Ivan's not so Bad

I just checked in on the flight status for our plane out of here, and Northwest Airlines hasn't indicated any delay... yet. Mary's principal issued an order last night that everyone was to go home instead of staying late to work, but the superintendent of the too-large Gwinnett County School System has not yet, as of this writing, canceled school in light of the hurricane. The school systems to the North, South, East, and West of the hubristic system have closed, but not Gwinnett, by gum.

My post is coming so early this morning because I set my hit-and-miss little battery-operated alarm clock just in case the power went out in the middle of the night and shut down my more dependable, plug-in clock radio. Unlike the days in which the alarm just refuses to turn on, this morning it decided to go off half an hour early. So it goes.

Another good paragraph from Tracy on theology's task:

Yet the basic grammar of Christian systematics endures. That grammar is constituted by the classic symbols and doctrines which every theology worthy of the history of the classic self-understandings of Christianity recognize as the paradigmatic candidates for Christian response and recognition--God, Christ, grace; creation-redemption-eschatology; church-world; nature-grace, grace-sin; revelation; faith, hope, love; word-sacrament; cross-resurrection-incarnation. All these symbols, like Everest, are simply there. They serve, minimally, as reminders that certain responses, certain moments of recognition, certain internal self-correctives, certain directions of thought and feeling have achieved paradigmatic, classic status. They cannot be ignored. In every cultural situation, an adequate Christian response demands that attention must be paid to the entire symbol system: through both critique and suspicion, retrieval and reinterpretation in and for the situation, yet controlled by some present experience of the event. (Tracy 373)

Wow. If theology is going to be more than a "period piece," this is the standard to which it must rise. And here's a passage about whether theology can ever be adequate to its task:

All the clasic systematic theologies from Paul and John to our own day are de jure inadequate, de facto relatively adequate accounts of the fuller range fo the entire symbol system from the dominating perspective of a singular stance of personal response. (Tracy 407)

This is an incredibly helpful evaluative tool, as is the whole of Tracy's book. It doesn't claim too much for the practice of theology, yet it does not default to ineffability as the only important theological category. Instead, the relativeness of any theology's adequacy is at the forefront; no systematic theology is going to "get it right" in an unqualified way, but given that YHWH is a God who reveals God's self, a theology can be adequate relative to other attempts to make YHWH's self-revelation intelligible. I like that.

I've only got about a dozen pages left before this book is done, and I'm not planning to haul the heavy booger onto the airplane today. On the plane I'm taking my copy of the Jonathan Edwards Reader, and assuming that Mary can muster the discipline to grade at the airports, I'm going to try to get some more of the greatest American theologian read. I'm looking forward to seeing my cousin Jill get married, but I'm not looking forward to the airport experience, getting on a plane with Mary in the middle of a hurricane, or any of the details surrounding the trip. So it goes.