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Philosophy + Theology = True!

May 8, 2013 Christian life, Ponderings, theology, Theopoetics One comment

Dictionary Series - Philosophy: philosophyI was approached last week by a Soldier that was concerned about my reading and quoting philosophical works in my blogs and my sermons. He quoted the oft quoted:

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12.2 NRSV)

Thus he bundled all philosophy together as human/worldly thinking as opposed to divine or divinely inspired thinking. It tickles me that I attended a Salvation Army – Ethics weekend last weekend where the main speaker: PhD James Reed said the absolute opposite. That many of the philosophers must have been divinely inspired in their search for truth and wisdom.

But if philosophy truly is what the name means, the love of wisdom, and if theology is words about god. Then it seems to me that Theology without philosophy is a dangerous enterprise. In my days within the church I have encountered good and bad theologies, wise and unwise theologies and it seems to me that the love of wisdom is a very good place to start the theological endeavour.

Listen to the scriptures exhort us towards philosophy:

Good friend, take to heart what I’m telling you;
collect my counsels and guard them with your life.
Tune your ears to the world of Wisdom;
set your heart on a life of Understanding.
That’s right—if you make Insight your priority,
and won’t take no for an answer,
Searching for it like a prospector panning for gold,
like an adventurer on a treasure hunt,
Believe me, before you know it Fear-of-God will be yours;
you’ll have come upon the Knowledge of God.

(Prov 2.1-5 The message)

It seems to me that if all truth belongs to god, then the search for truth, the search for wisdom will lead us godward in the end.

This is my voice

April 28, 2013 Life is my religion, Patrik, Poetry, Ponderings, Theopoetics One comment

imagesRecently at “Subverting the norm II” I was challenged by Katherine Sara Moody who took the platform together with some heavy hitters in radical theology and opened up with “as a woman and a theologian I am still looking to find my voice”.

She made me reflect, and I think I have been reflecting on, what is my voice, ever since I came back. Apart from realising (once again) that as a cisgendered white male in the clergy I am always going to speak from a position of power and privilege, no matter how much I deconstruct this and show how unprivileged I have been as I grew up. I also realised as I invited all these fantastic theologians to read my blogs that I did so with a certain trepidation. The old fear: “what if they find out that I am a fake”, quickly reared it's ugly head.

It's not that I am ashamed of what I write/have written, I'm not. It is the fact that I do not write with an academic voice like for example Christena Cleveland or with the philosophical depth of Peter Rollins. I write like, well like me.

This is where it hit's me, I am no academic. Don't get me wrong, I love academia, I want to read books that make my brain hurt as I strain to encompass the grand idea, philosophy or theology in them. But I do not write with an academic voice, and I never will.

In my writing, I am first and foremost a poet, sometimes a pastor and often a preacher. I am a pirate and at my best I manage to marry this to being a good parent.

This is my voice, I write not for the academics admiration or to enter into an academic conversation. Sometimes I am philosophical but, I tend not to delve to deep and often lack the philosophical discipline to truly enter into the philosophical dialogue. No, I reach up and pluck ripe fruits from the top of the tree and try my best to serve a nice fruit cocktail for my friends down here on the ground. I am not an academic, or a philosopher, I am a preacher/poet with my feet planted firmly on the ground looking for a theopoetic that will part the veil and allow me to, if only for a moment, experience the divine.

This is my voice.

 

This is my voice

April 28, 2013 Life is my religion, Patrik, Poetry, Ponderings, Theopoetics One comment

imagesRecently at “Subverting the norm II” I was challenged by Katherine Sara Moody who took the platform together with some heavy hitters in radical theology and opened up with “as a woman and a theologian I am still looking to find my voice”.

She made me reflect, and I think I have been reflecting on, what is my voice, ever since I came back. Apart from realising (once again) that as a cisgendered white male in the clergy I am always going to speak from a position of power and privilege, no matter how much I deconstruct this and show how unprivileged I have been as I grew up. I also realised as I invited all these fantastic theologians to read my blogs that I did so with a certain trepidation. The old fear: “what if they find out that I am a fake”, quickly reared it's ugly head.

