S  U  M  M  A  R  Y

Human knowledge is in the midst of a paradigm shift.

Not only have some stunning revisions affected our scientific perspectives, but we are experiencing a transformation in our view of humankind, its global predicament, its possibilities.

Tribal societies confront technology, ancient religions face modernity, with resultant moral quandaries about the basis from which we can even approach moral quandaries. Meanwhile, evidence we can’t ignore forces humankind forward into moral ultimatums bearing on our survival as a species.

To be in the middle of all of this, as we are, may be unsettling and threatening.

On the other hand, when things are sufficiently shaken up, we have a chance to say how they get sorted out again.

  
  James Ensor  "Christ Calming the Tempest"  1891
 http://www.artmagick.com/paintings/painting1322.asp

Christian theology needs to rise to the occasion, to do its duty: to interpret the gospel faithfully for a new age, using whatever new languages and means are available to it. The Alethia Foundation is among those who are dedicated to this task in this time.

The Alethia Foundation believes :

1. It is uniquely the task of philosophy and religion to provide a comprehensive explanatory-moral frame of reference for human life and experience (not that they always do so, or do it well).

2. The Christian faith is uniquely suited to the present need and opportunity for the restatement of transcendent meaning and purpose as they relate to our time and place.

3. The Christians of each generation are heirs to a sacred trust. Each generation holds the tradition in its safekeeping and carries the ark forward to the next. Our theological responsibility is to seize the challenges and opportunities of our time, using them to give faithful witness to Christ.

The climate of the times is more conducive to this task than it has been in a very long while. On the one hand the general intellectual milieu is indeed less than friendly to Christianity; but on the other hand, the broader movements of thought in this paradigm shift give us an edge.

Grand interpretive schemes in theology have much the same criteria as such schemes in their more limited contexts in the various sciences: to bring all kinds of unwieldy data and formulas under a comprehensive explanatory framework which

• orders them
  
• explains economically, simply, elegantly
  
• is not a closed, but rather an open system which can    interpret and assimilate new data
  
• provides a theoretical platform from which new questions and explorations are launched
  
• subsumes previous knowledge coherently within a larger logical interpretive context.

However, three of the distinctive features of a  theological "unified field theory" or "theory of everything," are:

its inclusivity of subject matter

its moral entailments

its spiritually-based epistemology.

The Alethia Foundation works toward  the assembly of this sort of  comprehensive, coherent, yet limber and open, Christian synthesis.

Such a new picture of things meets a need. Many people of our age have demonstrated longing where we sometimes mistakenly assume resistance: for a moral order that is anchored in a transcendent source of value, but that is also internal to the depths of human experience in space and time.

There seems to be a longing for some plausible alternative to a moral order

•  that is merely piecemeal, ad hoc accretion,
  
•  or that is externally and apodictically imposed,
  
•  or that is a closed shop of cult-like imperatives,
  
•  or that is perceived as a matter of mere personal choice or ethno-cultural accident.

The Alethia Foundation wants to offer an alternative, in the form of a Christian vision of reality which gives a good account of where we are and what we know, in terms of the love of God in Christ Jesus.

To judge from epistemological and cultural studies, it seems both unreasonable and undesirable to expect one worldview, one research program, to achieve dominance.

Yet on the other hand it also appears that there are some values with which the human community is going to have to come to grips if we wish to avoid our own undoing in any of several possible routes of self-destruction.

It must be given its best voice.

to let that voice be heard  in ways it can be understood and received.