On the Scope and Truth of Theology —— Theology as Symbolic Engagement

Robert Neville is vastly generous to traditions other than his own. He is historically and cross-culturally informed. His good will should carry the day. When it doesn't, the reason is his shallow notion of truth. Is it true that God exists? Well, says Neville, does your interpretation of God include a value--love, for example--that you the interpretor also embody? If, yes, then your idea of God is true to God and to yourself. This is an interesting idea of the behavior appropriate to an interpretation having personal import, but that isn't a response to the question asked: does God exist? Neville has no answer to this question. Better, his "ultimate" answer is that the cosmos is created from nothing in a creative act that has no agent (no God). Neville has imbibed the objections to arguents for God's existence. He acknowledges them by telling a creation story that eliminates God. This is another of the many expressions of Neville's intellectual integrity. It won't endear him to believers. I wonder if his theologian admirers have missed this implication.

I studied for a semester under Neville at Boston University. He is a good man and certainly well-read and thoughtful. The course was more a random book study than a true teaching course, so I got to know little about where he stood on anything. So this book interested me greatly because I learned from him in a less-than-twenty dollar book what he was not energized to share with students in a two-thousand dollar course! For that reason, perhaps I should give his book a five star rating! I wondered after reading the book and its reviews, however, how "America's premier systematic theologian" (as a reviewer puts it) has a fairly recent book that is 1,200,000+ on the Amazon best-seller list! Why so little interest in the work of one supposedly so eminent? After thinking about this, I conclude that his writing is obscure and meant not for a popular readership but intended to impress and address a small circle of elites from the mainline protestant intelligensia. The book is irrelevant to those who work in the church as pastors. As a pastor, I couldn't find anything applicable for real-life ministry. It was pure speculative theology for "the open-minded" who may or may not be religiously affiliated. For me, 90% of the book is in the "blah-blah" category. His critique of Stanley Hauerwaus was good, however. I enjoyed my own reflection on the difference between his position on theology as ever-open -- reflecting on symbols -- rather than Hauerwaus's attention to Christian identity and the witness of scripture to that identity. I reconsidered my own position on the priority of the exclusively Christian experience of the holy. Neville does a great job of provoking the reader to consider whether the Christian faith is rooted primarily in doctrine and the Bible or in on-going interaction with all religious and philosophical traditions. All in all, this is not a book for a wide readership. Nor is it very necessary for what happens outside academia. It struck me as the perspective of one comfortably on tenure, with a hefty retirement pension about to kick in. For such a person, ecclesiology is hogwash. I was troubled with how Neville overlooks what the Dutch sociologist Anton Zidjerveld calls "the institutional imperative". A way of life, such as what Neville recommends, needs a vehicle such as a handed-down institution in order to have any effect on real-life people, Zidjerveld would say. Neville's proposal in this book offers no institutional imperative or real-life possibilty, and so it struck me as deceived as he claims Hauerwaus's position to be. In the end, Neville is no more "truthful" than Hauerwaus, from my point of view.

Dr. Neville casts a wide net for theology - challenging what many would understand as its traditional subject matter. His 'Theology as symbolic engagement" - owing some of its roots to American Pragmatism - provides a brilliant system with which to engage the notion of theological truth - or any notion of truth for that matter. This is one of those books that opens the reader to a new way of understanding our engagement with the divine. While the concepts can be complex, I find the author discusses them with a clarity that makes the book accessible and enjoyable.