It's not that I am ashamed of what I write/have written, I'm not. It is the fact that I do not write with an academic voice like for example Christena Cleveland or with the philosophical depth of Peter Rollins. I write like, well like me.

This is where it hit's me, I am no academic. Don't get me wrong, I love academia, I want to read books that make my brain hurt as I strain to encompass the grand idea, philosophy or theology in them. But I do not write with an academic voice, and I never will.

In my writing, I am first and foremost a poet, sometimes a pastor and often a preacher. I am a pirate and at my best I manage to marry this to being a good parent.

This is my voice, I write not for the academics admiration or to enter into an academic conversation. Sometimes I am philosophical but, I tend not to delve to deep and often lack the philosophical discipline to truly enter into the philosophical dialogue. No, I reach up and pluck ripe fruits from the top of the tree and try my best to serve a nice fruit cocktail for my friends down here on the ground. I am not an academic, or a philosopher, I am a preacher/poet with my feet planted firmly on the ground looking for a theopoetic that will part the veil and allow me to, if only for a moment, experience the divine.

This is my voice.

 

Oh My Ego!

April 11, 2013 Christian life, Conference, Patrik, Ponderings, rant No comments

I am sittning at the Salvation Army leadership conference in Örebro, listening to Tommy Hellsten talking about finding your true self and how the ego must be crucified, taken apart, gotten rid of.

I think of Eddie Izzard that stated last night during his “Force Majeure” show that he had an overgrown ego, he tells an anecdote where he is riding in a taxi back from watching a show at Wembley stadium, the cabbie asks: Will you be going back to Wembley and Eddie thinks the cabbie is referring to his career rather than a return trip in the cab he's currently riding and embarrassing hilarity ensues. (This entire paragraph is just another example of what this post is about #namedropping)

In a moment of clarity I see how often I allow my ego to take center stage. How I make something unrelated about me and about my story. Especially looking back at my latest trip to “Subvert the norm II”, how often did I insert myself in a conversation, making it about me when it may have been something else entirely (and much more interesting) from the beginning. It seems terribly habitual, in every scene from the script of my life, I fall back into this pre-adolescent mode. See me, hear me acknowledge me.

Granted, the reason I went on this trip was to figure out what to do with my life, my calling, my ministry. Even so I break into the ongoing conversation with my story, when maybe listening to the others story might have been what would allow me to be confronted with a subversive story that may free me of my troublesome contemplations.

Henri Nouwen speaks of the wounded healer, but as my beloved mentor and friend Brian Slinn taught us in our understanding people class: your wound is where you find compassion and empathy for the other, but you do not have to bring it out and show it. In other words, our woundedness and the vulnerability we can develop out of it is what teaches us compassion, empathy and gives us the inner strength and integrity to help the other but we do not need to bleed on them.

My only solace and prayer is that someone else may have encountered my story and my journey and been transformed by being confronted with the other, however misplaced my motivations may have been.

I do hope that I will get better at spotting when this happens and say: Oh my ego! Time to shut up! Until that day I give you, my friends permission to speak for me, just tell me to shut it.

 

The return of the blog

March 27, 2013 Bible, Christian life, Faith, Poetry, postmodernism, Process Theology, story, Theopoetics No comments

tumblr_m9pb53vJjx1rnmfgho1_500After a long hiatus in blogging I have decided to warm up the keyboard and start blogging again. Any long term reader will immediately notice that the name of the blog has changed and with that maybe the direction of the blog as well.

Personally I think the new name “Theopoetics” better reflect the direction the blog has had for a long time and that the byline: Life is my religion also reflects this direction.

The return of the blog will start with a blog series that will unpack that very statement over the course of the next few months.

