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The Strategy
"In Christ all things hold
together..."
A NEW CHRISTIAN SYNTHESIS
Georges Rouault
Head of Christ c. 1939
http://www.hermitage.ru/html_En/index.htm
At this moment, a paradigm shift is taking place not only in
the sciences but in the culture at large.
These movements, a sort of conceptual
plate tectonics, have created a topography freshly receptive to a Christian confession of
faith.
The Alethia Foundation seeks to
demonstrate an emerging synergy within this unique intellectual and religious
renaissance.
Right now, in this stage of
disequilibrium, possibilities abound. Worn-out fabric of frayed, threadbare assumptions
will not contain what we are learning of our world and our selves, and it is bursting to
shreds at this very moment with more than it can handle of modernity. Revolutions, some
noisy, some very quiet, are rattling dogmas in every field.
Rather than tinker with tatters, we take
the opportunity to return to the sources and re-weave whole cloth.
We have new wine; we need
new wineskins.
We have a banquet of new materials
spread before us. They lend themselves to a restatement of the Christian tradition that
can address cogently both the unbelief of believers and the skepticism of the secular
world. It is possible to offer Christian faith that is neither, on one side, tyrannical
and invidious; nor on the other side, ashamed of the gospel.
The Alethia Foundation is not interested
in pushing the envelope. We are interested in breaking out of it and redesigning it.
Alethia is not interested in contorting various Christian tenets into agreement with an
obsolete scientific world view.
We look to the doctrinal roots of
Christianity, especially in the scriptural theology of its early ecumenical creeds, to put
together for our time an encompassing, rational, faithful Christian vision that is radical
as the gospel.
The Alethia Foundation is
dedicated to developing a new framework,
a new "map" by
which human beings orient themselves in the worlda new "map" by which human beings orient themselves in the world.
a new "map" by which human
beings orient themselves in the worlda new
"map" by which human beings orient themselves in the world.
Through what kind of lens will we
configure the universe and ourselves in it?
- What will be normative?
- What will be taken for granted?
- What questions will be
"askable"?
- By what criteria will we accept new data?
- By what attributes will we identify
power?
- What assumptions will drive political
events?
- What will be made invisible to us and
what will become "see-able"?
To such questions, we can compose
Christian answers that satisfy our need
- to balance the integrity of each
partitioned discipline with interdisciplinary coherence;
- to balance critical independence with
spiritual connection;
- and to balance a humility appropriate to
our human limitations and fallibility with guiding, transcendent moral vision.
Exciting research flourishes all
around us, with profound and reviving implications for theology.
Competent explorations of newly
perceived relationships between Christianity and many specialized fields of study are
underway in many quarters of the academic world.
Some larger themes are beginning to
appear. Intuitions of an implied unity are frequently encountered these days. They
surface in varying degrees of credibility and sophistication.
However, the correlations remain to be
organized. A vision of the whole begs to be expressed,
with scholarly care and rigor, and a feel for the fluid suppleness of a spiritually
connected epistemology with its hallmarks of receptivity and relationality.
Relying on the treasury of Christian
tradition, and drawing from the pool of new information and discoveries, an updated model
of reality can begin to be articulated.
It is a model which liberates the mind
for pursuit of knowledge; which resolves dualities of body and spirit; which provides for
mutuality and community to complete –rather than to compromise– individual
independence; and which breaks barriers of exclusion and domination.
What is more, as a wider vision is
discerned, it needs to be communicated in a vivid and accessible way.
The Alethia Foundation seeks to be an
agent of the panoramic view.
We seek to illuminate a new metaphysical
model which can anchor Christian ventures for a new millennium.
Part of the task will be to work out the
philosophic and theoretical anatomy of a new Christian metaphysic.
The other part is will be to give mythopoeic
expression to it, so that it is accessible to the popular imagination.
Are you
asking...
" Is this a quest for some kind of
theological Grand Unified Theory ? "
Yes.
The Alethia Foundation is interested in a theological unified field theory –or,
still borrowing from the language of physics, but more aptly-- a "Theory of
Everything." It is appropriated here (not entirely without a sense of humor) to mean
a Christian theological theory of everything. It’s a Grail Quest for our own day.
Grand schemes, theories of everything,
are a natural, though not always popular or useful, theological activity. But some
historical conditions are riper for it than others. Ours is one of those ripening times.
Metaphysical models have fallen on hard times, with an unappetizing reputation for
being overly-ambitious, rigid, hard-core deductive, closed systems...
and... when all is said and done, superfluous.
But the fact is, But the fact is, But the fact is, human beings
operate out of some sort of coalesced configuration of assumptions which, with or without
conscious analysis, shapes our thought and perception.
Some collection of ideas gels into
the mythos which houses our human awareness.
The Alethia Foundation seeks to make
that scheme of things a conscious construct which gathers the best knowledge of our time
under the sovereignty of Christ, in the light of the Trinity.
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