I've been reading another book with bearings on my recent thoughts on contextual theology. The book is The Silent Language by Edward Hall - it's a fascinating discussion of the nature of culture from the perspective of an anthropologist. This is actually something of a complicated subject to approach; before picking up the book, I thought I had a good grasp of what culture is. As it turns out, I've been continually surprised by how much I take my own context for granted and how inextricably I am bound to it.

One of the questions that it's raised for me is the purpose of theology, and in particular, the purpose of a contextual, local theology. Hall argues that, on some level, all culture is a matter of communication. Culture represents the conscious and unconscious systems that represent the frameworks in which we approach and describe experience. This includes elements such as language but also includes things like understandings of time and space, to name a few. In other words, culture represents all of the shared mechanisms that people in a particular context use to extract meaning from experience.

This question - meaning - gets to the heart of theology. Theology, after all, concerns itself with questions of ultimate meaning. After all, when we talk about matters of faith, we aren't talking about experiences per se, but rather about their meanings. Theology is, in some sense, the attempt to make sense of experience in light of faith. I think this definition would be somewhat contentious in some circles; many want to remove experience from the equation entirely. But even if we hold to the belief that theology is an attempt to understand revelation, isn't the act of revelation in and of itself an experience? At the very least, we have to make sense of what we have received and attempt to put it into practice.

Hall's point through much of the book is that culture - context - frames the way in which we approach this question of meaning in such a way as to define the possible meanings that we extract from those experiences. Put another way, I can approach a given experience from a variety of angles, but those angles are defined by my context and, ultimately, do not exhaust all possible meanings.

Wow, that's horribly abstract. Here is the point - as a male, as an American, as a thirty-one year old, as a resident of suburban Philadelphia, as an employee of a large financial firm, as a theology student, etc - I can think about theology in a number of ways. But there are a number of ways that are not available to me, simply because my context doesn't make them available.

I think I need an example for this.

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