Community & Relationships:
A Theological Take
An interview with Stan Grenz from Talk
- the Mainstream Magazine
1. Before the publication of your latest book I noticed the importance
to you of the theme of community in your theological work. For instance
you keep coming back to it in your Theology
For The Community of God. Why is it so central to your theological
thinking?
SG: Stating the matter simply, “community” is central to my theological
thinking because I am convinced that it is both at the heart of
the biblical narrative and speaks clearly to the contemporary
context. More specifically, I would add that community is crucial
because it arises out of the very essence of God. At the heart
of Christian theology is the doctrine of the Trinity, which declares
that God is not only the one who enters into relationship with
creation, and hence relates to us in time. Rather, God is internally
relational within the Godhead, and hence eternally relational.
Moreover, the Christian teaching declares that God is a trinity,
rather than merely a binity; God is three-in-one. This suggests
that mere one-to-one relationality does not exhaust the essence
of God. Instead, the one God of the Bible is the fellowship of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to cite the traditional Trinitarian
terminology. In short, the God revealed in Jesus is communal,
or community.
2. In this and your latest work I can see that the connection between
community and our Trinitarian God is important. Why is this?
SG: Ultimately, the appeal to the Trinity is crucial in that
our conceptions of the world and ourselves in all the various
disciplines of learning must always be theocentric rather than
anthropocentric. That is, they must be generated from an understanding
of, or an appeal to, the nature and character of God, who as the
Creator is the transcendent archetype for us as humans in our
calling to be the divine image. This forms a grave contrast too
much modern thought, which is anthropocentric in that it appeals
to what we suppose to be nature of the human person.
3. Were there any personal experiences you had of community that
helped you go on this journey in your thinking and practice?
SG: In a sense, the beginnings of my journey to this theological
perspective may be found in the churches my father served during
my childhood and teen years. I was raised in a Baptist conference
(association) that has its roots in work among German immigrants
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, it was
deeply imbued with the warm-hearted pietism that characterized
the early leaders, many of whom had come out of German Lutheran
Pietism. This group never participated in modernist-fundamentalist
controversy. They were instinctively somewhat conservative doctrinally,
but more importantly, they were held together by the warm-hearted
approach to the faith and the relationality they sensed within
the group. This, in turn, influenced my father's own very relational
operative theology. In university, seminary, and graduate school,
and during my first years as a theological educator, I gravitated
to a more cognitive approach to the faith and consequently to
theology as an intellectual discipline, although looking back
on those years I realize that I never lost the undergirding that
the pietism of my upbringing had engrained in me. In the mid-
to late-1980's two important events brought this underlying pietism
to the surface. I read Robert Bellah's intriguing study Habits
of the Heart, on the effects of radical individualism in American
culture, and I returned to Munich to write a book on the theology
of my Doktorvater, Wolfhart Pannenberg. The result was an awareness
that something was missing in the “scholastic” approach to theology:
true piety. Upon my return to the USA, where I was teaching at
that time, I set out to rewrite my theological lectures in a manner
that would incorporate into the foundational work that I had already
done, the pietist aspect in a manner that gave place to the importance
of corporate relationality, i.e., community. The result was my
theology text, Theology for
the Community of God.
4. That’s fascinating and shows how much we are indebted to the
community‚ of the generations. Does our very present and future
oriented society makes us vulnerable as church communities and if
so in what ways?
SG: Let me preface my agreement with you by offering a little
caveat. I think that the proper perspective from which to engage
in theological reflection and construction is the future or eschatological
viewpoint. That is to say, we should be seeking to answer the
central theological questions from the perspective of the eschatological
fullness of God's program for the universe. Hence, we should define
what it means to be human from the destiny that God intends for
us. As Christians, we know this destiny to be that of our being
risen and glorified saints enjoying fellowship with God throughout
eternity. Similarly, we should define the church from the vantage
point of our communal purpose to be the sign and foretaste of
the fullness of community that will be ours when Christ returns.
