Theology

I was all set to wade into topics theological and talk about JLA and Tillich, but right now the best I can say is that my 3 year old sees rain butterflies in the water splashing into the air off our street. A "moment of transcendence" for sure. It raises a point about the distinction between the theory of theology and the practice of theology.

I'm not sure I buy the post-modern notion that all theology is local. In general yes, I believe that context specific theories are better than over-reaching total theories. But I wonder if there might be a situation at hand akin to the relationship between quantum mechanics, Newtonian kinetics, and Einstein's relativity. Physics looks slightly different on the level of the very small, the very large, and the everyday world we live in.

I am a structuralist in orientation, and would like to see some structure to contain and explain all our different personal and local theologies. There is the tyranny of structure that tries to explain away the local and the personal to fit some grand theory of everything. And there is the atomism of the strictly personal and local that I feel UUism has spun into. And I believe that there must be something in between.

Tillich criticized both autonomy and heteronomy. He believed in a theonomy that called for justice, compassion and communion. He saw sin as all the idolatries and profanations that allowed us to divide ourselves and quit living as neighbors or sibling children of God.

And while his systematic theology is among the most dense reading I have ever done, I know that he remembered that theology must be based in that sense of reverrence and mystery expressed by my son.

There may not be a god per se, and there certainly is no such thing as a rain butterfly. But both ideas can give us a different way of living life and relating to the world even if neither is necessary nor sufficient.