70 PART ONE: INTRODUCTION are at the same time lacking if they are not brought into conversation.”180 Stephen Bevans refers to this very conversation when he writes: What is new, therefore, about contextual theology is that theology is conceived as a dialogue – or as David Tracey would put it, a mutually critical dialogue – between the experiences of the past and the experiences of the present. Both kinds of experience are normative, and theology is done by allowing our experience today to be measured, judged, interpreted, and critiqued by the wisdom found in the classical sources, the ‘classics’ of the Christian tradition, and by allowing those ‘classics’ to be measured, judged, interpreted, and critiqued by the happenstances in our lives, by our cultural values, by our struggles and by the epochal changes that are shaping our world.181 Bevans presents six models of doing contextual theology, addressing the question of “how the context functions as a theological source.”182 He seems to struggle with settling the question of authority within the dynamics of the loci: “Not only is experience understood as equal to Scripture and Tradition; in a certain sense it has priority over them. Scripture and Tradition, of course, are absolutely normative for Christian faith and theology.”183 The models that he then presents all address this question in different ways. For Bevans, “each of these models represents a valid way of doing contextual theology. The question might be raised, however, of the adequacy of any of them in a particular context.”184 In short, Bevans situates the models on a continuum, representing the scale to which they emphasize the experience of the present (the loci of human experience, etcetera) over against the experience of the past (the loci of Scripture and tradition), as displayed in Figure 1. As said before, the question of ‘which practice should be promoted’ (the sub question of the research program this study contributes to, see the Introduction) can be addressed from each of these perspectives. Yet, by inquiring specifically after the theological meaning or significance of the particular Eucharistic practice of two ecumenical communities, this study positions itself in the left-hand side of the continuum of Figure 1. Even though 180 John Swinton, “‘Where Is Your Church?’ Moving toward a Hospitable and Sanctified Ethnography,” in Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, ed. Pete Ward, Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids, MN/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2012), 72. 181 Bevans, An Introduction to Theology, 166. 182 Bevans, 168. 183 Bevans, 165. 184 Bevans, 170 (italics in original).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw