What grabbed my interest in looking at this book was a bit of promo blurb:
"The Great Open Dance offers a progressive Christian theology that endorses contemporary yearnings for environmental protection, economic justice, racial reconciliation, interreligious peace, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ celebration. Just as importantly, this book provides a theology of progress—an interpretation of Christian faith as ever-changing and ever-advancing into God’s imagination.
Particularly was the idea of developing a theology of progress. In part this relates to something I've been thinking about for a little while (for quick way in, see here). So, what do I make of it?
Well, from my point of view, there's a lot to like. It's well thought through and careful in explaining. I enjoyed the systematic sort of engagement and the wide range of it. It may fluster some and I raised an inner-eyebrow at starting with an exploration of non-duality and doing so by considering Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. But it is actually a really helpful starting place. I just fear that it means that I'd have to be careful lending or recommending it to some people I know who, I think, would actually really benefit from reading it. -That goes for the under-argued-for universalism about two-thirds of the way through. This is a bit of a shame because I think that Snydor makes a really good case for a biblically faithful, ultimately orthodox re-framing of Christian faith in a way that resonates for the age we're entering.
I'm excited to see someone wrestling with the implications of emergence and integrating that into discussions of Trinity. I think he does a good job of understanding the frame-space that orthodox teachings about the Trinity are seeking to place around consideration of the concepts and then showing how the 'third way' offered by emergence and non-duality properly understood, is a help in this.
There was an interesting discussion of slavery in the latter part of the book relating Christian attitudes to it to how scripture is handled. I think that this is a key point of reflection (as well as how the inerrantist doctrines are historically contingent and adrift of how Jesus and Paul used scripture). What gave me pause for thought was contrasting the experience and (Christian) response of Frederick Douglas to being enslaved vs the advice of the epistle of Peter. The former literally fought back against brutal dehumanisation, the latter appears to advise patient endurance of it as a salvific road. I thought it interesting that at this point we are not invited to consider Paul's letter to Philemon which seems to set an anti-slavery trajectory whilst being careful of the 'Overton window' of the time (arguably) which might have protected many Christian slaves in less unpleasant circumstances.
This is a stepping stone in the argument towards apparently espousing, at one point, an approach to scripture which, to be frank, I suspect Luther would have characterised as 'a wax nose'. And it felt rather dissonant with the way that Snydor actually uses scripture up to that point. I do agree with a lot of what he says up to that point, but I do feel that some safeguarding of the approach, methodologically, against wax-nosing would have been good. Though, perhaps that's not entirely fair: the main argument is that agapic interpretation should be the keynote -I agree. And by contrast, again I agree, noting that inerrantists also have a canon within a canon -despite protestations to the contrary. There is a brief run through of examples of inconsistency of approach. In practice, most of them also don't propose or support slavery (though Snydor mentions that some, in fact, do think it might be okay) and I'd suggest that a consideration of why most of them would decry slavery today would be worthwhile. And indeed, what kind of hermeneutics would underlie that?
I did like the spirit of the final words of the book:
When this book is forgotten, which it will be, I pray that it will be forgotten because it has been replaced by more loving theologies that are more faithful to our loving God. These theologies will correct every accidental offense I have committed due to my own immersion in a specific place at a specific time with a specific set of blinders. For those theologies, and for their eventual appearance, I thank God, who is forever leading us into the reign of love.
As a final offering, here are some more quotes I particularly liked.
historians report that church leaders have always worried about church decline, church membership has always fluctuated wildly, and attendance has always been spotty. Today is no different
a third of young adults complain, “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.” 9 Increasingly, people want church to be a safe place for spiritual conversation, not imposed dogma, and they want faith to be a sanctuary, not a fortress
pluralistic nondualism, the belief that reality is composed of real difference harmonized into perfect unity. ... pluralistic nondualism differs from monistic nondualism, which argues that ultimate reality is absolute homogeneity without difference. ... In our view, nondualism means indivisibly united yet internally distinguished. Nondualism discerns the unity in difference that underlies all things. ... perennial philosophy erases difference. If all religions are basically the same, then differences in thought, feeling, and practice are irrelevant. Nondualism, by contrast, finds wealth in difference.... Ramanuja’s personalist panentheism, in which God is a full- fledged person, better serves Christian faith than impersonalist Platonic idealism,... If nondualism is a fundamental ontology of relation, in which the one and the many are perfectly harmonized, then the Christian Trinity is a form of nondualism. That is, the Trinity is not either three or one. The Trinity is both three and one.
Given Christ’s revelation of God as agape, the Christian tradition must justify itself as agapic. Agape need not justify itself as traditional
people want faith to give them more life, and people want faith to make society more just, and people want faith to grant the world more peace.
Love is not the Godhead beyond God, a singular, pure abstraction. Instead, love is the self- forming activity of the triune God, the most salient quality of each divine person, and the disposition of each person toward the other— and toward creation.
Metaphorically, we could say that quarks function only in communion.
God is empty of any excluding, occluding self. 105 All separation is illusion and God, as all- knowing, is not deluded. As a result of God’s perfect wisdom God feels perfectly, which is to love perfectly. In other words, God feels what should be felt as deeply as it can be felt. 106 Within God there is no capacity for celebrating another’s pain or envying another’s success, because God is perfect. “Perfect” does not mean unchanging, but changing perfectly.
Exclusively male language for a gender transcending God misrepresents the divine nature; hence, it is theologically inaccurate.
The margins have the clearest perspective. The margins see the hypocrisy in hierarchy and realize that “what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God”
Why does Jesus characterize a preaching that explicitly threatens the rich and powerful as “good news”? Perhaps because they (at least some of them, I hedge, because Jesus didn’t qualify his statements) need to be rescued from themselves
Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence. Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion.
Therefore, the church must seek truth in others, with others, and for others, including other religions, in an attempt to develop a common wisdom that will be validated by the flourishing it creates.
Prayer is a spiritual gift, but other spiritual gifts can become prayer, and prayer alone is never a substitute for action. When Joan Cheever was fined for feeding the homeless in San Antonio, she explained, “This is how I pray. I pray when I cook. I pray when I serve.”
About the AuthorJon Paul Sydnor is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Emmanuel College, theologian-in-residence at Grace Community Boston, and a podcaster at The Progressive Sacred. He studied at the University of Virginia, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Boston College, where he received his PhD. He practices theology in conversation with other religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, whose concept of nondualism has highly influenced the trinitarian theology of this book. |
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