Theological Method and Imagination return to religion-online Theological Method and Imagination by Julian N. Hartt Julian N. Hart taught philosophic theology at Yale Divinity School and is the author of Lost Image of Man. Published 1977 The Seabury Press, 815 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. A variety of things commonly judged to be foundational methodological concerns for theology are examined in this book. They are looked at from and out of a conviction that the "faith once and for all delivered to our fathers" can be construed as true and defended as true. Introduction If "God acts in history" has become a largely vacuous proposition, we must—and as God helps us, we will—find language in which to express the Christian conviction that somehow and somewhere, at the heart of the great world, human life matters to Something, perhaps to Being; as, of course, at its best it matters to us. And perhaps the real meaning of this is that we should learn to care more about human life than a secularist society inspires us to do. Chapter 1: Beliefs, Cases and Reasons Theologians have sometimes flaunted the irrationality of true faith. Others have argued, or at least asserted, that rationality is there but is discernible only to the eyes of faith. Chapter 2: On Seeing God and Proving that He Exists Reasons for adhering to a worldview (religious or otherwise) are not in themselves viable reasons for preferring one metaphysical system to another. Hartt attempts to try to show that the inverse of this proposition is also true. Thus, "proving God" is not necessarily an abandonment of faith. But even a miraculously successful proof for God would not justify a course of life intended to carry one ever deeper into association with him. Surely, though, there is another and far loftier objective of theology. That is to discover and propagate the truth about ultimate reality. This must be the first and highest aim, the divine responsibility of theological thinking. Chapter 3: Christian Faith And Conceptual Schemes Theologians ought to take on board a systematic philosophic conceptual schematism. Would it not be more correct to say that theologians need to use a conceptual scheme that is clear, file:///D:/rb/relsearchd.dll-action=showitem&id=414.htm (1 of 2) [2/4/03 1:49:27 PM] Theological Method and Imagination internally consistent, and congenial both to the essential Christian message and to the mind of the age at its best? Chapter 4: Concerning Faith and Hope The methodological issues are raised here in the theology of hope rather than substantive views on the metaphysical issues of time and eternity or on the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. One of the prime functions of faith is to grasp and formulate the grounds of hope. From faith come the axioms which charter particular routes of inference, at the conclusion of which, if they are properly run, lies practical certainty. Chapter 5: Sola Scriptura: Problems About Authority How is the real and essential teaching of the bible to be distinguished and separated from its useless information, its archaic cosmology, and its nonrelevant prescriptions? Since the bible does not contain all that we know and need to know about human reality, how should the truth of Scripture be related to truth otherwise ascertained and already absorbed into the fabric of life in Everyday? Chapter 6: Revelation as Truth and as Command Revelation is not an information communique from highest heaven. God does not act to augment man's cognitional stores. Not that he disdains making himself known to sinful creatures, but rather he imparts that practical knowledge which man cannot attain to, by, or for himself, that which contains the sure hope of salvation in the world to come and the lines of acceptable behavior in this one. Chapter 7: Historical Reality and Historical Evidence What stake does Christian faith have in historical evidentiality? Is the Christian faith the most relativistic of all religious views of history? Does the Christian faith, rightly construed, contain a novel and powerful theory of historical reality? Chapter 8: Story as the Art of Historical Truth There is an incorrigible conviction that to make fullest sense of human activity, and thus of history, one must allow the shape of interpretation, thus of sense-making, to emerge from an interplay of creative imagination with historical factualities, an interplay at the antipodes from the realization of mathematical form. Science cannot do this. It cannot allow that interweave of imaginative structure with gross factuality. The putatively objective interpretations of science consist of the reduction of phenomena to causal laws expressed mathematically. 62 file:///D:/rb/relsearchd.dll-action=showitem&id=414.htm (2 of 2) [2/4/03 1:49:27 PM] Religion-Online religion-online.org Full texts by recognized religious scholars More than 1,500 articles and chapters. 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Hartt Julian N. Hart taught philosophic theology at Yale Divinity School and is the author of Lost Image of Man. Published 1977 The Seabury Press, 815 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. Introduction When the integrity, coherence, and authority of the spiritual life of a society have been called into question, thinkers of various persuasions and interests are sure to ask how, or perhaps whether, a treasured common life can be reconstituted. They want also, of course, to learn what has gone wrong, where the slippages are between the basic schematisms of that society and the great world beyond. But the question of highest priority is how to reconstitute a viable, harmonious, and fertile common life. Now "called into question" does not necessarily mean that those basic schematisms of belief and behavior are defenseless under withering philosophical fire; or that the battlements of this city of man have been undermined and rendered worthless by philosophical "sappers." A lively supposition is abroad that anything that greatly matters is not likely to be seriously affected by philosophical artillery, unless it is the childhood religious faith of tender souls from Fundamentalist hinterlands who have come to college believing all sorts of things long since jettisoned by enlightened souls, such as majors in the philosophy department. So even if one does not agree with Hegel that the philosopher is not licensed by his muse actually to change the world rather than properly to understand it, we should probably all agree that the meaning of life in a given society can be called into question by a great many different forces. The present age is much taken with apocalyptic visions of the world’s end, but in the interstices of these crises we know there are many nondramatic destructive forces at work. For instance, one day it dawns upon ever so many people that there is little to be gained now by hearing and repeating the old truths or by preserving the old loyalties. For as they now experience the world and reflect, however dimly and fitfully, upon it, the old truths seem neither to illuminate it nor give fertile or clear signals about how to relate to it practically. Here the words of the psalmist come to mind: file:///D:/rb/relsearchd.dll-action=showitem&gotochapter=1&id=414.htm (1 of 9) [2/4/03 1:49:42 PM] Theological Method and Imagination By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our Iyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!" How shall we sing the Lord’s song In a foreign land? (Ps 137)1 Of course the old songs can be sung simply to preserve the hallowed febrile memories of the lost world, and perhaps also to keep alive in the hearts of the young some sense of what that world was. But how often the young join the ranks of the cruelly mirthful tormentors and say, "Sing us one of those silly old songs of your dear dead past."2 But there are seasons of much more radical doubt, doubts that reach far beyond the plausibility of old songs sung in a foreign land. These are doubts about the traditional routes to truth and wisdom. Now the persistent refrain is not, "How implausible are those old stories!" The thrust of this far more radical doubt is rather more like this: "Why did any thoughtful person ever suppose truth and wisdom could be reliably and predictably attained in those old ways? O yes, some of the old truths may have had something in them, something that may have been valid in that world from which we are now separated once and for all.