If you are familiar with the kind of theologians that move in more progressive circles (process theologians and radical Christianity etc) you will already be familiar with the term theopoetics. But for those of you who wonder here is the Wikipedia entry on theopoetics:

Theopoetics is an interdisciplinary field of study that combines elements of poetic analysis, process theology, narrative theology, and postmodern philosophy. Originally developed by Stanley Hopper and David Leroy Miller in 1960s and furthered significantly by Amos Wilder with his 1976 text, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. Recently, there has been a revitalized interest with new work being done by Rubem Alves, Catherine Keller, John Caputo, Peter Rollins, Scott Holland, Melanie May, Matt Guynn, Roland Faber, Jason Derr, et al.

Theopoetics suggests that instead of trying to develop a “scientific” theory of God, as Systematic Theology attempts, theologians should instead try to find God through poetic articulations of their lived (“embodied”) experiences. It asks theologians to accept reality as a legitimate source of divine revelation and suggests that both the divine and the real are mysterious — that is, irreducible to literalist dogmas or scientific proofs.

Theopoetics makes significant use of “radical” and “ontological” metaphor to create a more fluid and less stringent referent for the Divine. One of the functions of theopoetics is to recalibrate theological perspectives, suggesting that theology can be more akin to poetry than physics. It belies the logical assertion of the Principle of Bivalence and stands in contrast to some rigid Biblical hermeneutics that suggest that each passage of scripture has only one, usually teleological, interpretation.

Whereas these strict, literalist approaches believe scripture and theology possess inerrant factual meaning and pay little attention to historicity, a theopoetic approach takes a positive position on faith statements that can be continuously reinterpreted. Theopoetics suggest that just as a poem can take on new meaning depending on the context in which the reader interprets it, texts and experiences of the Divine can and should take on new meaning depending on the changing situation of the individual.

 

 

Life is my religion

October 25, 2012 Christian life, Faith, holiness, Life is my religion, Ponderings 3 comments

There where two trees in the garden. There was the tree that the first eikons (reflections of god) was told not to touch, you know the one with the “apple”. But there was also another tree the tree of life, it is interesting to note that god never told the adama (earthling) and his  ezer kenegdo (lifesaver) not to eat from the tree of life.

Whatever we take from this ancient tale of first things (and I believe that we can learn volumes from these tales if we dare to listen to the message instead of the words) maybe we can take this:

Life is what god offers not knowledge. Knowledge when allowed to settle forms preconceived ideas, prejudice and the illusion that we know. Life puts knowledge on it’s head. Life throws us a curveball and forces us to rethink, to reexamine, to repent.

Jesus does not come with knowledge or with commandments, Jesus offers life and life in it’s fullness, life in abundance. Jesus offers aionos zoe (eternal life). Jesus even states “I am the life”.

So let me echo the words of my friend Jim Palmer: Life is my religion. I seek life with all my heart, all my soul and all my mind.

or in the words of Henry David Thoreau:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

First love

October 22, 2012 Christian life, Life is my religion, Marriage, Ponderings, theology No comments

An unnamed ancient eastern mystic have penned that you “…should always stay at the beginning”. The beginning of a new relationship is sweet and filled with endorphin induced bliss. Equally when we first meet/fall in love with Jesus we are equally blissed out. All our attention is on this new found love, we breathe it, dream it, dwell on it, obsess about it, we are totally and one hundred percent present in it and because of our wholeheartedness we are mindful of it.

It has been suggested that one of the reasons for this passion is our unknowing, the endless possibilities of this new found love and the promise of an equally blissful tomorrow. Someone said “ignorance is bliss” and in this case it may very well be true, our curiosity and passion drives us to find out everything about this mysterious being we have encountered, this other.

Then something happens, the love travels from the heart to the head. We go from unknowing to knowing. The known becomes familiar and “familiarity breeds contempt”. Our thirst becomes sated and now we think that we know the other and with that we freeze the other in an image of our making. We simply stop the clock and act towards the other with our finished pre-conceived idea of who they are and what they are thinking often based on past experience.

The problem is that the minute we stop the clock, the minute we freeze something living it dies. Life is change and everything alive changes by the second, hour, day.

