by

William J. Abraham

            Canonical theism as a living option for both church and academy emerged over time as a fruit of intense personal struggle within the contours of contemporary Protestantism.  Having expressed its claims elsewhere in this volume in terms of cold-blooded, impersonal theses, my aim in this paper is to provide a brief account of the spiritual and intellectual journey that lies behind it.  Clearly others who find it helpful to embrace the central convictions of canonical theism or who are happy to explore this or that element within it, will have very different stories to tell.  In a way nothing critical hangs on the particularity of the narrative that follows, for many can come to embrace a vision of the Christian faith from very different backgrounds and angles; the journey is not in itself constitutive of the position adopted.  The value of such testimony lies in this: canonical theism is not one more speculative effort in systematic theology; it is an attempt to find an expression of the faith that nourishes the soul and that provides shape and motivation for lively involvement in the life and ministry of the church.  There is merit, then, in providing a more personal take on the issues at stake.  While every element within canonical theism is subject to appropriate intellectual analysis, reflection, and rigorous criticism, these intellectual practices are intimately joined to a robust commitment to the kingdom of God in the church and the world.  So speaking openly and personally about such matters may help illuminate what is at stake.  I shall begin at the beginning with my initial conversion but will then work less chronologically and more thematically.[1]

            My conversion to the Christian faith took place in my mid-to-late teens within the warmth and honesty of a very strong version of pietism in the south of the North of Ireland mediated through the Irish Methodism.[2]  As a teenager from the countryside of Fermanagh, I was introduced to the Christian faith through religious education in the public schools, through caring Sunday School teachers, and through sensitive ministers who visited our home.  My family was opposed to any kind of living faith, but the early death of my father in a bad truck accident had made us a focus of concern to the members and leaders of the local church to which we nominally belonged.  I have a legion of memories of kind Methodist ministers and laity who brought the orphan money every quarter, prayed for us in the home, lured us to Christmas parties and to annual Sunday School excursions in Bundoran, helped out in times of need and crises, and the like.  The result was a deep impression of the Christian faith as something healthy, positive, cheerful, and open to truth.  To be sure, these experiences also brought home how difficult it was to be a Christian; yet the overall impression was unfailingly attractive. 

All this contrasted sharply with the sectarianism that was a constitutive part of social and political life.  Like everyone else in my setting, I knew such sectarianism intimately; it was pervasive and inescapable.  Yet exceptionally close relations tempered the sense of national and external religious identity. In my family’s case we lived face to face with Roman Catholic neighbors, playmates in the fields, fellow-travelers by bus to school, and everyday helpmates.  In my childhood I can only remember once being subject to sectarian abuse.[3]  On the way home from Sunday School we were stopped by a car load of vulgar Irish nationalists from an area called Coa where my maternal grandparents lived.  They tried to intimidate us by calling us Orange bastards, but after a short time sped off. 

            Within this world, under the influence of evangelical lay preachers I did make a personal commitment of faith to the gospel when I was nine or ten.  However, there was no serious initiation or follow-up; the difficulties of Christian discipleship and the pressure to reject the faith at home were simply too great; the seed sprouted and quickly died.  By my teen years the faith was dead.  I had won a scholarship as a dayboy to Portora Royal School, a place committed to exacting study and learning.  I loved intellectual work and did relatively well in my studies; I was drawn to the humanities side of the curriculum, most especially to the study of literature and languages.  However, in a quiet way cosmic and metaphysical issues that eroded any theistic or religious commitments that had been picked up in my childhood haunted me.  The fundamental problem was simply that if God was not visible, then he was unreal.  As a result I found it liberating to cast off any lingering fear of the divine.  Knowing that sliding into even a befuddled form of atheism was a very serious move, I gave myself a period of three months at church to make sure I was doing the right thing.  It was precisely this sense of freedom and discipline that set me free to have a fresh look at the Christian faith. 

