Doing theology in the everyday

Each of us has a theological work to do. We may think we haven’t but we can’t help it, because every time we make a decision, or refuse to make one, we are showing whether we are with Jesus or against hi. We are saying something about what we think Christianity is. There never has been a time when even the most passive could really allow a Church to make all their moral decisions for them, because the decision to obey is itself a moral decision and can have as many varied motives, from cowardice to true humility, as any other decision. Nor are the most emancipated present-day believers making their moral decisions in a vacuum. The cloud of witnesses from all ages and places surrounds them. They choose with the Church, or against it, in some sense of other, and there are many senses. So also our decisions form part of the tradition, and create the material from which others draw in making their decisions, and all these decisions depend on the kind of notions we have about what God is doing, to us and around us.

Our practical decisions display theological premises, whether we like it or not. To say ‘I’m not interested in theology,’ is to display an ignorance as gross as that betrayed by people who smugly disclaim interest in politics, not knowing that every day is crammed with political acts, from greeting certain people and not others in the street, to posting letters, or buying a newspaper. Each of these acts springs from a given political doctrine, however unperceived it may be. A person may not even know the meaning of the word theology, but there is scarcely a conscious act which does not express a theological position of some kind, and even unconscious motivations often grow from the theological views of our forbears.



Rosemary Haughton, in The Knife Edge of Experience, pages 31-2.
Quoted on pages 241-2 of The Lion Christian Meditation Collection

More of an action

The third of six summings-up that P T Forsyth gives in the sixth chapter of his book, The Work of Christ (page 150)

This reconciling and redeeming work of Christ culminates in his suffering unto death, which is indeed more of an act than an experience.  Here, in the Cross, is the summit of his revelation of grace, of sin, and of humanity.  And the central feature of this threefold revelation in the Cross is the holiness of God's love.  It is this holiness that deepens error into sin, sin into guilt, and guilt into repentance; without which any sense of forgiveness would be but an anodyne and not a grace, a self-flattering unction to the soul and not the peace of God. 

Gazing into the Cross

We do not preach our impressions, or even our experience.  These make but the vehicle, as it were.  What we preach is something much more solid, more objective, with more stay in it; something that can suffice when our experience has ebbed until it seems to be as low as Christ's was in the great desertion and victory on the Cross. We want something that will stand by us when we cannot feel any more; we want a Cross we can cling to, not simply a subjective Cross. That is to put the thing in another way, what we want today is an insight into the Cross.

You see I am making a distinction between impression and insight.  It is a useful part of the church's work, for instance, that it should act by means of revival services, where perhaps the dominant element may be temporary impression.  But unless that is taken up and turned to account by something more, all know how evanescent a thing it is apt to be. We need, not simply to be impressed by Christ, but to see into Christ and into his Cross.  We need to deepen the impression until it become new life by seeing into Christ.  There are certain circumstances in which we may be entitled to declare that we do not want so many people who glibly say they love Jesus; we want more people who can really see into Christ. We do, of course, want more people who love Jesus; but we want a multitude of more people who are not satisfied with that, but whose love fills them with holy curiosity and compels them habitually to cultivate in the Spirit the power of seeing into Christ and into this Cross....Insight is what we want for power - less of mere interest and more of real insight.  There are some people who talk as though, when we speak of the Cross and the meaning of the Cross, we were spinning something out of the Cross. Paul was not spinning anything out of the Cross.  He was gazing into the Cross, seeing what was really there with eyes that had been unsealed and purged by the Holy Ghost.

From pages 67/8 of P T Forsyth's The Work of Christ.

A peculiar and monstrous people

The failure on our part to accept the reality of pain, of anguish, of ambiguity, of death, has turned us into a very peculiar and monstrous people.  It means, for one thing, and it's very serious, that people who have had no experience have no compassion.  People who have had no experience suppose that if a man is a thief, he is a thief; but, in fact, that isn't the most important thing about him.  The most important thing about him is that he is a man and, furthermore, that if he's a thief or a murderer or whatever he is, you could also be and you would know this, anyone would know this who had really dared to live.

James Baldwin, from an article in a 1964 edition of Playboy.  [Quoted on page 313 of Colm Tóibín's book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother]

Awareness

"Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised."

-Shoshana Zuboff

God's presence

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle we really get.

Frederick Buechner
The Magnificent Defeat