I think this is why the sacred text tells us that gods grace (undeserved gift) is NEW every morning, it is not an old recycled grace but a new vibrant living grace. I think this is why Paul exhorts us to “be renewed by the transformation of your mind”. I think it is why the bibles use of the word bara in genesis 1.1 is not a done deal not a finished thing but rather “when god began creating the heavens and the earth”, that is something ongoing still unfolding. Because anything that has stopped changing, transforming has stopped because of death. Or as Adavaitananda said in his lecture this weekend: “If you want a safe/unchanging relationship, go look in the graveyard”.

Life is change, and alive people change all the time, if we are to keep the passion and the first love in our relationship we have to realise that the other is not the same person today as yesterday, and if we cannot accept that god constantly changes (because a real relationship implies two bodies that relate, influence each other) then at least we must recognize that god as the infinite other can never be fully known and thus at least from our limited experience must be perceived as ever changing as god revels more and more of godself to us.

The idea of the static god, static person, static marriage or the static relationship is an idea that is so poisonous that it will kill whatever relation it is applied to.

If we want to “stay at the beginning” we must embrace the idea of unknowing and thus allow for constant transformation, constant change, constant adventure. This will keep us guessing, keep us humble and at the same time keep us alive.

 

 

Looking for serious conversation

October 9, 2012 bloggosphere, Patrik, writing 5 comments

I was asked last week, why do I blog? Do I have a need to be heard, seen or is it something else? This has led me to reflect on why I am writing this blog, I have come up with a few answers to the question.

I write because I need to see my thoughts on “paper” so that I can examine them. Once a blog is posted I can come back later and examine my thoughts critically.

I write because I process through expression, in my mind is a jumble, as the words fall out on the page they re/organise themselves into sentences that carry meaning.

I write because there are people in various places in the world that actually want to know what I think and they ask me to keep writing.

But I think most of all I write because theology cannot be done in a vacuum. I need discourse, I need people who respond, who disagree, who question and who engage with the thoughts and challenge me.

In light of the last point this blog has been a bit of a disappointment. I need more conversation partners, I need more conversations, I need mentors, friends and dissenters.

So if you read this blog regularly, I beg of you. Comment, disagree, dialogue! And if you like send me an email and lets formalise a mentor/mentee partnership. I am not looking for people who think like me, but people who can challenge and gently guide me to greater insight. In this all are welcome! Let’s do theology together!

 

Taking the G out of the kingdom ….

August 14, 2012 Ponderings, Process Theology, Queer theology, theology No comments

I was listening to a Homebrewed Christianity – Theology Nerd Throwdown (TNT) when I was struck with this beautiful idea.

It was Tripp Fuller who said (Not the exact quote, though these are his words)

If you take the G out of Kingdom you get kindom with no cock and no crown.

The kindom of God, the extended interdependent family of god not ruled by a Patriarch or King but by a loving nurturing parent who is genderless or rather transgendered (as I have written before, not trans as in going from one tend to the next but as in more than both the one and the other).

We are invited, not as loyal subjects and subordinates, but as family members and co-creators. We are invited into the perichoresis the divine dance of interdependence and mutual, loving submission.

 

Wrestling with god.

July 12, 2012 Ponderings, theology 2 comments

My good friend Mackan Andersson came by today for a chat and a coffee. He brought me this beautiful one page of a 16th century vulgate bible with a woodcut of Jacob wrestling with god. Reminded him of me he said …

And yes that is what it feels like, wrestling with god. Yet I am unsure, I don’t think I am wrestling with god. I am wrestling with the Goliath that is church and organised religion. I am wrestling with the Leviathan of preconceived ideas and ideologies, the raging dragon of systematic theology, but I am not wrestling with the god self.

It is a consoling thought that I still can feel the lure of the divine calling me, luring me forward into new and ever more intricate dance moves in this perichoresis. No not a wrestling match, an intimate tango, that may sometimes look antagonistic but it is instead a suggestive, breathtaking swirling dance. The fighting or wrestling is reserved for the constructs of man. Theology, Church, Culture and Society or as Paul put it the powers and principalities.

 

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