Christian theology for the 21st century
A Word of Explanation
I
believe that Christians, both as individuals and as the Church, are challenged
in this new century to re-engage with a world from which they have
withdrawn. It is a world without law, purpose or hope, unless we can recover these from our heritage and offer them as the gift of God and the glorious opportunity of a future.
For we have roots, which many people have not, a history from which we can recover our values and discover God's, and a long-established relationship from which we can draw new understanding, motivation and conviction such as our world has lost. We have a past which can explain our present, yet opens up for us a future alive with challenge and adventure.
We can say, however tentatively, that we know God, and in that knowledge we have a light and a standard that never ceases to challenge our understanding of ourselves and our world. It is God giving us, if we dare to accept it, an integrity beyond all our expectations. It is God who has spoken to us declaring Godself to us, revealing Godself to us, engaging with us in all the events which have become and continue to be our history.
That is why the Jewish and Christian scriptures (the Bible) are important, and a source still relevant to us. Not that God dictated words which became an infallible written code for us, but that God has engaged with us and guided us to where we now are, in spite of all our opposition to God, and that many of those who, over centuries, experienced that commitment of God, have left us the story of it. And since God himself is as enthusiastic about the story as they were - and more so - he invites us to recognise himself as the story teller and enactor. We discover not only a story but Godself still enacting and writing the story in our lives, our times, our world.
I am not a fundamentalist or a literalist. I believe that we bring to scripture all the benefits of scholarly history, of linguistic and literary knowledge thru which we gain a critical appreciation of the text and thereby come to share the writers' experience of God and the experience of those about whom they wrote. What we get is not a page full of infallible words, but our own encounter with the living God, who made and remakes our world. We read about David and Elijah and we come to know our own hearts before God. We read about Samson, Jezebel and Jesus and we start to understand the suicide bomber, international politics, and (in spite of both) the great hope that lies before us in the 21st century.
In knowing God not as a metaphysical idea but as someone engaged with us in the working out of our history, we discover ourselves and the vast possibilities of community and society, from friendship and neiborhood to government and nations, which God is actively realising, and we may realise with God. We are heirs to a charter of freedom, and the scriptures describe it for us. If we use what is ours, we will find ourselves empowered by God, and Godself the Spirit breathing in us.
In the 21st century we need a theology, that is an understanding of God and ourselves, which can save our world from the ghastly cycles of self-delusion, greed and violence. We need a theology that is thoroly political, because politics is all about being together, and that is, or should be, love, and God is love. We need a theology that comes alive in story, for only story is truth on the move, becoming more and more truth as life and history become more and more. And we need a theology of repentance, to sustain a revolution that will supersede all the failed revolutions of the 20th century.
In the books I have published on this website I try to tell the story, our history remembered in scripture, which is the revelation of God and our assurance that Godself is still committed to us, still creating a world and a history that is to be the revelation and fulfilment of God. What I have written is not academic theology, of which I am incapable, but rather theology lived and preached. It is of course shaped in part by what I am, and I am many things, a Methodist local preacher, a Catholic, a Church Community Worker, an Australian, a British citizen. All of this is in my writing: but the style and the shape of it is the story-telling, the teaching and the enthusiasm of a local preacher.
I ask God to be in my words and in your reading, to change our world.