Meaning Making – A Model For Contextual Theology

This post is the second that have been adapted from my notes from a lecture with Wynand de Kock. It is likely to be a little disjointed, although I’ll try and expand this one out a little bit more and provide a little more personal opinion so that it has more of a natural flow. The ideas here are probably less difficult than in the narrative theology post, but it will probably go longer. It’s quite a long post, so you’ll have to click on the link to read the whole thing

There are some presumptions of the model, all of which seem to make sense to me. The first is that everyone, whether deliberately or not, engages in theology, and engages in theology in their own contexts. You cannot do theology without being effected by your wider cultural context. We’re going to take that as a given.

Our model begins with a basis of two concepts, that of faith content, and faith action (or faith commitment). Faith content describes the “what” of your belief system. For instance, I believe that God has a heart for the poor. That (propositional truth) is a part of my faith content. Faith action, therefore, is a description of the outworking of my faith in daily life. Some of the things that make up part of my faith action, will have a direct correlation with parts of my faith content. For instance, because I believe in a God who wants to be worshipped (faith content), I therefore choose to do participate in worship, and make deliberate decisions to honour God in my life (faith action).

The second presumption of the model is that there will always be a gap between my faith content and my faith action. Although I believe that God can raise people from the dead, I don’t pray for dead people in the hope that they will rise again. Despite believing that God has a heart for the poor, I don’t give all of my earthly belongings to them. There is always a tension between the two. So making sense out of that gap – trying to understand what I actually believe about God (or just what I believe full stop) becomes my faith meaning.

Faith meaning is our way of justifying and understanding the tension between what we confess to be true (faith content), and what we actually do (faith action). According to the model, this faith meaning is reached with a combination of three different “texts”. The first is referred to as “The Living Human Document”. The living human document can be described as ultimately your identity, particularly in relation to your beliefs – basically “what you believe about yourself”. Experiences, personality, events etc all work to shape your living human document.

The second “text” is what is known as your “Sacred Text”. For christians that means the bible, but moreso your interpretation of the bible, and the bible as it has been translated to you. Sacred text are the collective wisdoms about God that have been passed down to you, so it also includes doctrinal positions and general teaching. It might also include secular philosophies etc that you hold particularly dear. I think you get the picture. The third text is your “Context” – (yes it’s a poor attempt at a pun, but it’s not my poor attempt at a pun). So obviously your faith meaning is influenced by the wider community and events, as well as things like your upbringing, your nationality, your time in history all have an impact on how you make meaning.

So the model starts with the tension between your faith content and your faith action being in tension. The efforts to resolve/justify that tension is shown in how you reach faith meaning – through the amalgamation of your sacred text, your living human document, and your context. This gets held in a nice gentle equilibrium. You are the complete Christian – you have everything worked out and justified, and you are happy with the way things are travelling.

Along comes “Emerging Questions”. In the context of living out your ffaith on a daily basis, there comes questions that don’t quite fit with your faith content, or faith action. They push you to reconsider the things that you’ve previously “known”. The first, instinctive response is to reach for “traditional answers”: “God knows best”, “I don’t have to worry about that”, “I’m sure that the theologians who have considered this in the past must have known much more than I do”. That sort of idea. But after a while, you begin to understand that those answers just don’t cut it.

Once the traditional answers can no longer satisfy, you have reached a point of faith crisis. Your faith can no longer continue as it has been in the past. Ultimately, you have three options:

1. Make a change to faith content.

2. Make a change to faith action

3. Throw away faith and start again.

It is unlikely that you will only choose either a change to your faith content or your faith action. Most likely both would change in some way. And it is in these faith crises, when you choose to make a change to your faith, that your faith actually grows and matures. But here is the ultimate challenge for disciplers: there’s no easy way around that. And it’s at the points of most opportunity for growth, that we are at our most vulnerable. We somehow need to provide an environment that gives permission for the type of doubt that these crises look like. But at the same time we need to be a community that is reassuring believers that the hope is in Jesus, and in creating a community where the answers are sought from each other. It’s surely a difficult thing to create, but the results have got to be enormous.