By David H. Kelsey What follows are reflections on two marvelously rich and suggestive sets of essays, one dealing with "New Testament Interpretation from a Process Perspective’ (JAAR, March 1979) and the other dealing with Old Testament Interpretation from the same perspective. It is important, I think, to set candidly into the record (what will be clearly enough revealed in what I say, anyway) that my standing in the process philosophy game is strictly amateur. Because of that, and of my rather more long-standing interest in how theologians argue in defense of their theological proposals, these reflections will deal far more with formal questions about the use of process categories and doctrines than with material questions about the cogency or truth of process theses. After reading these essays, I find myself with three major questions about "process hermeneutics." I will state them briefly now, and then develop each of them in turn. One: What makes interpretation o
Three Types of Today Theology "Pluralism," the day's catchword, reigns in theology as well as culture. Gone are the towering figures and their entourages (Barth vs. Tillich, for example), or the simplistic 11 conservatives contra liberals" of another day. Now it's a bewildering array of traditions and tribes. How do we sort and sift this diversity? George Lindbeck, whose postliberal school has current high visibility, offered a threefold typology at the 2001 meeting of the American Theological Society: academic, political and ecclesial theologies. Readers of The Clergy journal live and work in the third arena, so we narrow the focus to that circle, using another threesome within that category from a recent study of trends in systematic theology in the English-speaking world: evangelical ecumenical and experiential (As examined in the issue, "The Resurgence in Systematic Theology," Interpretation, Vol. XLIX, No. 5, July 1995.) Evangelical theology is gro