A New Dichotomy

It has been too long since my last post...too much time spent doing classwork and not enought time spent thinking about it. However, I was at a discussion with Tony Jones (an author involved in the emergent movement) tonight, and it got me thinking about the prevailing transition to "both/and" from "either/or." I have always been a fan of this switch, but tonight has me questioning the "both/and" understanding. What if it isn't a "both/and" either, but a "yes, but."

Perhaps what I hear most from the emergent conversation is that friendship is the heart of good theology, that the conversation is truth, and that the truth of the gospel is found as it is made incarnate in culture. For the most part I agree with this and much of what is said in emergent circles, but I feel like no one there is willing to say that there is an absolute truth. Even though I don't believe that anyone can fully understand the immense truth of God, I do believe that the immense truth of God is absolute. There is so much fear that the idea of an absolute truth will be oppressive and will be forced upon people and I think it is a reaction to something that has occured more than it is a reality. Sure, when we believe we have the absolute truth of God figrued out bad things happen, but that is not a reason to disregard the idea of it all together. If we do then we tend to find ourselves having a conversation about an amorphous good instead of a conversation about the truth of God. Foundations are not bad, Jesus talks about them more than once, it is when we place our theology on the wrong foundation that we trip ourselves (and too many other people along with us) up.

All this is to say that I was thinking about the idea of looking at situations and theology as a "yes, but" instead of a "both/and" and here is what I mean. When someone asks me if there are requirements to be a Christian, I no longer want to try and dodge the question and try to convince them that that is the wrong question. Instead, I want to say, "Yes there are, but I do not completely understand what they entail and I am not as concerned with how you measure up to them as I am about who you are and how you are doing."