Within those three months I had become a convinced Christian.  I read the New Testament for myself, followed with increasing dread and then joy the content of the sermons and the poetry of the Methodist hymnbook, and finally took the plunge publically for myself in a mission in my local church.  I was immediately taken under the spiritual care of the church and its ministers, most especially that of Shaun Cleland, whose integrity, wit, intellectual rigor, and passionate faith were then and remain to this day a tonic.  I immersed myself in Wesley and the story of Methodism and found there some of the additional spiritual and intellectual nourishment I sorely needed.  Sensing a very clear call to the ordained ministry of the church, I went off to Queen’s University in Belfast to study philosophy and psychology.  From there I went to seminary at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, an independent Wesleyan seminary committed to the renewal of the Wesleyan heritage.  Given that I had as many questions as I had intuitions and answers, I then went to Oxford to work with Basil Mitchell and take up again my primary interest in issues in philosophy of religion.[4]  As we have already crossed the border into philosophy and theology, it is time to shift gears and refocus more thematically.

            Philosophy has been and remains the bedrock discipline that I cherish and enjoy the most.  While I find myself working across the whole spectrum of sub-disciplines that feature within Christian theology, philosophy is where I am most comfortable intellectually.  My formation within it has been clearly within the Anglo-American analytical tradition.  While I appreciate the drive to conceptual clarity and intellectual rigor that are the hallmarks of this tradition, I have never received its treasures in an exclusivist or doctrinaire fashion.  Thus one of my earliest tutors in philosophy was a French phenomenologist and existentialist; moreover, I have always kept an eye and ear open to the rival Continental tradition.  Happily, it is now clear that while the concepts, forms of argument, and general styles may be radically different, these traditions represent cousins operating in the wake of Kant that often have very similar concerns.[5]  Thus both traditions in their own way have been wrestling with the loss of faith in the modern world, with the nature of natural science as an intellectual and cultural enterprise, with the nature of language and meaning, and with appropriate contact with the world of every day experiences and agents, especially human agents.  The greatest failings of analytical philosophy have been its intellectual narrowness, insularity, and arrogance, its failure to come to terms with the creation and transposition of concepts in history, and its prejudice against religion.[6]  Recent developments, especially in the United States, have made such prejudice look increasingly intellectually insensitive and partisan. 

The developments I have in mind lie within the region of epistemology and philosophy of religion; they still remain ignored or sidelined in contemporary theology, have a profound bearing on the emergence of canonical theism.  In my own journey I was immersed initially in an epistemology that was thoroughly evidentialist in orientation.[7]  Thus the standard approach to the rationality of religious belief consisted of a threefold strategy.  First, one argued for the meaningfulness and coherence of general theism.  Second, one mounted some kind of natural theology either from various proofs or from religious experiences.  Finally, one turned to divine revelation to finish off the job and get to a more robust version of theism.  As I was committed to a robust version of theism, I was clearly interested in proposals about divine revelation, and much of my early work was taken up with the nature of inspiration and the status and content of divine revelation.  Given that these notions were intimately related to conceptions of the Bible, I was also fascinated by the impact of historical investigation on scripture and explored this arena both as a topic of interest in its own right and as a way into the wider debate about the justification of Christian belief.  At the same time I was exposed in person as a student at Oxford to the early work of Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga.  In between these two towering giants, I pursued with enthusiasm the work of my supervisor, Basil Mitchell, who in turn opened up a line to the brilliant insights of John Henry Newman.  Another figure that made a lasting impression on my thinking while at Oxford was Isaiah Berlin, whose seminar with Patrick Gardiner in the philosophy of history reinforced my convictions about the irreducibility of human action in metaphysics and of the indispensability of human judgment in the life of the mind. 

