Part 1: Philosphical Theology

We had a discussion at the housegroup last night after listening to some inputs on "faith". So, OK, honestly I really struggled with it. I wasn't wilfully mishearing the thing - I just couldn't get it. How it sounded to me was "this is the way to get God to give us stuff" (I know guys - that's not how you hear it) how do I build faith, how do I get healing - for myself and also for others. But really it felt to me like "if you can see that the supernatural world is more real than the natural world then you can ask God for anything". I worry that this is about trying to commodify God, if only we can reduce him to a set of formulae, then everything will be fine. The trouble is God doesn't think like us. He just doesn't obey our rules and we cannot cannot cannot put God in a box.

I think my head is just in a different place ("as usual" I hear my friends shout!). One of the places my head is in is with Karl Rahner. Reading him has been interesting. It is slow going because I don't seem to have had too much time recently but also because it's not the easiest read. It is brilliant and requires quite a bit of thought and concentration, but he has taken me further down the whole philosophy track. The way Rahner sees things is just different. He talks about God in terms of holy mystery and that makes sense to me.

So I found myself listening to a podcast by Emergent Village (you can download it free on iTunes) - a discussion involving John D. Caputo and Richard Kearney, 2 pre-eminent philosophers and people of faith. Some of the comments they made were really interesting to me, here are some highlights:

80% American teens self identify as Christians but their understanding of God is as a cosmic butler, there when you call, it's a hyper individualised experience, "me and God - we talk, we have an understanding", the "fix all" God – if we call loud enough he’ll come to the rescue. They talked about how this traces its roots back to Greek philosophical thought not Jewish or Christian. God as patriarch, emperor, caretaker of the world - a god that one isn’t really involved with most of the time just, when you need him – distant and abstract – don’t think about it till you need a fix “god was born for me”, and is deeply embedded in our liberal individual tradition so prevalent in the west.

But to think about ourselves not as an autonomous individual but someone who is “laid claim to” by something that had us before we had it, then our faith becomes not about rights but about responsibilities; not about individuals but about community, about ‘the other’, the least of these.

Richard Kearney talks about Etty Hillesum – ‘An Interrupted Life ’ who eventually died in Auschwitz. When asked how God could allow the death camps to happen she replied “We must help God to be God". "One should want to be a balm on many wounds." We need to preserve within us the dwelling space for God to be and to enter the world even in the midst of hell. This is the God of the constant call – unless we open the door the messiah can’t enter. Answer evil in terms of vanquishing it – not individually but by seeing God in “the least of these” Christ enters, the humble and broken God. We need to treat each moment in time as a portal through which the messiah is trying to enter. I understand through Jesus, the vulnerable God, a God who calls modestly and incessantly.

I think that's why I struggle with both a simplistic view of God and, what feels like, a liberal individual view of God.

Now I know this is tricky and I probably haven't explained it that well and you might just think that this is some kind of intellectual exercise, but in all honesty all this grounds itself for me in my experience out on the streets on a Saturday night as a street pastor. It might seem philosophical but actually this is really about "lived" theology.