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AMBIGUITY

Ambiguity is a general term that expresses the irreducible pluralism and uneven change in the world, especially as these affect theology. Experience in the modern world can be one of bewildering complexity and a baffling encounter with multiple values and points of view. This aspect of experience produces diverse interpretations that resist human simplification. The experience of change often has unforeseen effects: having to choose among imperfect courses, having to accept the consequences of decision, experiencing competing interests, and facing explanations that yield different interpretations.

Absolute ethical norms and unambiguous truth claims are elusive. For example, the concepts of “good” and “bad” are relative terms because the same thing, event, or person may be simultaneously good for some and bad for others, or good in some respects and bad in others to the same persons at the same time, or may change in character as good or evil over time. Apparently, unambiguous truths are also relative over time. Change, diversity, and polyvalence characterize experience, although experience also includes times of stability, continuity, and consensus. Such an ambiguous world is capable of many value systems and multiple interpretations at any one time or through time.

Order is necessary in the world, but it is achieved temporarily, and it is never discovered as the world’s underlying characteristic, because change overturns all attempts at finality of order. This world is not chaotic in the sense of lacking all order, but it is continually changing because it is “orderable” rather than ordered, capable of being shaped and reshaped by whatever or whoever can make a difference. Thus, cyclones may reorder part of the world physically, or military dictators may reorder it socially. Even then, further change is always a possibility.

The ambiguity that is true of every feature of experience is also true for religion in general and Christianity in particular. Every religion has had varieties of interpretations of its fundamental beliefs, texts, and practices. Christian theology throughout history has used a variety of philosophical systems in order to interpret the biblical revelation in changing cultural circumstances. Change and diversity in Christian theology can be seen in the earliest texts, for example in the different portrayals of Jesus in the Four Gospels. Yet, theologians have been resistant to acknowledge the existence of ambiguity. In the first account of creation in Genesis, God is described as bringing about order and calling that order “good.” Order has therefore been closely identified with God, and change and diversity have been interpreted as disorder, which is consequently understood as destructive and impious. Moreover, the platonic philosophy that influenced early Christian theology supported the notion of one unchanging truth. Therefore, unwelcome changes in belief were labeled heresy.

Theologians not only resisted ambiguity caused by change, they also denied diversity. Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century propounded the Vincentian canon, which became an orthodox maxim for the Catholic faith: The church proclaimed what has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone. It is difficult today to see what content that canon could hold when one observes the multiple understandings of God and Jesus Christ through the centuries. Another unambiguous emphasis, moreover, remains embedded in some theology: God has given one true order to the world, however much the world has been disrupted by sin. This oversimplified understanding is still visible, for instance, in theological accounts of biological evolution. When evolution was finally accepted by many churches, after widespread attempts at rejection, it was interpreted as God’s manner of creating in an orderly way over a long period of time. Theology has scarcely acknowledged the existence of evolutionary dead ends or the impact of climactic change, both of which challenge the notion of an orderly creative process.

One way to give theological value to ambiguity is to believe that what God freely gave (and continues to give) creation is the possibility to act freely rather than a world already ordered. Whatever results from our actions is ultimately a response to the divine gift, although at the same time it is a finite and contingent becoming. Thus through evolution and history the possibilities giving rise to the continuing orderability of the world have been actualized, changed, and refashioned in multiple ways, producing the ambiguity described above.

In terms of chaos theory, God-given possibility gives an instability to any status quo such that new orderings are possible. But if God’s only action were granting the free use of possibility, there would be nothing to create belief in divine love. To include divine love one must affirm divine creation in freedom and God’s loving companionship through the ambiguity of the world. If God had created order, there would be nothing more relational to do than to monitor its working; but if God has given possibility, then God is involved in all the processes of actualization—encouraging, provoking, confronting, comforting. If God’s action is characterized by freedom and love (and the same may be said of Jesus Christ), then the freedom given to reflective humanity carries with it the responsibility of using that freedom with love, even within and among the ambiguities of the world.

Ambiguity is a concept of the first importance. Nothing escapes the problems and possibilities of a diverse and changing world. Therefore, theologians who take the concept seriously find that it implies fundamental changes to the content of theology and to the claims made for theology. Everything has to be rethought to incorporate the changed perception of how the world is.

RUTH PAGE

Bibliography

Ruth Page, Ambiguity and the Presence of God.

I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order Out of Chaos.

Stewart R. Sutherland, Faith and Ambiguity.

David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity.

Cross-Reference: Being/Becoming, Diversity, Experience–Religious, Language–Religious, Postmodernism, Process Theology, Truth.

ANALOGY (See LANGUAGE–RELIGIOUS.)