Theology is Story

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.