Theology in Many Voices: Baptist Vision and Intercontextual Practice

By Amy L. Chilton

Western evangelical and baptist theologies have largely avoided experience as a source of theology. By not seeing, or not utilizing, lived experience in its own theologies and rejecting it in "contextual" theologies, these traditions have failed to recognize the full presence of God as revealed in the world. Current theological dialogues arising from admittedly contextualized experiences, such as LGBTQI+, Black, or various women’s theologies struggle to find a place at the theological table, because they ring untrue to evangelical and baptist ears. What we are then left with is an idiosyncratic deity who mirrors the community in power.

Theology in Many Voices presents an understanding of theology as a practice of the church, one that both makes space for lived community experience in theological content and also provides the means necessary for encountering, engaging, and incorporating the theological insights of the global and historic church into Western theological discourse. Amy L. Chilton engages the contemporary use of Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of "practice" in theological method, particularly through the writings of James Wm. McClendon Jr., to show how it can be used as a means of moving beyond the "Scripture vs. experience" divide while still retaining the norming role of Scripture and the essential nature of God’s revelation in context.

Two other figures illuminate Chilton’s vision of experience-oriented theology, giving fuller voice to the church’s witness of faith and practice: the Roman Catholic Jon Sobrino, whose work with the Salvadoran poor influenced his Christology through his "Christo-praxic" method, and Muriel Lester, whose communal living practices influenced her theology of peace and ability to move across religious boundaries and showed how to do theology as practice intercontextually. Finally, whereas the methodological use of practice has found few inroads to Christian doctrine, Chilton explores the doctrines of the Trinity and theological anthropology in light of the practiced contributions of the church global, especially women and the marginalized.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781481317320

Book preview

Cover Page for Theology in Many Voices

Theology in Many Voices

Theology in Many Voices

BAPTIST VISION AND INTERCONTEXTUAL PRACTICE

Amy L. Chilton

Baylor University Press

© 2023 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design by theBookDesigners

Cover art: Lillian V. Chilton Thompson

Book design and typeset by Ely Encarnación

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chilton, Amy L., author.

Title: Theology in many voices : Baptist vision and intercontextual practice / Amy L. Chilton.

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Engages the concept of localized practice in the work of Christian systematic theology to reclaim experience as a theological source--Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023026239 (print) | LCCN 2023026240 (ebook) | ISBN 9781481317306 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481317337 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781481317320 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Communities--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Globalization--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Women in Christianity. | Experience (Religion)

Classification: LCC BV625 .C485 2023 (print) | LCC BV625 (ebook) | DDC 201/.727--dc23/eng/20230804

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026239

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026240

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Baylor University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To

Lillian Pettis Knox

Gladys Theresa Chilton

Mary and Stan Chilton

and

Lillian Vijakshana

You are my tapestry of love.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I Theology Rooted in Local Practice

1 Theology as Practice

2 Jon Sobrino

Theology Practiced throughout the Realidad Histórica

II Theology Done Intercontextually

3 Practicing across Divides

Theology as Learning a Second First Language

4 Muriel Lester

Intercontextual Theology in Practice

III Doctrine

5 God as Trinity

Women’s Relational Theologies and the Triune God

6 A Fleshly Theology of Humanity

Women’s Bodies as the Body of Christ

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index of Names and Subjects

Index of Scripture

Acknowledgments

My dear friends Daneli Ureña, Becky Shenton, Laura Spoerri, and Christy Cobb have cheered me on through the fatigue and joy of writing this volume while dealing with four major interstate moves. My congregation at Phillips Memorial Baptist Church (Cranston, Rhode Island), where I began my work as senior minister halfway through writing this volume and always behind in its submission, has been nothing but kind and gracious. Many thanks as well to Altadena Baptist Church (Altadena, California) and St. John’s Baptist Church (Charlotte, North Carolina), which welcomed us on our journey through. My academic mentors, Nancey Murphy and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, were invaluable in the early stages of this project, some of which overlapped with my dissertation work at Fuller Theological Seminary. My friends and classmates during those years are always present in my work, especially Rebecca Horner Shenton, Ryan Andrew Newson, and Andrew C. Wright. I am thankful for each of the professional organizations in which early forms of this work were presented for discussion: including the Baptist World Alliance Baptist Theology and Christian Unity Commission; the American Baptist Churches, USA Theology Commission; and the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, especially the Region-at-Large. Certainly there are more who deserve thanks. Know that you are included here.

Thank you to Baylor University Press, especially Cade Jarrell and the editing team, who have polished up this rough stone into something I am proud to send forth into the world. Your excitement for this project and patience in waiting for its submission helped me stay at it when life intervened. Special thanks to Steven R. Harmon, who has read and consulted with me on many of these chapters, sometimes with very short notice and turnaround time, and to Eileen Campbell-Reed and her Three Minute Ministry Mentor Writing Table. Those little Zoom screens and the women and men gathered therein have helped keep me on track, encouraged me, and shared with me many helpful tips on how to be a better writer.

