PLGRM

I want to start by making something absolutely clear:

My objection to way theology is currently done is in no way a reflection of my feeling about being utterly dependent on God.

What I am trying to do with these posts is to help us see that we can be fully modern people who think critically about wife and our place in it, as well as deeply religious people. I believe the only way to do so, both intellectually and religiously, is to take seriously our experiences of God. I mean really take them seriously.

I don’t want us parroting words that were taught to us growing up. I want us to be critical of our faith and theology, because I believe when we do that we will find we are much less prone to make claims about God that lead us into idolatry.

Theology has to start with the feeling that we’ve encountered something extraordinary and beyond all our comprehension.

Do you remember when you first felt like that? Have you ever felt like that? I remember it for myself. I think I was in college, but the the experience that most readily comes to mind happened to me as an adult.

I was sitting in my backyard on a summer evening, and the sun was going down and it was one of those sunsets where the sky simply lit up. I was watching it, and I started thinking about how utterly amazing it all was. I noticed the chimney on my house and thought it was quite amazing that humans had figured out how to make something like that. And then my mind kept wandering from thing to thing, just reveling in the reality of it all. After a while, it hit me: all of this is extraordinary, utterly extraordinary, and there is no real good reason we should get to be part of it! The fact that no one really seems to know how we got here in the first place, just deepens the exhilaration that I felt.

I want you to notice that I’ve been talking about feelings a lot. “Feelings” as in “a sense of something.” It’s the same thing as “having feelings for my wife” sure I can give you a list of her qualities. I can tell you what she’s good at, but nothing I would tell you would come close to explaining what it is like to be in her orbit. To say she’s one of the funniest people I know does not help in explaining why I “have feelings for her.” I’ve known her almost 30 years and I couldn’t come close to telling you why I feel for her like I do. I just do.

It’s the same with God. How do I describe the feelings I have for and about God? I’m not sure I totally can. And neither can you, if you are honest. And if we find that task so difficult, how do we presume to be able to claim that God is this or that, once this, or that, loves this or that? But this is what we’ve tried to make our theology do, and they simply can’t live up to that task.

I believe the best we can hope for is to refine the ways we talk about what we’ve experienced of God and our feelings about God.

Beginning with with feelings is the best place to start with our theology. That’s because it’s the best place to start with Art.

In 1953, the philosopher Susanne Langer wrote a book titled Feeling and Form in which she gives what I consider the best definition of Art we have:

Art is the creations of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Art begins with experience – our sense of things – and in theology, we are dealing with our feelings about God, specifically our sense that we are utterly dependent on God.

“Utter dependance” is a key idea, and one that come from an 18th Century theologian, named Friedrich Schleiermacher. He famously defined spirituality as the “feeling of utter dependence on God.” We can do nothing apart from God. God gave and sustains our life.

This, then, gives us our definition of Theology:

Theology is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling about God.

Now there’s certainly more to unpack here. We’ve talked about symbolism already (words are symbols that stand in for something else), but what does “creation of forms” mean? I’ll get to that next week, but, for now, I encourage you to think about the ways you’ve experienced God over the years.

Have you had a moment like I had in my backyard? Was it more subtle? More dramatic? Have other theological words you’ve heard over the years connected with you and made sense given what you’ve experienced of God?

Till next time…