I’m a good theologian. I believe nearly everything I say, and can talk myself into the rest. And yet sometimes it all seems rather ridiculous. To talk about God? Shouldn’t I just be sitting here with my mouth hanging open in awe…”buh-buh-buh”?
At the Wheaton conference on the church fathers, keynote speaker Christopher Hall cited St. Gregory of Nazianzus‘ admonition that you shouldn’t do theology unless you have a pure heart and meditate often. Otherwise it becomes a competitive sport, or an arrogant attempt to penetrate all of God’s mysteries through human reasoning. Unless one simultaneously engages in perceptual and behavioral habit-formation within a church community, it’s best not to bloviate about the Almighty.
So I won’t.
i grew up catholic and i hate the church and i think that all of these stupid wars are from religious zealots and nothing else. i am tired of everything i see on the news. Who the hell is pure of heart? And why can’t you analyze religions,etc…without
meditating etc? Do you have to be a believer to be a theologian? Do I have to be a war-monger to be a historian? What a bunch of bull.
I’m sorry your experience of Christianity was so negative. You ask some good questions. As you say, it is possible to analyze religions from a secular perspective. The “outsider” will see some things the “insider” does not and vice versa, just as (to use your example) a pacifist and a career soldier will write different types of books about the same historical events. Ideally, all these perspectives would be valued for the specific information they add.
In this blog post, I was speaking to and about my fellow Christians, sharing my own experience as a warning not to become so enthralled with our own cleverness that we forget that our theological concepts are only an approximation of the ineffable. No one, indeed, is completely pure of heart — so when we claim to speak about how God really is, we should retain a little fear and trembling.
The pitfalls are different for a nonbeliever who is studying theology from a purely intellectual-academic standpoint. That person probably isn’t worried about the presumptuousness of describing God, since her focus is describing the function and development of religion as a human-made system. She’s more like a historian of ideas, not really a theologian.
Anything that people feel passionate about will produce strife and sometimes violence — religion, politics, romance, etc. Meditating to cultivate awareness of one’s own motivations and of the larger reality that lies outside our mental categories is generally a good idea whether one is religious or secular.