1. Journey: Where I come from; Where I’m going

Theology at every step of the journey

As a lifelong Christian believer, I have studied theology in some way or another since I was a small child, even when I didn’t know that is what I was doing.

As a child, I assembled the various teachings of preachers and family and my own limited yet creative understanding into a basic structure of belief.

That was theology.

It was more of a passive theology, as I absorbed a lot of doctrine at face value, without criticism. But still, my Christian family—the Church as I knew it—was collectively interpreting the scriptures and making decisions about what those scriptures meant for our beliefs and daily lives.

Kicking against the pricks

 As an adolescent, I wanted to smash the pillars of that structure that felt so narrow and restrictive.

That too, was theology.

This was an engaged theology, when I started to look beyond the teachings of my childhood, reading what was actually on the page, and noting the difference. I began to interrogate my doctrine, and wondered if in history, there had been other possible ways to interpret what I’d always taken for granted as “Biblical” teaching.

As a young man, I tore through the Bible and its history, determined to find out “the truth,” or leave my faith in shreds trying to find it.

Theology.

This was a theology that ranged between angry and desperate, as on one hand I tested my theory that Christianity as we had received it was little more than a tiny cult in 1st century Palestine that stole its ideas from other philosophies in nearby regions—a cult that got way out of hand once started to be used as a tool by the Empire—and on the other, I feared what would happen to me and my foundations if I did expose Christianity to be a fraud.

As I studied the history of the Bible and the ways it had been handed down—books assembled from multiple sources, oral traditions committed to writing decades after the events they communicated, manuscripts pieced together from a patchwork of fragments in multiple languages, a canon selected from a much larger pool of possible canonical writings through the heated arguments of a committee, writings full of contradictions with one another but glossed over in interpretation—the pages of the book seemed to fall apart in my hand.

The Kingdom was the key

But then, like a last-minute reprieve, in my senior year class on the origins of Christianity class, I first truly encountered the concept of the “Kingdom of Heaven.” It really brought Jesus back to life for me. It was not some far-off promise of a gold-plated Heaven, but a radical upheaval of earthly values that was happening right now, among us and near us, even though it had not yet been fully realized.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, everything was upside-down: the poor were exalted and the rich walked away disappointed, the last would be first and the first last, the prodigal was welcomed and the obedient ignored, the lost sheep was sought while the flock of 99 was left alone, and a tiny mustard seed could become a mighty tree. The Kingdom was weird, it was foolish, it was hard to grasp, and it was lovely.

I discovered I could use the Kingdom of Heaven as a key to interpreting the whole of scripture, looking at how Christ said, “you have heard it said this way, but I say it this way,” and realizing that not only did all scripture need to be interpreted, but that scripture had a history of interpreting and re-interpreting itself, as God progressively made God’s love clearer, even as God made God’s nature a greater mystery.

I realized that the Bible made so much more sense read through this lens, not so much to my mind, but it certainly witnessed to my heart.

We were definitely doing some theology in there.

A faith evolves

During the time that I tried to hold God at arm’s length, because it felt intellectually irresponsible to embrace the divine without some empirical evidence that I could see, touch, and understand, I was doing theology.

As I pored through histories and apologetics and testimonies to find the data I needed, Jesus was there, even when He was the one with whom I was wrestling. Fighting with someone can look very much like dancing with someone, from a distance. The shadow of Jesus loomed over me, even as I tried to find proof for the light.

And it was theology, in the form of a series of rational arguments that created and justified the existence of the irrational, that allowed me to finally surrender and admit that I believed—I just believed—whether I wanted to or not.

And now, I continue to listen, to read, to search for new ideas, and to stay open to the new ideas that I would not have sought out—even if they make me uncomfortable—so I can collect the ones that fit the best with the ever-evolving shape of my faith, and live my daily life based on my best understanding of what I have learned so far, that too is theology.