CHAPTER 1

WALTZING THE TWO-STEP

~ A Hopeful Theological Method ~

Learning how to dance and learning how to "do" Christian faith have a great dealin common. The theological potential in this connection occurred to me someyears ago, when I was introduced to country-and-western dancing. Before then, Ihad not paid much attention to country music, but the dancing looked like a lotof fun. With some encouragement from friends, I decided to take lessons.

The instructor tried to reassure us by saying how simple this kind of dancing isto learn. We began with the two-step. "All you need to know," the instructorsaid, "is two sets of steps. The first is slow, the second quick: slow ...slow, quick-quick, slow ... slow, quick-quick." After a brief demonstration(which really did make it look easy), he reminded us that two-stepping is onlyone kind of country-and-western dance. So we also learned steps for thetraditional waltz, which requires a different kind of count: one, two, three andone, two, three, and so on. The underlying rhythm of a given piece of musicdetermines which of these steps to follow.

I had much more trouble with the two-step than I did with the waltz. The conceptof two-stepping seemed easy; actually performing the steps was hard. Afterseveral instructional sessions over a number of weeks, I still wasn'tcomfortable with matching the two-step count to the rhythm of the music. Iremained hopeful and tried my best, but I grew increasingly frustrated with mystumbling feet. I started to avoid two-stepping music and waited for waltzes.

Then one day, after complaining about my apparent lack of two-stepping ability,a friend made a deceptively simple suggestion. "Just use the waltz count for thetwo-step," he said. This confused me at first—how can you count to three for atwo-step? Then I tried it, with the slight modification he recommended. Ratherthan "one, two, three and," I tried "one, two, and three and, one, two, andthree and." It worked. Adding the extra "and" in the count made my feet move abit more quickly on the "ands" and a bit slower on the numbers, matchingprecisely the rhythm of the music for a two-step.

Not everyone has the same kind of trouble with the two-step as I did, and forthose who do, two-stepping to a waltz count may not work as well as it did forme. But I gained two insights from that experience. First, the rules of dancingare meant to help you dance better, not the other way around. Dancing wellserves the dance itself, not the rules. After all, the point is to learn how todance, and if you can learn to dance by fudging the rules, so much the better.Second, by learning how to two-step by using a waltz count, the world of dancingopened up for me in a new way. Before long, I was whirling around the dancefloor without bothering to count at all (or even look at my feet!). The rulesslowly faded away and only the dancing remained.

I soon carried those insights off the dance floor and into my theological work.I realized that dancing with God, just like the two-step, requires someinstruction. We need to learn the "dance steps" of the divine-human encounter.Yet these rules and procedures in theological traditions are tools to help usdance in encounters with Divine Reality, not the other way around. The point isthe encounter itself, and if the given procedures at hand prove troubling orless than helpful, it's probably time to adjust the procedures.

Rule fudging certainly seems appropriate for something like dancing; it seems abit less so for questions of theological method. Hardly anyone I know wouldinsist on making the rules for two-stepping more important than actually doingthe two-step. Yet in the history of Christian theological traditions, religiousrules and procedures have sometimes eclipsed encounters with Divine Reality,which those procedures were designed to facilitate. Consider the place of honorgiven to the Bible in theological method. What do we do when a theologicalinsight—uncovered in prayer, perhaps—casts some doubt on the usefulness of aparticular biblical passage? Or consider a particularly well-loved and cherishedliturgical tradition, a particular phrase learned in childhood, perhaps, or astylized gesture. What do we do when that tradition creates friction in how ourcommunity feels moved to worship together? In situations such as these, someChristians continue to rely on the biblical text and the liturgical tradition atthe expense of their own experience; others feel compelled to abandon thoseancient touchstones altogether. As I discovered on that country-and-westerndance floor, there is another option. We could choose to waltz the two-step.

Whenever Jesus addressed this kind of dilemma, he refused both the staticpreservation of tradition and its outright disposal. Consider his apparentviolation of Sabbath observance, to which Jesus responded with a creativeinsight we would do well to take to heart. "The sabbath was made for humankind,"he said, "not humankind for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27). Note that Jesus didn'tdisparage the Sabbath just by breaking some of its rules. Likewise, in myexperience with country-and-western dancing, I did not abandon the two-step justbecause I learned how to do it better by using a waltz count. In fact, just theopposite is true in both cases: The two-step and the Sabbath are taken moreseriously by adjusting the rules to achieve them.

Human beings are frequently tempted to follow the procedures of religioustraditions whether or not those procedures actually facilitate encounters withDivine Reality. We might do this for reasons of comfort and safety or perhapswe're simply unaware of alternatives. This approach carries the risk ofmistaking the procedures for the encounter itself, as if the point is to masterthe rules. Worrying only about the rules of religious traditions is not sodifferent from learning the two-step count without ever stepping foot on thedance floor. The result is a static, rather wooden form of religious faith thatseverely limits our ability to recognize an encounter with Divine Reality whenwe stumble into it. And we will stumble, as the many stories from Christiantraditions illustrate. Remember the conversion of the Apostle Paul, who didn'tmerely stumble but fell to the ground in an encounter with the risen Christ(Acts 9:4).

If we manage to avoid an obsession with rules and procedures, we might slip intothe opposite dynamic and be tempted to forgo any instruction for the dance atall, preferring instead to make it up as we go along. Innovation certainly hasits place, both on the dance floor and in the life of faith....