On Theology

On Theology

I call myself a theologian. Most of my posts on this blog are theological. I’m also professionally trained in law and history, and some of the posts here reflect those parts of my life too; but for at least the last twenty years or so I’ve been some sort of theologian. I’ve even written theological books. Yet only recently have I started to think seriously about what theology actually is and what it must be if it is to mean anything significant to human beings like me. The other day I even thought about writing a systematic theology, not that anyone writes systematic theology anymore. So just what is theology? Why do we write it? How can we be so bold (or so arrogant) as to attempt to write it? I want to examine those questions here.

The Greek roots of the word theology mean word (logos) and God (theos). The word theology then means a word or words about God. As soon as I write that statement the question immediately arises: How dare you! How dare a mere mortal like you arrogate to yourself the ability to say anything at all about the infinite, transcendent, totally unlimited, totally other reality that we call God? God infinitely transcends us. God infinitely transcends our human minds and our human language, yet our human minds and our human language are all we have to use when speaking about God. So how dare we, how can we even attempt to say anything about God at all? Yet some of us do write theology. Some of us do attempt to understand at least something about God and to put that understanding, partial and fallible as it must be, into our human words. How can we do that?

We can do it because we must do it. If we could avoid doing it we would. After all, when we stop to think about it the task or creating theology becomes overwhelming. It seems impossible. We would avoid doing if we could, but we can’t. We can’t because as utterly transcendent, as totaliter aliter as God is, we mere mortals experience the reality of God. We long for greater connection with God. We could keep that experience and that longing to ourselves. We could hold them within and say nothing about them. Yet some of us find them to be so foundational for who we are that we are compelled to share them with other humans. We think that perhaps if we can express them in words or other forms of expression other humans may find what we say meaningful to them and helpful in their own striving to understand what it is to be human and how we humans relate to the ultimate reality that we call God. So we do what we know to be impossible. We attempt to say something  in our human words about what which our human words cannot possibly depict, cannot possibly confine, cannot ultimately define. We do it because we cannot not do it.

Doing it is fraught with danger. We might get it wrong. Indeed we cannot not get it wrong at least in part, for our capabilities are incommensurate with the task we are undertaking. We do it anyway because we must, and as we do it we must be honest about what we’re doing. We cannot claim to have said the complete and final truth about God. If we do we have arrogated to ourselves that which is not possible for us to do. We have claimed to do more than we possibly can do. We will have presented as certain something about which we cannot be certain.

We can say something meaningful nonetheless. We will have said something meaningful as long as what we say remains grounded in two things, namely, what it is to be human and our lived experience of God. To be human is to be limited, to be finite, to be constrained by the bounds of time and place. To be human is to unavoidably fallible. Yet to be human is also to yearn for and to seek to find connection with something greater than ourselves. To break free from those bounds of time and space. Why else would people want to go to Mars other than to break free of the limits of earthly life, to find and experience something totally different from the life we know on earth. Yet even life on Mars would not be totally different, for wherever we go, there we are. We cannot escape being human. We cannot escape all of the limitation that being human necessarily entails. That’s why even on Mars we would long for God. When three men first orbited the moon one Christmas Eve one of them read chapter one of Genesis back to earth. Having escaped the bounds of earth these men experienced and longed for connection with a reality even greater than the one they were living, for they were living that reality as human beings. We humans always long for and seek more than we have, more than we are. Theology must always be grounded in, express, and seek to convey that human longing for connection with the transcendent.

Moreover, even though God is totaliter aliter, totally other, and even though God is utterly transcendent of our creaturely existence, we humans nonetheless experience God in our earthly, limited lives. I have experienced the reality of God in my life. I hope that you have too. Yet whether we have experienced God personally or not we know, or at least we can know, that an experience of God is a genuine human possibility. At least some humans have experienced the reality of a transcendent, spiritual dimension of existence for as long as we have records or other evidence of human experience. That’s why every human culture we know of has had a religion, a system of symbols and myths that expresses an experience of the unlimited in limited human words. We humans experience God in many different ways, but some experience of God is part of what it is to be human. Theology must be grounded in that experience, must strive to explain and deepen that experience, and must never contradict it.

Theology then is an unavoidable attempt to do the impossible. We know both that we cannot do it perfectly and that we must do it nonetheless. When we experience  the reality of God we have to share that experience. We have to invite others into our experience and seek to open them to their own experiences of God. As long as theology does that with full awareness of its unavoidable limitations it is a legitimate and necessary human activity that can be a great benefit to us all.