Marginal Christianity

Ch.1 From Heraclitus to Havel. The problem of the one and the many in modern life and thought                 1 The idea of modernity There is both continuity and diversity between ancients and moderns (contra the claims of some postmoderns that humanity today is something new and different than other eras. Task: “ I shall look at the world which we all share, believer and unbeliever alike, through a focus provided by the doctrine of the God made known in Christ and the Spirit, and in a process of identification and elucidation shall hope to illumine where we stand now, so laying the basis for an approach to a Christian theology appropriate to the time.” -In other words, Gunton proposes to use a trinitarian view of God to forge a contextually relevant view of today’s world. the complexity of the modern world is obscured by the ideology of modernity. For us to truly see our world is there...

Theology thrives and best fulfills it purpose in wrestling with pronouns and prepositions more than with propositions. It can’t do its work without propositions but unless they are directed and seasoned by pronouns and prepositions their work will remain barren.   -the guiding pronouns are we and ya’ll. Me is only truly found in We – not a faceless collective but a teeming throng of difference; no individualism where we find our identity and vocation by standing out from and over against the We, turning it into a They and Them (the third person is deathly to theology) but rather an individuality and vocation birthed in the womb of connected and relationality which calls forth who we are and what we are to do. Ya’ll is the truly genuine language of theology. Ya’ll is self-involving rather than selfish, relational rather than transactional, committed rather than instrumental. Ya’ll is constituted by communication, communion, and community. The singular has its place in...