Week 7 Fuellenbach Chapter 6

09Nov07

While I don’t quibble with appropriating Kuhn’s insights concerning paradigm shifts into our thinking about the church (in fact I agree with it wholeheartedly), I do think it a good idea to throw up a few warning flags.  Kuhn’s paradigm analysis was powerful precisely because it broke up the old modernist assumptions about progress and the supremacy of scientific methods, but Kuhn’s theory, we must remember, is predicated (like science) on success.

If a theory works and answers more questions than another, then we keep it.  If it doesn’t we try to repair it until that becomes impossible and then another, better theory will replace it.  In theology, we are, just as scientists are, beholden to a 2 thousand year old tradition.  The tradition furnishes us with a number of resources, but it also sets limits on what and where our thinking can go.  There is such a thing as out-of-bounds.

Now, as Fuellenbach applies this stuff to ecclesiology, I don’t think we have much to worry about, but what if we were to find problems with, for example, maintaining our doctrine of the trinity?  If something more historical, more palatable comes along (like the non-divinity but radical obedience of Jesus, for example), are we free to just dump the old forms and accept “conversion”?  I hope not.  I like Kuhn, I really do, but “new models” have to be rooted in the tradition or they constitute complete paradigm shift.

Just throwing that out there…

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