Contextual theology: faith in what?
‘Contextual theology’ is spot on. If I’d got my act together and written this yesterday, I would have waffled at length about the Incarnation, and what it means about the importance of the present.
Context is inescapable. We cannot stop learning about our universe; things change; what we once thought was true turns out to be only a tiny part of what we now know to be true.
Faith in what? Faith in God who is infinite. Everything that I can imagine that God could be, plus everything I can’t imagine. God in whom we live and move and have our being; God who contains everything that we know – and that everything is always expanding, and that what we believed yesterday is not enough, and what we can imagine today is nowhere near the truth.
It isn’t so much that what we knew yesterday is wrong; it’s that we understand more about it. The new truth doesn’t contradict the old truth; it builds on it, reaches beyond it, adds dimensions upon dimensions to it. The more we know, the more we understand, the more we are able to appreciate the wonder of reality and of how much we can never know.
What we knew yesterday was good, but we have more of it today. One has to take all the evidence into account. Integrity demands it.
Kathleen Jowitt 