The Fault Line

 Here’s a nice quote from Adam Cooper’s new book ‘Life in the Flesh’:

‘Between traditional Christian thought and the greater deal of contemporary theology there runs a fault line dividing them off as two quite different ways of going about the theological task. Putting it most simply, the former perceives its main task in terms of the receptive vision of reality, the rational discovery of objective revelation, the affective experience of divine things. The latter, by contrast, perceives its task in terms of the production of reality, the subjective creation of divine things, the sublimation of the data of revelation to the exigencies of historical and personal evolution.’

I think this quote sums up things succinctly and accurately. It also helps me understand why I find traditional Christian thought generally so much more serious and challenging than much contemporary theology.

Reinhard Hutter, is, on the other hand, a contemporary theologian whose work interests me. But his ‘Suffering Divine Things’ is an attempt to do theology in the more traditional way – at least in terms of receiving rather than self-creating revelation.