These thinkers are but the tip of an iceberg in recent philosophy, more specifically in epistemology.[8]  The crucial streams that swirl around them can only be mentioned in passing here.  One stream is the reemergence of externalism as a rival to internalism.  Externalism puts human agency, human capacities, trust, and intellectual virtue back on the table in the quest for rationality, justification, and knowledge.  While it does not displace the proper use of logic, rational principles, and the like, externalism undermines the standard version of evidentialism that I had implicitly and none too happily embraced.  A second stream is that of particularism as a rival to methodism.  For me the importance of particularism, that is, of focusing ruthlessly on the particulars of our actual intellectual endeavors, emerged most sharply in the impossibility of reducing history to science as an intellectual enterprise.  The search for one method of inquiry, whether of deductive logic or of the patterns of reasoning exemplified in natural science, is a chimera and a snare.  The third stream fastens on the claims of foundationalism over against coherentism.  Initially I was deeply drawn to coherentism, in that it fitted with the attraction of cumulative case arguments and with the clear character of historical reasoning.  However, it became all too clear over time that I was generalizing too quickly from the critical place of judgment in certain areas of inquiry and failing to distinguish between classical and moderate foundationalism.  I had confused the discovery of cumulative case arguments with coherentism and have since abandoned it as a global theory.

The crucial point to register at this stage is this.  While I have my own vision of the epistemology of theology, one that puts a premium on the place of divine revelation in our knowledge of God, we now have at our disposal an extraordinary range of epistemological options in thinking through the topics of rationality, justification, and knowledge not just as these apply generally to critical inquiry but as these apply to theology.  Thus the breakup of the standard evidentialism that was prevalent in my training in philosophy has been matched by the development of better options in the philosophy of religion.  This is a revolutionary development.  Clearly something akin to this observation shows up in talk about a shift from modernity to postmodernity, but this way of speaking fails to do justice both to the range of options that have emerged and to the philosophical rigor that accompanies them.  I find reference to postmodernity as a cultural artifact or development helpful in making sense of the recent past.  It is much less helpful as a guide in sorting through the epistemological options available because it makes too much of the failures of classical foundationalism, makes too little of the real diversity available, too quickly dissolves the debate into one about the dynamics of contemporary politics and culture, and tends to undermine the need for careful, detailed epistemological work from all the contestants in the current debate.  Worst of all it fails to note that robust Christian theists have worked up a network of competing epistemologies all of which are clearly compatible with the Christian gospel.  Christian intellectuals need no longer be on the defensive, as they have been throughout the modern period; they no longer have to feed off scraps dropped from the philosophers table; they have at their disposal a full range of competing menus each with its own feast on offer. 

The importance of this development for Christian theology is simple.  Epistemology has at one and the same time been radically diversified and radically relativized.  Consequently, the church can be thoroughly substantial in her theology and practices without making the integrity or legitimacy of its claims depend on the formal or canonical adoption of this or that epistemology.  More generally the worry, if not obsession, of having the right theological method is now sidelined.  Equally, the quest for some kind of absolute certainty can also be seen for what it is, that is, an imposition from without on the faith of the church.  Expressed differently, Christian intellectuals have been freed up to explore a host of epistemological options.  Most importantly they are liberated to articulate and develop the various epistemological suggestions that show up in scripture and in the wider canonical heritage.  We might capture the salient point in this manner.  The internal life of the church has been turned upside down, or more aptly, the right way up.  Where before the first order of business was to settle the issue of canon, conceived as getting the right criterion of truth in theology, now the first order of business is Christian formation in the full life of the church.  Questions of apt criteria, rationality, justification, and the like are secondary; they are not constitutive of the life of faith.

I have sketched this conceptual revolution by way of recent developments in recent epistemology.  In my own journey they coincided with my own spiritual and ecclesial experiences.  The point to register at this juncture is my encounter with the Methodist tradition in North America.  Given that it was Irish Methodists who first brought Methodism to North America, there is more than a passing interest for me in this journey.  Having come to know the ecclesial scene in United Methodism from top to bottom and from end of the continent to another, the critical observation is this.  While the Methodist tradition is very much alive and its renewal is much further along that its critics acknowledge, it has enormous difficulty securing a sufficiency of content and practice to nourish one’s spiritual life over time. 

