Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography)

by Christian B. Scharen

is here that we require, even for ultimate theological purposes, the services of the focused perspectives of the methodologically naturalist disciplines. While our prior starting point might appropriately be with explicitly theological convictions concerning, for example, all things having their origin, being, and end in the trinitarian life of God (or concerning the church being the Spirit-indwelt people of God), and while we might appropriately intend to end up asking how the given area of finite, created reality in question — whether the laws of physics or an aspect of the life of the church — is to be read in explicitly theological perspective, our actual understanding of these finite created realities in all their complex particularity requires other frames of analysis than the explicitly theological alone.