Theology
is largely autobiography. To reflect on
God is basically to reflect on ones experience of God and that means to reflect
on one’s own life. Our theologies grow
out of our stories. Some do that
reflection within the confines of a tradition, a religious heritage that
outlines a history of God’s revelation to a particular people. But even there, the acceptance of one
religious tradition or historical witness over another is mostly a matter of
one’s own life story. If your parents
provided you with a childhood steeped in the life of a Baptist Church, then
that Baptist tradition will always shape your way of thinking about God
(positively or negatively). If you are
raised as a religious Jew, the stories from the Torah will always form a basis
for your reflections on God. Our life
stories and our faith stories are one.
Our God is revealed truly, only as we tell the tales of our living.
When
I was nearing graduation from college, I was anxious to pursue studies in
comparative religion. I went to see my
professor in that field, Dr. Kenneth
Morgan, looking for advice and a recommendation on pursuing further
study of other religions.
“I
won’t recommend you,” he said, much to my dismay and shock. “You have no business nosing around in other
people’s religions until you know what your own is.”
At
the time, I was floundering through one religious experiment after
another. I had started college as a
devoted atheist. Life later gave me some
glimpse of God, but I still had no idea what that meant in terms of tradition
or religion, sect or community. I had
flirted with Hinduism and, with Morgan’s help, had experimented with Zen. I had studied mysticism, Tibetan Lamaism and
Sufi practices. In it all, I still
wasn’t sure that I was anything but a soggy agnostic looking for any kind of
solid ground.
I
protested to Morgan that I wasn’t sure I wanted to have any single
religion. If I were religiously neutral,
it would make it possible for me to study world religions more dispassionately,
more objectively.
“Everybody
has to stand somewhere,” he said. “It’s
better for everybody if you know where it is that you’re standing. When you look into a religion, you had better
know whether you’re a scholar or a pilgrim.”
“What
if I’m just an atheist,” I said.
“If
you’re an atheist,” he answered, “you are a Christian atheist. If you’re an agnostic, you are a Christian
agnostic. Look to your own roots. You stand in a tradition of some kind even if
you spend your life pretending otherwise.”
Even
if you start life outside of any obvious religious tradition, as I did, roots
(cultural, family, experiential) are profoundly powerful. For most of us, God has a shape, a taste, a
feel, a scent, and a sound that grows out of our pasts like a plant from
seed. Another way of saying it is that
God comes to each of us in ways that we can understand and to which we will
respond. Just as God may come to
different cultures in ways that are resonant with each cultures expectations. John Robinson once wrote that if the religion
of Jesus had traveled east rather than west, the same Jesus would have been
worshipped as an avatar of Brahman. The
differences aren’t in God, they are in us.
Xenophanes wrote in the fifth century B.C.E. that “the Ethiopians say
that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light
blue eyes and red hair.” It is not that
we create God in our own image, but that we find God, discover God, amidst our
own set of cultural and personal predispositions. We know the face of God that we need to know,
because, most of the time, that is the only face of God that we are able to see
at all.
