Conceptual Design, Sin and the Affordances of Doctrine

Systematic Theology harnesses the best modern reason has to offer for a coherent and rational presentation of Christian faith. Constructive Theologies point to the contextual nature of all theology, and criticize systematicity’s unexamined bias and complicity in structural injustice and oppression. Moving beyond epistemic incommensurability and mutual imputations, this article presents one Systematic Theologian’s attempt to understand such criticism as pointing to the insurmountable implication of theology in epistemological sin. Drawing on the architectural metaphor in construction and system‐building, it proposes a new understanding of theological work as conceptual design, responsibly ordering and structuring given materials for a purpose. It thus has to account for the actual use, material effects and fit with environmental requirements of its doctrinal design. Aspiring to a more realistic adaequatio ad rem thus necessitates an expansion of theology’s critical standards to encompass not only cognitive and logical criteria, but also the practical effects and uses of doctrine in an ethic of affordances. Finally, ‘queer use’ effectively expresses how both the lives of real human beings and the reality of God will never fit into conceptual logics nor be exhausted by whatever current use we attribute to them.