....Centered-set ecclesiology does not, however, come without its own complications.
Chief among these is what I term‘the problem of the contested center’. Put simply,
the center toward which a community orients itself has to have some
content in order to be meaningful, and community members may well agree on
the name of the center (e.g., ‘Jesus’) while disagreeing about its content. For
centered-set Christian communities, this problem is inescapable. Because such
communities claim to be oriented toward a person, and because persons are
inherently mysterious, the center of those
communities always remains in some sense surprising and unpredictable.
Moreover, because humans are finite, our knowledge (even our knowledge of Jesus)
is always finite, making incompleteness and error in our understanding inevitable.
Chief among these is what I term‘the problem of the contested center’. Put simply,
the center toward which a community orients itself has to have some
content in order to be meaningful, and community members may well agree on
the name of the center (e.g., ‘Jesus’) while disagreeing about its content. For
centered-set Christian communities, this problem is inescapable. Because such
communities claim to be oriented toward a person, and because persons are
inherently mysterious, the center of those
communities always remains in some sense surprising and unpredictable.
Moreover, because humans are finite, our knowledge (even our knowledge of Jesus)
is always finite, making incompleteness and error in our understanding inevitable.
In response to the problem of the contested center, I offer several counsels for
churches that think in the terms of
centered-set ecclesiology. First, the task of wrestling with the problem is an
ongoing process of discernment, not a simple matter of logical deduction.
Second, centered-set communities must seek to foster truthfulness as a way
of life in order to mitigate the problems that arise from self-ignorance and
self-deception in the pursuit of the common center. Third, this process of
discernment should be a community process in which a prima facie
commitment to remain in community in spite of disagreement is the rule.
Fourth and finally, the community
discernment process should return repeatedly to the foundational stories
of its faith because Scripture is the
most reliable witness we have to the character of the person who we
want to make the center of our life together.
2)Related: centered-set reductionism discussed by Jonathan Leeman here.
3)Also: Does Los Angeles have
a center?
Read this
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4)One more: centered sets with moving center
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