Carter Heyward - The Task of Theology

The Task of Theology

A consequence of this dynamic view of God and Christ is that truth is evolving, not static. A hint of this can be seen in Heyward's approval of Dorothee Soelle’s remark that God's Spirit works through ‘revolutionary patience'. This leaves a certain openness to the church's work of proclaiming the truth of Christ: there is an insistence that 'we who currently constitute the Christian church are the temporary authors and guardians of "Christian truth". It is ours to determine and ours to tend'. So the theologian's task involves 'a capacity to discern God's presence here and now and to reflect on what this means', and is part of a communal effort and struggle to enable the flourishing of love and justice in a world where the potential for relationality is broken, often violently. The project of 'godding', or relationality, then, is an alternative to an authoritarian understanding of social/relational power, both inside and outside the church. Mutual relationship entails a willingness to participate in healing a broken world, and so is not (Lucy Tatman notes) a private or individualistic task.

Heyward sees her own task within this broader programme as working particularly for the expansion of the church to include people who have historically been left out. In short, the theologian's task is to help bring a greater measure of redemption to the world. Though that task is always concrete, the precise shape it takes depends on the exact ‘shape of the evil from which people need to be redeemed'. As a theological educator, Heyward's passion was to enable students to 'do theology at its roots' - connecting their everyday lives with those of others, past and present, like and unlike them, in order to bring about transformed lives capable of 'creating, liberating and blessing the world'.