Map-makers use a lovely word to describe the essential discipline of checking the map they are making, however perfect and satisfying it seems, against the uneven ground of the earth it pictures: ground-truthing.They get away from the table, outside the car, and walk across the earth, which is always bigger, richer than the map. Maps are useful guides. But we need to keep checking them against the bumpy ground we walk on. The intertwined pleasures and dangers of maps are especially good to be aware of in a school of Christian theology…[or any parish]: for theologies too are maps””human worlds imposed on the mysteries of God’s action. It is all too easy to become overly comfortable with our world of necessary maps. Perhaps, then, theological students””and pr ofes s or s ””must , more than anyone, cultivate the discipline of ground-truthing.
I think this is a symptom of what is going wrong in so much of current theological thinking, and why the theologians who are supposed to be helping the church resist heresies like liberalism are so often the carriers for it.
A map is an abstraction of the reality, nothing more than tool created by human ingenuity that helps us interact with reality in an [i]indirect[/i] fashion. The reality is not actually present when you look at a map. That’s why you need to go and encounter the reality directly to ‘ground check’ the map.
But theology is not like that – unless you are liberal (or progressive). The reality of God in Christ is present in the declaration of the gospel. To read the word of God is to encounter the living God; he is mediated [i]directly[/i] through those words. And theology, when it is an exposition of what Scripture teaches, functions the same way. I read something or hear something that expounds the reality of God in Christ then I encounter God himself.
If you want to say that our theological statements should be ‘ground checked’ against Scripture then, okay, not the imagery I’d choose in today’s climate, but okay. But a whole page which gives the impression that theological statements about God need to be ground-checked against people’s variegated experiences of God, as though theology is nothing more than a map of the real thing? Just roll over and ask Schliermarcher to teach your courses. He was there long before you.
“Ground truthing” a lovely word? What kind of linguistic barbarian could think such a thing? “Sick making”, more like.
[blockquote]But a whole page which gives the impression that theological statements about God need to be ground-checked against people’s variegated experiences of God,[/blockquote]
Um, I don’t hear Professor Wilkinson saying that at all. I think he would say that one must ground check one’s theological map however it may have been drawn including the use of ‘people’s variegated experiences of God’.