As part of my healing after the pandemic lockdown, I brought home a four-harness thirty-six-inch floor loom. The neighbor who helped me move it had moved many things in his truck, but never a loom. What can I say—it followed me home! Ever since I was a young child, I have been enamored by how one can take fibers in the form of yarn, thread, or fabric and turn them into wearable and usable art. Tertullian, in his dismissal of women’s colorful fashion, perhaps never knew the joy of turning a flat piece of fabric or skein of yarn into something beautiful. My first major project is now an altar cloth at St. John’s Baptist, where I hope it blesses those who commune there. The fiber arts have become for me not only a way of creating beauty but also a metaphor for my life. The quilt of family lore that my maternal grandmother, Lillian Knox, never finished and the rows of costume jewelry that color every memory of my paternal grandmother, Gladys Chilton, are woven into the work that fills these pages. My parents, who have celebrated each step of my journey (which has thus far taken me further and further from the West Coast and our family home), traveling with me to professional meetings in Switzerland and Norway, or grandparenting my daughter while I travel and write, are here as well. Meanwhile, the vibrant art on the cover, painted by my spitfire daughter in the fourth grade during a tumultuous time in our family life, literally brings onto this work my greatest work: mothering her. My profound thanks go to my family, who are the tapestry that holds me. May their beauty and voices be sought out and valued as part of this thing we call church. And Vija, may you always color the world around you a brighter and more vibrant place.

Of course, any mistakes in this work are solely my own responsibility. But I like to think that any mistakes present might just be openings for the church global to keep on in its work of doing theology.

Amy L. Chilton

Cranston, Rhode Island

Easter 2023

Introduction

Every theology text is a story, although far too often their published sentences smell of having been born in a celestial void. The story of this text is clear enough, I hope, that the reader need not question its location in the church’s ancient, global, and future story. There is not any question, of course, of its close tie to my own theological journey to understand and have my voice heard in the patriarchal, evangelical contexts of my calling to ministry, childhood faith, and early theological education. Within this all-too-common path (common, at least, to those outside the mainly white, male power structures of the church and its academies), there were pivotal moments, birth pangs of a sort, that hastened its development.

One of those was a Christology seminar I took as a PhD student. Every week those around the seminar table chose sides, dividing themselves between Reformed and non-Reformed students and between the ontological dualists and the nonreductive physicalist/multiaspect monists (who had studied under Joel B. Green and Nancey Murphy). One particular week included fists slammed into the table. After five weeks of discussing various christological topics seemingly unrelated to the life of the church, I asked the not-so-innocent question of how the virgin birth had meaning in the church global (and not just to the hypothetical extraterrestrials that had won a place in our syllabus). What stands out clearest in my mind was another student loudly declaring that whatever the virgin birth means to the church global does not matter to him, because he would never pastor anything but a white church. As I had been shaped by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s systematic/constructive theology in interreligious dialogue and Nancey Murphy’s work on embodied and community-embedded epistemologies, this provocation only hastened my journey toward finding answers to how my voice, and the voices of others, could find space in theology.

This heated exchange came when I was still wrestling to find the categories, terminology, and allied voices to give shape to my own deep questions. Ultimately, that seminar turned me toward the use of praxis/practices in the theology of the baptist James William McClendon Jr. and the Catholic Jon Sobrino, SJ.¹ Their work showed me ways of rooting theology in the local community and thereby making theological diversity not only interesting but also necessary for orthodoxy.

Practices certainly are not the final form of theological enquiry, but I suspect future reflection on their rise to methodological popularity will recall how this methodology came at a time when deepening divisions, nationalisms, the resurgence of a public form of white supremacy, and increased wealth divides threatened to hold theology captive to failed narratives that precluded any kind of meaningful theological, community-rooted diversity. As this book will show, understanding theology as a practice or set of practices is not without potential problems (see chapter 1). Yet if we understand practices as community-rooted ways of encountering and participating in the Triune God, as part of the discipleship to which we are called as Christ’s body, then we can see anew how theology might be a way of crossing contextualized theological boundaries. A new idea will most certainly arise that will find ways to bypass the weaknesses of a methodology of practice and that will hopefully reveal the continued concern that theology be rooted in faith communities, held accountable by the lamb who was slain, and able to go on in the face of theological and lived diversity. Since we are not yet there, this book utilizes the concept of practice, taken from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre by many postmodern theologians, as a means to help the church and its theology go on.²

THEOLOGY AS PRACTICE AND GOING ON

Theology in Many Voices makes a case for understanding theology as a practice of the church, a practice that makes space for lived-community experience in theological content and the lived experience of Jesus. While, as chapter 1 will show, many uses of practice are related to the practical concerns of theology (e.g., ethics and practical theology), this book contends that attention to practice is also needed in Christian systematic theology. Theological outcomes are always parts of stories, and stories always have theological outcomes for Christians. Thus, the stories of theology proper should create a plethora of theologies. Our task as theologians, then, is to navigate those stories more adequately.

