists with 20th century fervor and when I read Spong (to use one of their favorite
bĆŖtes noires), I simply find myself bored and want to move on. For me, those debates are over and both sides lost.
So, why aren't we spending our time talking about lives that are changed by an encounter with God (descriptive discourse that can be filled with joy and thanksgiving) instead of screaming beyond each other about how we are supposed to believe (proscriptive discourse)?
A parish priest who listens to her flock, attentively and lovingly, will know that people's experience of God and approaches to faith vary widely--if there is a local community that does not operate on the model of a cookie factory. Yet all these people, drawn to Christ and growing in grace, being changed from glory into glory in both the most ordinary and the most amazing ways, are living testimony to God's saving work.
Speaking of factories, perhaps it is the model of standardization and mass production that has had far too much influence in out theologizing. 'Nuff said on that.
Micro-loans are transforming economies these days. It is the antithesis of global corporatism. I see far too much global corporatism in religion these days. I wonder what micro-mission might do, renewing small communities from the grassroots up? [This last paragraph is just me thinking out loud, something that popped into my head only just now. I have not pondered it at all. Perhaps others can help think about it.]
SECOND UPDATE (the first was the commentary):
Somewhat paralleling the final paragraph here, only in the social and political sphere, is Simon Barrows' article yesterday at Ekklesia titled "
Challenging the neo-liberal paradigm."
--the BB