Therefore, we must see ourselves as called to seek to live in
the present in the light of the glorious future that awaits us.
But the valid orientation toward the future ought not to lead
us to cut ourselves off from the past. As many sociological theorists
have pointed out, a true community is a “community of hope” (one
that anticipates its glorious future) as well as a community of
memory, i.e., a people who remember their communal past. One real
danger in the church today is that we become fixated on the “new”
that we fail to appreciate the “treasures” of our heritage. One
obvious area in which this is evident is in the music chosen for
worship services. Although I truly enjoy and appreciate much of
what is being written today, we dare not ignore the great musical
treasury bequeathed to us. Why not allow worship to build from
a “conversation” among a variety of musical styles and music from
a variety of eras?
5. The last century saw a lot of thinking about the individual
in relationship--Martin Buber immediately comes to mind. Why do
you think this interest developed, and what can we learn from it?
SG: Buber stands at the genesis of a movement in philosophy that
found a crucial parallel in theology, namely, the proposal that
to be person‚ means to stand in relationship. No doubt several
reasons would need to be mentioned to understand why this idea
caught on in the English-speaking world, including developments
in science.
6. Do you mean that modern science was a positive influence in
this direction or that the strong scientific-rationalistic approach
to reality of the modern meant we lost sight of the importance of
relationship to our human identity?
SG: The empirical science that emerged out of the Enlightenment
did indeed overshadow the importance of relationship to human
identity. But in the comment I just voiced I have in mind instead
the significant developments in twentieth century science that
moved us away from the Newtonian model, which viewed reality as
consisting of independent entities that are assumed to be complete
in themselves and then engage in relationships with each other.
The Newtonian model was drastically altered by impulses from Einstein,
quantum theory and other developments, which pointed to a much
more relational universe. Not only humans, but everything in the
universe, has been shown to be far more relational and connected
than was previously assumed to be the case. But alongside this
we could also point to the growing realization that radical individualism
is both intellectually suspect and experientially unsatisfying.
Buber’s lasting contribution was that of helping us realize that
we are to relate to each other as “thou,” i.e., person, rather
than as “it,” i.e., object.
7. You’ve recently published a key book in this area, how is your
own thinking influenced by and builds upon these trends, and is
there something distinctive you believe we need to get hold of as
Christian communities?
SG: My latest book, which came out last November, is entitled:
The Social God and the Relational
Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei. In this
book, I seek to indicate how a truly biblical understanding of
the concept of humans as the image of God offers a way forward
in a context in which people have experienced the loss of the
sense of “centered self.” In the book, I indicate that in the
Bible the imago dei - the image of God‚ is a social, rather
than an individual reality. The biblical focus is on “we” being
the divine image, rather than the image being lodged within each
individual. Moreover, the imago dei is a communal concept.
The locus of the divine image in the New Testament is the community
of Christ who together comprise the foretaste of the new humanity
in Christ. This is where I seek to go beyond the important work
of Buber, who offered the paradigm of the one-to-one relationship.
8. How do relationships within the community of God differ in reality
from relationships within any other shared interest group? Are we
fooling ourselves if we think we are in any way different from the
numerous tribes‚ that seem to be all around us in our pluralist
society?
SG: I would suggest that we can best see the difference, when
we introduce several key insights into the nature of communities
offered by contemporary communitarian thinkers, coupled with aspects
of the narrative understanding of identity formation. In the quest
to make sense of our personal lives and the world around us, we
are dependent on narratives that provide the “plot” by means of
which we tell the story of our lives. The overarching narrative
is mediated to the individual person by the community that embodies
it. To be a Christian means to tell one's personal story and hence
to find one's identity in accordance with a particular narrative,
the story that is passed from generation to generation through
the Christian community, but which is ultimately found in the
Bible, the book of this community. And this story, of course,
centers on the narrative of Jesus. This description suggests that
we are both similar to and decisively different from the tribes
that inhabit the post-modern world. We are similar in that each
group, including the Christian church, functions as a community
to its adherents. We are different, however, in that we find ourselves
we make sense out of our lives and our world by means of our participation
in the life of Jesus Christ, who is Immanuel, God with us, and
the Word made flesh.
