From proclamation to conversation: Ethnographic disruptions to theological normativity

Abstract

In recent years, theologians have increasingly used ethnographic research methods to strengthen the connections between their theological constructions and the social practices they seek to impact. The migration of these methods into the theological context has raised important questions about theological normativity. This essay draws on the author’s fieldwork in a Southern Baptist congregation in Nashville Tennessee to argue that the ethnographic intervention into traditional methods for producing theological knowledge shifts the mode of speech in which normative theological claims can be made from that of proclamation to an anti-hierarchical practice of conversation. The author proposes that ethnographic theologians can use the ethnographic research question to shape the normative weight of sources in the field and what types of normative claims can be made out of that fieldwork in the theological text. She argues that while such a shift in the understanding of theological normativity and, by extension, of theology itself has the potential to threaten methods seeking to preserve the authority of Christian speech in an increasingly post-Christendom context, that this more humble, collaborative approach is better suited to the interfaith, intercultural contexts of contemporary life, all of which face the reality of the contingency of all truth claims, including religious truth claims. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on radical theologies.