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presuppositions. According to them, there are no neutral starting points, definitions, or
methodologies from which we may begin to do theology (16). Rather, "experiences are always
filtered by an interpretative framework" (49). This interpretative grid is primarily a linguistic
one, for as they claim, language "provides the conceptual tools through which we construct the
world we inhabit" (53). The main task of theology therefore becomes the exploration of "the
world-constructing, knowledge-forming, identity-forming `language' of the Christian
community" (53).
It is one thing to claim that theology is influenced and shaped by our social context and
language usage; it is quite another, however, to assert that there is no way outside of language to
an objective realm. Yet, Grenz and Franke come quite close to such a position. For instance,
they explain forcefully that
It is simply not possible to step back from the influence of tradition in the act of interpretation or
in the ascription of meaning. Interpretive communities that deny the reality of this situation and
seek an interpretation unencumbered by the "distorting" influence of fallible "human" traditions
are in fact enslaved by interpretive patterns that are allowed to function uncritically precisely
because they are unacknowledged. (113)
While they are careful to qualify these comments with terms such as the "distorting influence" of
traditions, they state their views more clearly elsewhere. For example, after surveying and
appropriating insights from sociology into their study of the church as community, they quickly
warn that these insights must not be allowed to "deteriorate into a new foundationalism" (226).
Why might this be a problem? Their terse reply is instructive:
Such degeneration occurs when speech about the church as community begins with some generic
reality called "community," which can supposedly be discovered through objective observation of
the world, and then proceeds to fit the church into this purportedly universal phenomenon as if
the community of Christ were a particular exemplar of some more general reality. (226-7,
emphases mine)
So, by implication, if not directly, they impugn the possibility of our having objective
observations and knowing universally valid, linguistically independent realities.