9. To help us with the contrast could you identify the thinking
of some other thinkers about community and in what way you see their
approach as maybe helpful but in end inadequate.
SG: Let me respond to your question in a somewhat indirect manner.
A key distinction that I have found helpful in this discussion
is the differentiation Robert Bellah makes between a lifestyle
enclave and a true community. My favorite contemporary lifestyle
enclave is “Fitness World” (or whatever may be the local version
of this in your context). At Fitness World one finds a sense of
community and what appears to be a fellowship based on mutual,
genuine concern. Yet the concern and the fellowship extend only
to a narrow aspect of personal existence, namely, to the constellation
of matters relating to one’s weight-loss or body-building program.
And at Fitness World, one’s sense of identity are bound up with
this quite truncated aspect of one’s life. In a true community,
in contrast, fellowship and concern extend to all aspects of one’s
existence and a full-orbed sense of personal identity emerges.
I find insights such as these helpful. My task as a theologian
is to draw from the work of the sociologists and social psychologists
who offer this perspective and apply it to my own theological
work.
10. What responsibility do church leadership groups have in forming
the local church as a genuine expression of community?
SG: A local congregation of believers is a community ultimately
in that it mediates to its members the grand narrative of God
at work in creation, commencing “in the beginning,” centering
on Jesus Christ, and climaxing in the glorious vision of the consummation
of God's program. The first and most basic task of church leadership
is to keep this biblically-given narrative before the congregation,
doing so in many and varied ways preaching, teaching, through
the ordinances (or sacraments) in pastoral care, and even in church
“business” meetings. As this vision works its way through the
life of the congregation, the people will begin to minister to
one another in a manner that will build the more visible and directly
experiential aspects that we generally call to mind when we hear
the word “community.”
11. I can see the importance of doing these things, but could you
also comment on the way church leaders need to incarnate this way
of living? There are so few models of community these days that
we hardly know what community is in practical terms.
SG: Well, the first point to make, I would think, is that leaders
must be “communitarians” themselves. That is, they must acknowledge--and
let the congregation they serve know that they understand--their
own embeddedness in the life of the community. They must see themselves
as Christians first and only then as those whom the congregation
has singled out for the leadership role within the community.
Hence, they must participate in the worshipping life of the congregation,
to cite one example, as worshippers first and only then as leaders
in worship. This suggests as well a “bottom-up” rather than a
“top-down” leadership model. Leaders derive their status in the
church first and foremost from their participation in the life
of the congregation. They are called to shepherd and empower the
people for the task to which God has called the whole community.
And to this end, they seek to keep before the congregation the
biblical vision of who we are as the people of God, as well as
to seek to live out that vision in their own lives and relationships.
12. How does good theological thinking help practically in forming
and maintaining healthy church communities and healthy mission?
SG: Solid theological reflection is crucial in the practice of
ministry, understood both narrowly as the work of ordained leaders
and in the wider sense of being the whole life and mission of
the people of God. Actually, today the chief rival to ministering
from a theological base is engaging in the practice of “church”
by means of a pragmatic outlook, that makes decisions largely
if not solely on the basis of a consideration of what “works.”
In the long run, however, the pragmatic approach is self-defeating,
simply because it transforms the community of faith into an institution
whose chief end is not the glory of God and the fulfillment of
a divinely-given mandate, but survival. The long-term health and
viability of the church demands that its leaders and people return
again and again to the forming and informing vision of what the
community of Christ is called, mandated, and empowered to be by
the Lord of the church. Above all, I would add, we are called
to be a people who embody in our life together and in our relationships
to all humans and even to all creation the great narrative of
the biblical God, the one who has come to us in Christ and now
empowers us through the Holy Spirit poured out in our hearts and
in our fellowship.
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