lifeasmission

It’s baseball season. I am from Northeast Ohio, so I am an Indians fan at heart, but to be quite honest I don’t follow baseball all that much. However, Tony Jones offered a good post with regard to a paper he delivered at Wheaton College, in which he likened Christian orthodoxy to an umpire calling a baseball game. His simple point is that while there is something of a strike zone which is meant to guide umpires as they make calls, really, each pitch, for all intents and purposes, becomes a strike or a ball when the umpire calls it as such. This has been the role of the people of God down through the ages - living in such a way so as to illustrate how God wants the game of life to be called.

Like Tony, I see problems with foundationalism as an epistemological system (sorry for the big words). Basically, it means that there has to be some universally agreed upon truth claim upon which all others can be built. Instead, I think we do the best we can with what we got, and for the Christian, we finally (and firstly for that matter) place our faith in God as a relational being as opposed to some propositional claim on truth.

So, there exists this dialectical tension between believers, denominations, Scripture, history & tradition, culture & context, and so on. The real matter, then, is not an emphasis on what constitutes a strike and what constitutes a ball (doctrine), important as that is as a guide, but rather an emphasis on what it means to be the people of God (formation), so we are better able “call the game.”