In coming to Perkins School of Theology in 1985 the prevailing orthodoxy was unmistakably Liberal.  I had been invited to apply for a position, and I only agreed to be interviewed after I was convinced that I would have real freedom in my teaching and thinking.  The first couple of years at Perkins were exhilarating, not least because of a splendid faculty.  Clearly the leading voice in theology was that of Ogden, a scholar of such intense clarity, and ferocity that he had become legendary in his impact.  While we were poles apart, we routinely roomed together at faculty retreats, and I came in time to judge Ogden one of the greatest Liberal Protestants of the twentieth century.  As is well known Ogden demythologized the demytholigizers.[9]  By the time he was finished there was nothing left of the Christian faith that held any interest for me, much less that would have been minimally adequate for Christian discipleship.[10]  The problem this posed for me was historical.  How did it come that a whole stream of Methodism had failed to preserve critical components of the Christian faith over time?  The standard reply on the part of conservatives was that this stemmed from either lack of piety or lack of theological and intellectual integrity.  Neither explanation applied to Ogden.  He was pious to the core in his own Liberal way, and he was a paradigm case of intellectual integrity, that is, of exploring and of articulating the relevant options and following the evidence where it led.  Over time the conclusion that emerged was this: there was something fundamentally flawed at the origin and core of the tradition itself.

Critics of Methodism will reach naturally for the usual causal suspects: the anti-intellectualism of its pietism, its obsession with experience, its suffocating moralism, its unhealthy pragmatism, its liturgical antinomianism, its lust for respectability, its artificial anthropomorphism, its corrupting institutionalism, and the like.  All these worries strike me as superficial.  The really deep problems stem from a much wider development in Western Christianity, namely, the obsession with right epistemology as critical and constitutive of the life of the church.  The immediate expression of this in modern United Methodism is the unconstitutional and canonical adoption of a quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as the solution to the problem of the criterion in theology.  As a serious piece of epistemology, this proposal is intellectually naïve, a manifestation of both bad judgment and of intellectual incompetence.  As a rendering of Wesley it is false, for Wesley was thoroughly medieval in his conception of scripture and in the role he gave to reason and experience in its interpretation.  What is critically important, however, is that both Wesley and those moderns who project their own views back on him by means of the Quadrilateral share the same fundamental vision in that they have privileged epistemology as constitutive and canonical for faith.  While any appeal to a single causal origin of our current woes is clearly mistaken, this mistake is critical in any accurate account of the thinning out of the life of the church and its inability to provide adequate resources for robust forms of Christian discipleship.[11]

This growing conviction coincided with two other developments that I can only mention in passing.  First, this discovery was given flesh and bones in my work on the intersection of theology and epistemology at the beginning of the Enlightenment.  As I have argued at length elsewhere, the turn to epistemology and the forms of its proposals in the modern period are only fully intelligible when the connections between theology and philosophy are visited with care.  It is surely no surprise that Christianity has been decimated at the hands of modern critics in the name of intelligibility and rationality.  Modernity was invented initially by Christian intellectuals to resolve the problems thrown up by an obsession with epistemology that took hold of the Western Church after the Great Schism.  Once the epistemology changed, the faith had to be changed to make it fit, until so much change has been produced that there is sometimes nothing left to believe or disbelieve. 

Second, the place of spiritual formation and discipleship in the development and formation of Christian doctrine was driven home in a powerful way in my conversations and work with Ellen Charry, who was then a colleague at Perkins.[12]  It became very clear to me that the adoption of a body of official doctrine was not simply a clever intellectual exercise designed to secure tenure but a brilliant exercise in spiritual and intellectual formation that was intimately related to human healing and recovery from evil.  Moreover, the church that evangelized the Roman Empire needed more than a canon of scripture to get the job done; minimally she also needed a canon of doctrine.  The whole canonical enterprise, including the adoption of a canon of doctrine, was driven by soteriological and theological concerns; the place of epistemology was relative and secondary.

