Waving or Drowning?

theology

Again, I've combined some comments from Dan Allender and Brian McLaren (from the gathering).

What is theology?

A systematic outline of truth, in the form of propositions extracted from the Biblical text through technique to create a "Biblical world view",

or,

An ongoing creative enterprise of making models of the universe based on beliefs about God?

One represents a system of belief, the other a way of life.

Check this out from C.S. Lewis:

Footnote to All Prayers

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

+ Our theologies, like our prayers, are words at best. God is not them. The danger is they can become idols. "Concepts create idols, only wonder understands anything." (Gregory of Nyssa)

+ There are no answers. "He does not answer because He is the answer." (C.S. Lewis). We have no answers because we have the presence.

+ We are not here to preserve our own systems or to be at our own community's unique service. Every system is wrong. They are finite efforts to sanitize and domesticate God.

+ It's not that I have anything to offer anyone, but that everyone has the opportunity to offer Christ to me. Am I willing to learn from everyone?

What an incredible conversation! You could hear the sound of minds stretching in the room!

Posted by mike at May 7, 2003 06:11 PM