Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 12
intrinsic interrelatedness of all things (thesis 1). Things exist in a web of relationships, horizontally with
one another, and vertically in relationship with and dependence upon God. God himself, in this view, is
intrinsically related to creation, especially as revealed in the incarnational and pentecostal narratives.
Thus, no thing or reality exists in-, of- or for-itself, as such can only be non-being. Rather, the clue to
reality`s form and structure is to be intuited from the theological vision of God as triune relationality.
The ancient doctrine of perichoresis which envisions the divine life as constituted by three relationships
enables our own transition from an Aristotelian metaphysics of substance toward a trinitarian (and,
post/modern) metaphysics of relationality.
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Things, persons, realities, etc., are therefore what they are
precisely through their relational configurations.
Second, a neo-pragmatist theology would also emphasize the ontological and epistemological
holism which emerges from Rorty`s non-dualism (thesis 2). Ontologically, the unity of the world is a
corollary of its createdness by God. Epistemologically, the beautiful, the true, and the good cannot be
sundered for theological reasons. To be related to God therefore is to participate in the divine life; to
know God personally in and through Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life; and to love God
with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. As such, neo-pragmatic
theology would be just as impatient as Rorty regarding the abstract, technical and finally useless jargon
bequeathed both by the Philosophic and classical theological traditions, especially as mediated through
the dualistic presuppositions of the modern period.
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Alternatively, the Kierkegaardian and Polanyian
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The emergence of relationality as axiomatic in contemporary theology is widespread. Representative
studies include Harold H. Oliver, A Relational Metaphysic (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, 1981); Henry Jansen, Relationality and the Concept of God, Currents of Encounter 10 (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, and Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995); James E. Loder and W. Jim Neidhardt, The Knight's Move: The
Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1992); Ted Peters,
God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993);
Stanley J. Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Louisville:
WJKP, 2001); and Bryan P. Stone and Thomas J. Oord, eds., Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love: Process and
Wesleyan Theologies in Dialogue (Nashville: Kingswood Press, 2001). This last volume is a signal of theological
convergences emanating from the turn to relationality.
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Thus it is that Rorty sees his own program of deconstruction as ultimately curative and healing, as tearing
down roadblocks previously set up so as to enable our recovery from the wounds of dualism inflicted by the Platonist
and modernist traditions such as epistemological skepticism, transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, logical
constructionism, and phenomenology (see Truth and Progress, 109 and 154). On this point, then, Roger Lundin`s