Quantum physics has made it impossible to divorce the observer from understanding what is observed. The determination of 'hard' scientific knowledge seems to contain an irreducible element of know-er participation.

A CHURCH'S group studies become a genuinely corporate learning experience, not merely one person telling everybody else what to believe (although to be sure a pastor's role does include teaching)

• E.g. "What is worship?" can focus and learn from personal understandings/definitions of worship, struggles, 'innovations' and so on
• Members truly learn from one another i.e. truth in its most personal/helpful sense is 'built-up' via sharing, praying, and intra-communal learning
• Heightened expectancy of new learning and fresh ideas

THEOLOGIANS can think more about :

• the contextual and communitarian nature of truth, how we must avoid abstracting doctrines from real life, real people, real conflicts, real culture i.e. doctrine is disciplined and grounded in community
• how knowledge/doctrine is shaped in dialogue (with other minds, with nature, with whole societies) and how it may be impossible to entirely escape the give-and-take necessary for understanding (other cultures, other religions, other doctrines). This suggests that true understand does not happen in the absence of genuine dialogue
• how different cultures/thinkers assign different 'weights' to different concepts, arguments and data
• how much of 'truth' may be more a function of a time- and culture-bound perspectives than we think - once again, this is NOT to deny we can speak of a reality which transcends space-time, but it does force us to reconsider precisely HOW this Absolute Reality a) can actually be known b) wishes to be known

As INDIVIDUALS, this motif reminds us that:

• We need each other to be co-producers and co-users of knowledge
• We actively tie knowledge to community and temper our tendency to go ivory tower-ish.
• We avoid one-size-fits-all theories/paradigms which are often 'imported' (usually without great qualification) from one context to another