Sunday, December 14, 2008
Conniry #19: McClendon’s Heart Metaphor
19. We observed that dealing both imaginatively and faithfully with the tension between changing contexts and unchanging truth is the perennial challenge of ministry. We noted that theologian James Wm. McClendon, Jr. likened this to the beating of a healthy heart. Be prepared to explain McClendon’s use of this metaphor.
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Dealing both imaginatively and faithfully with the tension between changing contexts and unchanging truth is the perennial challenge of ministry. It is a challenge that Irenaeus, Augustine, Calvin, and Teresa of Avila have all shared in immensely different historical settings. So it is the case in Christianity’s modern setting that the creative appropriation of Western categories had reflected the same recurring developmental theme by which the church sought faithfully to embrace the ever-unfolding revelation of God’s truth in the world. It is in this vein that theologian James Wm. McClendon, Jr. has said that the modern church’s oscillation between cultural engagement and dissociation—manifested in its tensions between the liberal and conservative, and the academic and the practical, respectively—is nothing other than the diastolic-systolic rhythm of its healthy heart.
ReplyDelete“The same systolic contraction of the heart that drives blood out to the body’s members simultaneously pumps blood through another artery into the lungs, where its impurities are removed and fresh oxygen is acquired. The same diastolic relaxation and enlargement of the heart, thanks to its cleverly divided chambers, at once permits matter drawn through veins from all parts of the body to the heart and through another great vessel permits fresh, lung-purified blood to enter another of the heart’s chambers. If either of these two processes ceases, or if they improperly leak together in its chambers, the heart fails. So it is, if you my reader will permit it, in our work here: Theology means struggle, and part of the struggle for Christians is to permit the dual rhythm of both circulatory cycles to form one bloodstream supporting one single church of Christ, one Israel of God. That is what I have struggled to represent here; if I have done so, albeit imperfectly, the outcome of my struggle is rightly termed theology.”
Good luck to all!!