Theology as practice also provides tools for encountering, engaging, and incorporating the theological insights of the church global into the theological work of evangelicalism’s erring children.³ What that Christology seminar painted in high relief for me were the ways in which Western evangelical, including baptist, theologies have largely been experience-blind. Stanley Grenz and Nancey Murphy both outline in great detail the history of modern foundational epistemologies that have categorically excluded lived experience from the church’s theological work.⁴ By not seeing or consciously utilizing lived experience in its own theologies and rejecting it in contextual theologies, evangelicalism also failed to recognize the presence of God in the faith and theologies of other communities. As a result, the current theological dialogues arising from admittedly contextualized experiences—such as LGBTQI+, Black, or various women’s theologies—struggle to find a seat at the theological table, because they ring untrue to those in the orthodox center. What we are mostly left with in mainstream evangelicalism is an idiosyncratic god who, unsurprisingly, mirrors those in power—albeit not admittedly. The recognition and admittance of stories and practices matter in both the work and the outcomes of theology; otherwise, our theology cannot go on to continue to actively engage God’s presence in our communities and world or to find solutions to ways that we have erred in seeing those realities clearly.

A NOTE ON METHOD

While a praxic method does not naturally split into neatly distinct dimensions, this volume will pry it apart for the sake of clarity and ease of reading. While the last two chapters will focus primarily on the doctrines of the Trinity and humanity from the perspective of female baptist and Catholic theologians, an explanation is in order regarding my use of primarily male theologians to set the stage. I hope that I have not used male theologians to sanction the presence of female theologians, although certainly it may appear thus on the surface. I hope instead that what this shows is not a sanctioning but rather a reflection of the increased presence of women in theological academia—at the very least the increased attention to women’s theological contributions by academic theologians. I have taken the liberty of expanding the kinds of sources I consider useful for academic theological work. A respected colleague once told me that Muriel Lester is not a serious theological interlocutor because she had published just a few popular pamphlets on theology. While it is true that her specifically theological publications are aimed at lay persons, it is also true that the social structures of Victorian and early postmodern England categorically precluded her from publishing the types of work produced by a Barth or a Tillich. So I have included sermons, pamphlets, and even some of her autobiographical writings because those writings, although not systematic or academic, are theological. David P. Gushee urges his readers to seek out the sources to which marginalized voices have had access as a means of shattering the stranglehold racism and patriarchy have had on theology—including the novels of black women writers.⁵ If theology is to be understood as a practice and, thus, is to take the voices of the church global as serious theological resources, creative resourcing is a necessary means of breaking up the patriarchal hegemony of theological academia. Simply put, if we are to know God by God’s presence in the entire church, then we must find ways to hear the voices and read the theologies of that church, even if we must leave the approved path of theological research through the sterile forest of the Church Dogmatics and systematic theologies of the West.

ORGANIZATION

This book is split into three parts of two chapters each: (1) theology rooted in local practice; (2) theology done intercontextually; and (3) doctrine. Chapter 1 will show that understanding theology as a particular kind or set of practices aids in the recognition of the presence of one’s own lived experience in theology and doctrine and creates space in theology for the theological contributions of the lived experiences of differently located and practicing communities. If theology is considered a practice (as I have considered it here), this provides additional tools by which Western evangelical theologians can enter the global theological dialogue with a hospitality that makes space for their own theology to reflect their lived experience. This chapter will explore the use of practice in Western theological methods in the last thirty years, including the particular uses of practice in Alasdair MacIntyre and Ludwig Wittgenstein and their theological heirs. This chapter will pay close attention to the recent critiques of how practices can go awry, thus necessitating what McClendon calls powerful practices, and the overriding community-shaping image of the lamb who was slain, in short: Christology as center.⁶

Chapter 2 will turn to the life and work of Jon Sobrino to examine how theology as practice might look in the lived realities of the historical church. In particular, it will look at Sobrino’s concept of christopraxis as a method by which the theological insights of the Salvadoran poor come to shape his Christology and help him to go on from the insufficiencies he found in mid-twentieth-century Euro-American Christology. Sobrino’s method relies on the concept of realidad histórica, borrowed from Ignacio Ellacuría’s work on Xavier Zubiri’s philosophy, which requires that all of reality must be accounted for if one is to understand God—because God is present in all of reality. Thus, the dark places of history must be accounted for in theology. He argues that the church global must become the church of the poor by being in solidarity with the poor and that theology must be done by the practice of following Christ—and those who follow Christ from the underside of history have a particular perspective on Christ that must be present in theology.

