PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

13 Oct PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. To that end, he is reviewing the theology of three contemporary theologians whose thought is very integrative of Nature and Spirit from three very different approaches. His current focus is the thought of post-modern theologian Mark I. Wallace. This blog is part of a weekly series.

Pastor Pat Bailey

Mark I. Wallace is a professor of religion at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. His family background includes descendants from the Seminole nation, which makes him both familiar with and sensitive to Native American worldviews. He, therefore, seeks to reconcile Pagan aspects of the Jewish and Christian tradition with late-modern Christian theology and to engage postmodern analysis “to explore the promise of Christianity as an earth-centered, body-loving religion,” and “a new adventure in the return of Christianity to its green future as a continuation of ancient Pagan earth-wisdom.” Wallace proposes, therefore, “a nature-based model of the Spirit as the ‘green face’ of God” and a “new vision of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the earth.”

One of the first things that interested me in reading Mark Wallace’s theology is his bold language, describing the Holy Spirit as “the fleshly, carnal bird God of the Bible who lives in all things. . . . a wholly enfleshed avian life-form made up of the four primitive elements—wind, water, fire, and earth—that are the key components of embodied life as we know it.” What allows and inspires such startling language is Wallace’s methodology of rhetorical theology based on postmodern concepts of truth and knowing. Wallace takes the constructivist approach, asserting that Nature as human persons experience it is constructed within their culturally informed and value-laden context, as opposed to the objective approach that considers Nature to be a fixed reality waiting to be discovered.

Wallace’s constructivist approach leads to another postmodern distinctive: the rejection of foundationalism with its universal metaphysical assurances and metanarratives: “by abandoning the Myth of the Given, contemporary theology, like other disciplines, is seeking for a postmetaphysical, antifoundational footing upon which to base its enterprise.” Constructivism rejects the idea of any single objective and universal model of Nature with foundational meanings and values already inherently present.  Instead, constructivism sees reality as a “series of perspectival understandings” that are shaped by specific contexts of language and culture.

The perspectives that Wallace wishes to recover and construct are drawn from presentations of the Spirit in scripture and tradition “within a nature-based desire for the integrity and health of all life-forms—human and nonhuman.” Theology for Wallace, then, is “a self-consciously fictive enterprise with an emancipatory intent.”

What do you think of Wallace’s bold imagery to describe the Spirit?  Do you agree or disagree that the human experience of reality is constructed rather than given?