Forging theology in the fire

Field notes from a lifetime spent wondering and wrestling with God

In the midst of book writing this week, I stepped back and shared on Instagram about a question that’s been pressing on me with increasing urgency: does our theology work for anyone else besides ourselves? In my experience, it’s a question that we must keep asking, over and over, in our search for God. Otherwise our particular collection of beliefs and perspectives becomes self-serving, not other-focused. Comforting, not challenging. Inward, not outward—toward God or neighbor. 

Per requests from many readers, I’m sharing a written version of my videos below—put into conversation with key thinkers and theologians, poets and writers, whose words have sat on my desk or hung on my walls for years. My hope is that something below nudges you to dig deeper into the unfathomable mystery of God, acknowledging the truth of what you have known but also urging you onward, never to be satisfied with simplistic answers or trite clichés, but widening your willingness to listen and learn from others whose experiences are utterly opposite from yours. Far from finding less to know or say or believe about God, the stance of humility opens us into more and more and more.

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Something I've been thinking about a lot recently, that we don’t think or talk about enough, is do our beliefs work for anybody else but us? I thought about this again today, because after natural disasters, a lot of bad theology comes out of the woodwork. People like to talk about what God did or didn't do in a given place, based on things like prayers. I think that as each of us is going through life and doing the lifelong work of trying to sort out what it is we believe, we can't simply end up with something that only works for ourselves and wouldn't work for someone else at the table.