Reference to the practice of evangelism naturally takes me to another dimension of my journey.  Thus far I have touched on my conversion, my formation in philosophy and theology, and my encounter with the weal and woe of modern Methodism.  In coming to Perkins I had only come on the condition that I would teach philosophy, and over time I began to work intentionally in systematic theology.  My primary brief, however, was to do serious work and research in evangelism.  While this appeared to be a distraction at first, it very quickly took on a life of its own, bearing fruit in arenas I neither imagined nor anticipated.  In some ways I now credit my work in this territory as every bit as important as my work in philosophy or my experiences cross-culturally. 

I took as two critical areas of historical investigation the history of revivalism and the evangelization developed over the first four to five centuries of the church.  The former provided a window unto the vicissitudes of spiritual formation in the modern period, most especially as that related to conversion.  Both the success and failure of various forms of revival brought home to me the critical place of Christian formation in any contemporary vision of evangelism.  This dovetailed with the crucial place of catechesis in the formation of Christians in the patristic period.  The obvious analogies between our current marginalization in a pluralist world with the place of the church in the ancient world only serve to drive home how wise the ancient church was in its evangelistic patience and practice.  Yet this was not the most startling or exciting element in my fresh encounter with the early and developing tradition. 

I had studied the history of the church with great interest in seminary, and I had been keenly engaged intellectually with the work of Maurice Wiles, a first rate teacher I had encountered in my time at Oxford, but the historical material always struck me as foreign and even artificial.[13]  I now read the early history and patristic theology as part of my interest in evangelism.  As a result the debates and intellectual developments of the early tradition were totally transformed.  I came to see the life of the church in all its complexity and fragility as incredibly relevant, intellectually fecund, and spiritually nourishing.  Where before I was reading ancient texts professionally and following the institutional developments sociologically or merely historically, the whole life of the church came alive as a place where folk were brought to faith, nourished in holiness, helped in the battle against evil, motivated to persevere, and energized to plum the full depths of gospel conviction.  The great fathers, teachers, and saints were no longer distant figures drowned out by my critical preoccupations and concerns; they became mentors and living inspirations of the Holy Spirit.[14]  The creeds of the church ceased to be mere summaries of scripture; they took on a life of their own in the formation and preservation of authentic discipleship.  In turn this kind of encounter expanded into a fully orbed vision of the internal life of the church as constituted and formed not just by scripture, but also by the content of Nicene Creed, by a canon of teachers, by lists of saints, by rich liturgical practice, by normative forms of iconography, and the like.  Moreover, it was both fitting and essential that there be forms of episcopacy that ensured the preservation and proper use of this complex canonical heritage. 

Within this encounter, I naturally took a keen interest in the relation between theology and philosophy, a well-worn topic in the history of theology.  What became patently obvious over time was that the church could beg, borrow, and steal from philosophy without canonizing any particular vision of philosophy or theory of knowledge.  Of course, the standard line I had been taught and had accepted was that the great doctrines of the church were an amalgam, say, of divine revelation and neo-Platonism.  However, aside from its naïve simplicity, this vision did not begin to do justice to the way the church’s teachers skillfully deployed a variety of intellectual resources to express the truth of the gospel.  What struck me most forcibly was the way the church kept its own counsel and insisted on its own convictions in the teeth of intellectual challenge and ridicule.  What also struck me dramatically were the official omissions.  Thus while the church was adamant about such matters as the Trinity and the nature and person of Christ, such issues as the nature of divine revelation, atonement, and the doctrine of the Christian life were left to be carried in diverse vessels in the sea of faith.  In short, I came to see that the life of the church was the reverse of what it had become in the West.  The canonical faith of the early church focused on a diverse body of materials, practices, and persons that were critical and instrumental in spiritual formation and left epistemological matters to be taken up as needed; the medieval and modern church reversed this over time by reducing canon to scripture, by treating canon as a criterion of truth, and by subjecting everything to a highly artificial process of intellectual validation.  Thus while I began my work in evangelism by exploring the evangelization of the ancient world as a way of exploring Christian initiation, I ended up with a fresh reading of the tradition that dovetailed both with my philosophical intuitions and discoveries with my spiritual struggles in the contemporary church.

