I gave a presentation at the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Conference in Minneapolis October 30, 2010... here are some of summary points from my ppt.
“conceiving the same on the basis of the different” makes identity secondary to and derivative from difference. [Deleuze, 1968]
–I am different from you, and that is my identity
“The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence;” [Foucault, 1977]
–Will you allow me to be different, period?
“a theology of difference would stem from the diversity intrinsic in God’s creativity and would analyze the ways in which humanity has distorted God’s abundance of difference… of which the urge to suppress difference is one expression.” [Titus Presler, IBMR, 2010]
The encounter with Other challenges us to see the unexplainable beyond ourselves, and calls into question everything we have previously understood or constructed. [Levinas]
- If mission is intrinsic to Christian identity – that is, to be a Jesus-follower is to follow Jesus into the encounter with difference – then ‘engaging the other’ who is different is, in fact, intrinsic to Christian faithfulness.
- Christian mission, then, is not a marketing campaign to persuade people of other faiths, or non-faiths, to accept my version of reality [we are called to be a ‘witness,’ to state our experience with Jesus], but a community of practice which has come to believe a particular set of convictions about reality and would like the freedom to offer those convictions for consideration by persons who hold other sets of convictions, while at the same time allowing them to be different, period.
- And it is in this engagement with difference that I am adjusted and shaped toward the image of God, because I come to recognize the different other as also shaped in the image of God, period.
We need to be released from our “present dependence upon one set of cultural forms so that we can provide the place wherein we are able to do theology in the only way that it can be done properly – by learning with increasing capacity to confess the one Lord Jesus Christ as alone having absolute authority and therefore recognize the relativity of all the cultural forms within which we try to say who he is. [Newbigin, 1995]
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