The word “theology” literally means “God” (Theo) “Talk” (logy) or “God-words,” and I remember getting to a point in my life (somewhere in the middle of graduate school) when I was completely fed up with talking about God. I was just plain sick of talking about faith, church, grace, humanity, creation, salvation, sin, sanctification, Spirit, God, Jesus—I had had enough. Sure, it used to be interesting, but hadn’t we covered it already? Hadn’t we used enough words? Was it possible that we were talking about the relationship between humanity and God again? Wasn’t there something better we could be doing with our time?
Now, as a pastor, I probably think and talk about these subjects more than most people, but in spite of this little fact, I think that two questions beg to be answered.
Why was I so tired of talking about theology?
Why is it important to discuss it at all? Why does it matter?
To be honest, I was tired and looking for easy answers—brief paragraphs that could describe who God was, what it meant to be a person of faith, and how to be church together. I wanted something simple to define, and even easier to apply. Now, I was right about one thing—our discussions of theology should be applied. If our words and all our talk about God and faith do not find some kind of concrete, lived-out reality, then all our words—no matter how beautiful and deep—are actually empty. They ring hollow in our lives. But God is infinite. God is a mystery. God’s reality and ways of doing things are beyond us, and no matter how much we try or talk or think, we will never fully understand or wrap our minds around God. We will never get to the end of our words about God. Which means that there will never be easy answers; amidst the glimpses of truth we see, there will always be some paradox and some ambiguity and a few unanswered questions that caused blurred vision. There will always have more questions, and we will always have more God-talk.
So why discuss it at all, especially if there’s no end in sight?
Because when we talk about God, we are not hamsters running on a wheel—working hard, but never getting anywhere. We are not running around in endless circles. Instead, it’s much more like a spiral—and every time we come around to talking about God or faith or the church or what it means to be human or the bible, it’s not so much that the core of what those things are have changed, but we have. In each season of our lives, we come back around to theology, and discover something new, something more. We have met new people, developed new relationships, found ourselves in different places, learned new things, experienced hardship or anxiety or loss, joy or deep satisfaction. And all these things have changed us—for good and for ill. If we don’t talk about God in the midst of it, then all those important changes in our lives do not have any bearing on our relationship with God; God is left out of our real lives, and we are left without any real foundation on which to measure these changes. That’s why it matters. That’s why we continue to come back around to talk about God (and all the other related topics)—what it means to be saved, or how we grow in our faith, or what sin is, or what it means to “do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8). Because God is the source of our life, and the measure by which we find meaning in it.
- Amy
“All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?... the human spirit is the lamp of the Lord, searching every innermost part.” – Proverbs 20:24, 27.
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