Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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This picture of truth as it pertains to religious statements demonstrates the flexibility and indeterminacy at the heart of a pluralistic theology. The test for such a theology will focus on how the “grammar” of the beliefs and practices of a community facilitate its shared ends and values. Where a question arises as to the truth or legitimacy of a particular belief, doctrine or practice, the final arbiter must be the community itself, and as communities are by nature dynamic, so too will its reflected picture of religious truth. A pluralistic theology cannot be ossified since the negotiation of what counts as “true belief,” i.e. “warranted practice,” will necessarily emerge from contestation, negotiation and provisional acceptance. Within this framework, again, lies an openness to new possibilities and hybrid expression.

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It is worth elaborating these mutually opposed yet creative forces further, not only to clarify their activity but also to intimate the ironic nature of pluralistic theology we shall describe later. Two processes are at the heart of the centrifugal /centripetal tension I have described: the centrifugal, creative revelation of metaphorical predication, and the centripetal, coalescing manifestation into forms regulated by aesthetic attraction. This dialectic both/and movement between creatively opposed forces recapitulates the dynamics of metaphor. Indeed this dynamic is the fountainhead at the center of creative theologizing. It will be useful to rehearse Paul Ricoeur’s highly influential “interactionist” account of metaphor in order to describe this dynamic.