Strangers and Pilgrims

In this current critical junction, in the face of the disintegration of Age of Enlightenment epistemology and metaphysics and the transition from "Modernity" to "Postmodernity," Strangers and Pilgrims presents a fresh theology of spirit that stands in tension between the heritage of the Christian tradition and the call to responsible action toward unification in a world that is languishing under the ideology of separation. This book proposes a non-epistemic faith that is oriented toward the biblical motif of journey and that at the same time advances into the transcendence of resurrection while acknowledging the limitations of flesh and blood existence and the "profound un-knowing at the heart of all experience." Neither universals nor particulars provide a metaphysical explanation of experience. Consequently no single system of truth or belief can qualify for an adequate exposition of the Christian faith in the increasing pluralism that is emerging in the world today.

The book identifies six aporiai, which characterize the journey of non-epistemic faith that seeks understanding. These are not simplistic dualisms but "no-way-through" (aporiai) binaries linked in a rich, indissoluble tension: spirit and world, logic and praxis, figurative and literal language, revealing and concealing truth, cosmological and anthropological time, the self and the other; and they are analyzed separately in individual chapters in dialogue with the foremost theologians and philosophers of this century and some of the past.

"Rather than theology commencing with God, the Christ, or the Scriptures, it must start today with human experience and the spiritual character of that experience to understand the constitutive aporiai or paradoxes shaping experience before it can turn to the task of inquiring after an understanding of God, Christ, and the Scriptures."

The book offers both a hermeneutics of retrieval and a hermeneutics of suspicion in order to recover "the profoundly spiritual nature of experience rooted in history". Indispensable to this spiritual odyssey is a healthy ongoing projection of possibility that is intimately related to the reality of individual life in community in which selfhood unfolds and develops its potentiality through interaction with the "other" who is encountered in the daily experience of "being-in-the-world".