Sobrino’s work, however, does not quite answer the question of how theology of practice might be done and facilitate intercontextual theology, which is the church’s ecumenical task and that of this text’s part 2. Thus, chapter 3 will use MacIntyre’s concept of learning a second first language to show how by sharing practices across contextual lines, practitioners are given the insights necessary for encountering the contextualized theological diversities of the church global. Also, understanding theological practices as learning a second first language opens the path for our own theologies to be shaped by the encounters between communities, allowing each community to go on in its theological work.

Chapter 4 will explore the life and work of Muriel Lester, a people’s parson in London’s East End during the first half of the twentieth century, as an example of how doing theology as a second first language might help us better adjudicate and incorporate the theological insights arising from other practicing faith, and even religious, communities. Lester, who converted to a life shared with the impoverished East Enders, is an important example of how particular faith practices can function as a second first language. Her practices of worship, prayer, communal living, and voluntary poverty gave her the interreligious perspective necessary to see and participate in Gandhi’s peacemaking work in India, even as her embrace of her own Christian faith deepened. Her teachings and practices on worship and prayer likewise gave her an altered perspective on the worth of the impoverished East Enders and opened her to a life of mutual work with them through Kingsley Hall.

Part 3 turns to two doctrinal investigations into theologizing in many voices: Trinitarian theology and theology of humanity. Both chapters here will examine contributions made to these doctrines by theologians whose work is visibly tied to the lived experiences and practices of their theologizing communities in order to discern how our own theology ought to be shaped to remain orthodox. Chapter 5 will explore the doctrine of the Trinity, with particular contributions made by Baptist female theologians Molly T. Marshall and Loida Martell-Otero. Since the most recent revision of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message (2000), significant conversation has taken place on the social implications of understanding the Triune God in light of participation rather than imaging, and with a relational ontology. This chapter will also explore how limitations placed on relational spaces of divine revelation have limited our concept of God in ways that produce destructive ways of being for the church, ways of being that do not reflect the life of the historical Jesus or the ongoing work of the Spirit.

Chapter 6 will turn to theological concepts of humanity within the participatory encounter with the Triune, relational God. As Sobrino and McClendon argue, revelation happens between the giver and the receiver, and thus humans who encounter God’s revelation are not only necessary to the process but theologically relevant to its recounting. At the same time, theology as practice necessitates navigating theological crises intercontextually. Thus, this chapter will engage the work of baptist and Catholic women’s theologies as necessary resources for helping us better theologize about what it means not only to be made in God’s image but also to live as receivers and articulators of divine revelation. In particular, this chapter will engage women’s theologies of the body, including reimaginations of menstrual blood as redemptive.

Like my previous book Sources of Light (coedited with Steven R. Harmon), although in some ways this volume functions as its predecessor, this book shares the concern that the church be shaped in the image of the Triune God and the conviction that this cannot happen while isolated from the church global. While the goal of that book was to encourage the formation of more Baptists in the convictions and practices that will help them toward that goal, Theology in Many Voices turns specifically to theological methodology as needing further reform.⁷ The church and theological academy are not always on the best of terms, but the struggle to continue their work together is a struggle worth pursuing—for both the academy and the faithful who follow Christ from within their own lived contexts. The Triune God is at work in all of history, as the life of the historical Jesus shows, and thus it is the task of theologians to hear the voice of the church global as it follows that Jesus so that we might better know God and live into our callings as those created in the image of God.

1 McClendon, a former Southern Baptist, uses baptist to refer to the heirs of the radical reformation, including Baptists. Unless speaking of Big-B Baptists in particular (those affiliating themselves with a Baptist denomination), I will also use baptist throughout.

2 I will discuss MacIntyre’s concept of going on in chapter 3.

3 I initially intended to say, evangelicalism and its erring children, but that implies that evangelicalism has an orthodox center from which some of its followers have erred. In my assessment of evangelicalism, I stand close to David P. Gushee’s conscientious objection in After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2019), 2 (emphasis original). Be that as it may, if we are to find the solid ground he calls us to seek out, we must assess the booby traps in which we are likely to get caught—of which experience blindness is one.

4 Two books that have been integral to my work in this area are Nancey Murphy’s Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1996) and, to a lesser extent, Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).

5 Gushee, After Evangelicalism, 164.

6 James William McClendon Jr., Systematic Theology, vol. 2, Doctrine (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), 101.

7 Amy L. Chilton and Steven R. Harmon, eds., Sources of Light: Resources for Baptist Churches Practicing Theology (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2020), 293.

Part I

Theology Rooted in Local Practice

1

Theology as Practice

Introduction

In January 2019 Baptist News Global (BNG) published two pieces on Baptist responses to toxic masculinity, which was at the center of a controversial Gillette razor ad, and to