One obscure person had a truly dramatic role in this journey and reference to him will round off this section of my comments.  As I was ruminating one afternoon on the extraordinary thinning out of the doctrines and practices of Methodism and on the aetiological narrative of Protestantism I sketched above, I turned by accident to Aleksei Khomiakov’s polemical account of developments of western Christianity after the division between East and West.  I found the early part of his paper, “On the Western Confessions of Faith”, uninteresting and even boring.[15]  Then in the course of reading a few pages I was suddenly gripped and thunderstruck.  After insisting the division of the Church was essentially a matter of bad manners in that the West had changed the Creed without consultation and then went on to invent suitable theories to defend its lack of affection, he proceeded to develop a picture of theological developments in the West.  I was immediately taken with his sketch of what had happened in that one painted a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic; the other looked like a vivid portrait of Schubert Ogden.  Having reread the relevant section of Khomiakov several times, I am not all that sure how far my chain of thought was prompted more by my background beliefs at the time than by the content of the text itself.  What hit me with incredible force was that it was possible to conceive of the life of the church in terms not of theory, or of epistemology, or even of truth, but of affection, of mutual love, of a community of sanctity, of a people called out and equipped by the Holy Spirit to bring us to Christ, the Son of God, and through him to lead us to the Father, the Creator of the universe. 

Even though I have no illusions about Khomiakov’s shortcomings and polemical intensity, and even though equally I have no illusions about the Eastern Orthodoxy he so dearly loved, I consider him a theologian of acute perception.[16]  When I stumbled upon his grave in a Moscow cemetery in the summer of 1997, I counted that discovery as an act of extraordinary providence and an occasion for deep gratitude.  After reading his paper on that memorable afternoon, I picked up the phone and found the telephone number for St. Seraphim’s’ Cathedral in Dallas, a temple of God that has become something of a second spiritual home for my thirsty soul and my aching intellect.  It has also provided a point of entry for ongoing encounter with the treasures of the Eastern Orthodox tradition.  Taken in the round my encounters with Eastern Orthodoxy have served to confirm the conviction that the church in the New Testament and patristic period was first and foremost a school and haven of salvation rather than a seminar in religious epistemology.  The full ecclesiological implications of this judgment remain for me murky and undeveloped.

