A few days ago I walked into my roommate's room to drop his mail on his bed. As I turned to leave, my eye caught a Frederick Buechner book, The Sacred Journey (Some will remember my deep love of Buechner's Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. See my yet unfinished series of quotes from that book: Telling the Truth. Tragedy. Comedy.). Never to turn my back on a work by Buechner, I opened to the introduction and began to read:
About ten years ago I gave a set of lectures at Harvard in which I made the observation that all theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining so honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there....It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks. Someone we love dies, say. Some unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart or makes the blood run cold. We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we all of us have for estranging the very people in our lives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at all - just one day following another, helter-skelter, in the manner of days. We sleep and dream. We wake. We work. We remember and forget. We have fun and are depressed. And into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments even the most humdrum of our days, God speaks.
For some reason, I've been thinking about theology lately. What it is. Its purpose. Maybe someday formally studying it.
Theology as autobiography?
Yeah, I think I agree. If all of life is woven together and integrated to form one thing, then theology is most certainly autobiographical. It has to be, for how else do we interact with the world around us except through our lives and capacity to experience. And yet, it is not merely the autobiography of a handful of individuals, but us all, the whole of humanity. For as much as our individual lives affect our theology, so do our collective experiences.
And thus we have a beautiful tapestry of theology woven from the ages for us to engage and wrestle, argue and refute, accept and embrace, ever drawing us closer to the one called I AM.
3 comments:
that's a really great thought. i'm definitely learning that in my life. i hope to see more 'theology' to come that is interwoven with the personal story, i think the key next step being 'personal' because we've maybe reached story in some ways--but is it the personal? is it the parable with the truth in it? or is it our parable ? I wonder if Jesus spoke all his parables in the air to a great crowd, or if he fixed his eyes on the one whose heart shaped that parable? interesting stuff to think about.
I completely agree. For so long, I've felt this pressure to conform to Christian theology, presumably a truth foreign or outside my nature. So, I thought the Christian experience was ever working to get me, who is 'out there,' to be 'in there.'
I love that picture you used of the personal parable... the question being, is that my parable?
Am I that person?
I increasingly wonder if what makes the Christian Story true is not that it is true 'out there' for me to conform to, but that it is already true within, for me to accept, embrace and unlock.
this kind of stuff makes my mind reel.
with so many different doctrines and theological thought,
how can it not be due to personal stories and histories?
for myself, i then think,
should i really be opting to research?
or should i just dwell in the Lord and wait for his answers that he's already instilled in me?
ugh.
reeling mind.
Post a Comment