PLGRM

I remember the first conversations I had with my wife when we were college students. They were halting and awkward, the inevitable result of two people trying to learn of the other without sounding stupid.

It was when we both realized we came from near the Kansas City area that things started to pick up. We started making connections. We started making jokes about common experiences. We discovered we had both had similar thoughts about a particular news anchor and the way she said her name.

Learning those things about each others settled us down and made us feel seen and less alone. We may have been new kids at college, but we were two new kids from Kansas City. That meant something.

These kinds of connections are what we seek as humans, what we crave. We want to know we are not alone. We want to know we are not crazy. We want to know that other people see the world the way we do, have feelings about the world the way we do. The simple fact that someone from near where I grew up was going through the same experience I was brought me comfort. Obviously, there were things about her life that were wildly different from mine, but the critical experiences we did share made it possible for us to rely on each other as we entered this new and different phase of life.

When we have an experience of God, our first impulse is to see if anyone else has had any kind of experience like it. When we get to the place where we experience our deep and profound reliance on who- or whatever made the universe – “utter dependance on God” – we want to see if anyone else has felt that, too.

Turns out almost all of us have, and we use a wide variety of words to describe that experience.

This is where “God Talk” – theology – becomes talk. We have to talk to other people about what we’ve experienced, and we have to hear others talk about their experience. In these moments, the utter dependence we feel is no longer private. It is now public in the form of words. We have taken our feelings and turned them into something. We have “created form.,” and these forms help us understand what we’ve all gone through. They allow us to attract “conversation partners,” as it were.

I believe theology must always be in the business of creating forms.

Probably my deepest critique with how theology is typically done comes from our belief that “proper” theology is a set of ideas we all have to memorize. And then there is a group of people who judge the rest of us on whether or not, we have memorized those ideas correctly. But with this understanding, theology becomes all about “the right answers.” I can’t tell you the number of times I have been asked “what do Christians believe?”

Not only are people very concerned about getting it right, there are people very concerned that we all get it wrong.

It’s absolutely true that when we do theology, we ought to know and understand what people who lived before us thought about their experiences of God. Just like us, they were faithful people who experience God, and they did their best to describe that experience in the ways, they thought that experience impacted the way they lived, but it should not be lost on us that many of these people lived in very different times, and places than we do.

I’m a Presbyterian, and probably the most important theologian in my tradition is a man named John Calvin. John Calvin lived in the 16th century and wrote much of his theology while living in Geneva Switzerland during the second generation of the Protestant reformation. A lot of his mental energy was spent helping us understand how to be Christians if we weren’t part of the Roman Catholic institution.

Another theologian, Saint Augustine, live during the fourth century in North Africa. This was a time when a lot of our understandings of Christianity were being solidified, and Christianity was becoming a powerhouse religion after the Emperor Constantine converted. What did it mean that this little revolutionary religion was now the official religion of the Empire?

Some other theologians who have had a large impact on the world were Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi. They were 12th-century mystics in Italy, and they were struggling to make the Christian faith relevant as the European population exploded and urbanization was starting to become a thing.

All of these people were 100% good and faithful, and they have much to teach us about the ways God can be encountered. But restricting theology to what a man in the 11th century said robs it of any potency it has for us today.

I’m writing this blog post in the United States in the year of our Lord 2023. Arguments over the two natures of Christ (while interesting and certainly fundamental) don’t seem as important to me is what it means to be God’s people after a global pandemic. If someone says “What does a post Covid church look like?” and the answer is “Jesus is fully human and fully God” – what does that even mean?

Theology requires that we’re always making up new words – always creating new forms – not simply regurgitating old ones.

Absolutely, the words that people used to use will inform us as we use new words now. But our new theology must be created to address issues and understandings of today. We have to understand that that’s what our ancestors and the faith were trying to do. They were trying to describe in their time and place what it meant to be utterly dependent on God.

I like to say that the people who have done theology before us are the Giants upon his shoulders we stand. Many of us are afraid of making those giants angry, of disrespecting them. But I think we waste our lives if we only use the words the Giants used. They were describing what they felt, what they experienced. They were describing the far-off horizon as they could see it in their day. But we are on their shoulders, and we can see farther.

Isn’t it an insult to them to not describe the horizon we see – the horizon that is even further away – even if it means we have to use new and different words?

I think it is.