We might summarize the outcome of this thematic journey as it relates to canonical theism in terms of three comments.  First, there is a high price to pay for the privileging of epistemology in the life of the church.  Canon becomes an item in epistemology; hence its nature and its scope must be reworked to fit the demands of the favored epistemology.  This is bad for both canon and for epistemology.  This move reduces canon to scripture, and then reconfigures scripture so that it is first and foremost an infallible foundation for theology.  Equally, it is bad for epistemology, for it casts epistemology in terms of a search for the right criterion or criteria, a strategy that impoverishes the field by limiting our options.  Second, the way out of this intellectual cramp and captivity is to revisit the topic of canon and over time to find a way to recover the full canonical heritage of the church.  This means that we must come to terms with the complexity of canon, relating it afresh to the practice of spiritual formation and to growth in grace.   This move in turn frees up the church to be both more relaxed and more disciplined in its epistemological endeavors: more relaxed, in that she eschews the need to canonize any epistemology; more disciplined in that she expects the highest standards of performance that can be mustered in any generation.  Thirdly, we must revisit our vision of the church as a community brought into existence and equipped to do its work in the power of the Holy Spirit.  The whole canonical heritage is the fruit of the Spirit’s inspiration in and through the life of the faithful.  Its fresh appropriation and ongoing usage depends critically on the human side on prayer, humility, repentance, and trust; on the divine side these depend on the constant anointing of the grace and Spirit of God.  What has been lost needs to be rediscovered; what has been neglected needs to be revisited; what has been despised needs to be celebrated; and what has been kept and used to good effect needs to be cherished and sustained.  In pursuing this vision we start from where we are and not where we would like to be; we gladly acknowledge the gifts we do possess and add to that stock as providence and the work of the Spirit give wisdom and guidance.  As different ecclesial communities have sinned differently in the use and abuse of the canonical heritage of the church, renewal will be intergenerational and tradition-relative.  The goal in the end is the full visible unity of the people of God fully equipped to minister in and to the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Canonical theism is then both a discovery and a project in the making.  It seeks to come to terms with the theism canonized and adopted by the church and that as such shines through her complex canonical heritage.  Thus it cannot but engage in sensitive reception of the treasures of the church.  Yet that reception is a project that calls for extended labor on all sides and from every quarter of the Christian fold.  Thus the canonical theist welcomes every effort to retrieve and renew the faith of the church.  We might legitimately relate such hospitality to the extraordinary efforts extended currently across the length and breadth of the church to recover vibrant and generous forms of orthodoxy.  Orthodoxy has of late become like a fleet of new cars; there are many models that share the same general form and function.  Consider what we might call Narnia Orthodoxy unleashed by the writings of C. S. Lewis, or the Paleo-Orthodoxy of Thomas Oden, or the Radical Orthodoxy of John Millbank and his allies, or the Post-Barthian Orthodoxy of Colin Gunton and John Webster, or the Classical Orthodoxy of Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, or the Feminist Orthodoxy of Sarah Coakley and Ellen Charry, or the soft Liberationist Orthodoxy of Jurgen Moltman and Miraslov Volf.  Clearly many theologians and intellectuals in the Christian tradition are hard at work refurbishing and replenishing the intellectual treasures of the church. 

Canonical theism differs from these versions of Christianity in two ways.  First, while all of them are interested in retrieval and reappropriation of the past, canonical theism has its own way of thinking about this retrieval.  Thus canonical theism is very intentional about retrieving the canonical heritage of the church in the context of extended spiritual and ecclesial renewal.  We are not just interested in some sort of patristic consensus, or a vague orthodoxy, or generic Trinitarianism, or classical Christianity.  We are interested in the very particular components of the heritage, that is, in the scriptures, the rule of faith, the iconography, the canon of saints, and so on.  Moreover, we receive these as precious gifts of the Holy Spirit given by God to incorporate us into the life of Christ.  Second, canonical theists are resolute in exploring the best epistemological prospects for Christian theology, all the while refusing to canonize such epistemological projects.  We believe that theology, as much as science or common sense, give us access to truth, that it has a rightful place in the academy, that it is demanding and rigorous disciple, and that it should aggressively make good on its claim to knowledge in the marketplace of ideas.  Yet every effort to secure its status in epistemology or in the wider culture should remain in the bosom of the church, deployed appropriately in its catechesis, preaching, and apologetics, but treated as Midrash rather than as constitutive of ecclesial identity.

Furthermore, canonical theists welcome the interaction with contemporary culture missiologically and intellectually.  Missiologically the task of spreading the gospel, of forming robust disciples, and of being salt and light in the world, call for extensive engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural realities.  New and old forms of ministry are needed to take the gospel to the world in an effective and faithful manner.  In this engagement, and in the renewal of the church that it entails, fresh insights will be formed and developed.  In some cases this will lead to new and innovative understandings of the canonical heritage.  In other cases such engagement will lead to new Midrash and to new interpretive commentary that will become part of the contingent, ongoing life of the church.  Either way we can expect resistance, criticism, and even fierce opposition.  Yet what is at issue is no mere secular effort to win this or that intellectual debate or to score this or that polemical point.  What is ultimately at issue is the comprehensive renewal of the church, and this work lies in the hands of God.  It is enough on our part to see things as clearly as we can, to articulate the faith of the church with as much flair as we can muster, to offer a reason for the hope that is within us, and to live humbly before Almighty God, the Triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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