What theology can do for people

In the last few weeks I have encountered again a view of God and of life in general which I can only call oppressive. I attended the funeral of a person whose family of origin belonged to a quite exclusive group: they believed that to have any association at all with Christians who did not hold their views, let alone the great multitude of the unsaved, was itself sinful. When this man loved and married a Christian of another group, he was cut off from the entire family, for the rest of their lives. He never saw his parents again.

In her book Sunday Best, Robbi Neal recounts her own experience of such a family. She grew up with the sense that being a girl was the source of so many of her alleged failings. Having a body was itself such a disadvantage, but a female body was that much worse. Her mother and her family imposed so many restrictions on a normal child’s life: so many things would bring shame to ‘the Lord’.

Although many of those people would deny it, this perspective is a form of theology. It is  a view of God as so other, so ‘holy’, that God cannot relate to the great unwashed, as they have been called. God must remain apart from the world and those who serve God must also keep apart: this is said to be the meaning of holiness, to be apart, separate, and Christian life and community is about maintaining this ideal of purity.

And what a dull and dreary life that produces. It is a truly oppressive theology.

Robbi Neal recounts the wonder-filled experience of engaging in theological studies‑‑as it happened at Whitley College. There she made so many discoveries, of different ways of reading and understanding both the Bible and the developments of ideas within the broader Christian tradition. One example she mentions will illustrate the point: she learned that the biblical words for God’s spirit are feminine in Hebrew and neuter in Greek. Only in the later traditions, dominated as they were by male scholars, did people begin to call the Holy Spirit ‘he’. For Robbi Neal, this was an invitation to think in liberating new ways about her own femininity and God. Being a girl was not an inherent bar to knowing and relating to God.

Theology has the potential to liberate people from oppressive views of God. Long ago, the wonderful Belgian Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx put it just like this: Jesus liberated people ‘from a constricting view of God’. As he puts it, ‘man’s cause is God’s cause’. (Jesus: an experiment in Christology, p.229 f.)

Robbi Neal is just one person amongst a huge number  who have needed theological study first of all to push back the barriers to thinking (and feeling and sensing, and especially imagining) and then to reclaim and expand the concepts and possibilities, experiences and challenges inherent in a faith that has something to do with everything—ethics, worship, history, society, personal relations, and all of our life in the world.

Alas, theology of this nature has its challenges. It introduces us to some areas of ambiguity and many areas of differences. If we imagine such a subject can be all sewn up into neat packages of ‘answers’, we will soon be dis-illusioned. Yes, that is an illusion and life will prove it so. We are better to embrace it and learn how to negotiate difference and ambiguity, indeed to welcome them as gifts. For sure, there are complexities. Many scripture texts do not in fact have a simple meaning that can be ‘read off’ from the surface. Responsible reading introduces such complexity: as one student said to their New Testament teacher, ‘Professor I could preach much better before I did your course.’ What they meant was perhaps it was easier, rather than ‘better’.

Encountering these ‘complexities’ is such a gift to us, in several ways. To begin with, it should make us humbler and less assured that we ‘know it all’. And that in turn should invite us to welcome the perspectives of others, who may hold different Christian views, or those of other faith traditions, or indeed none. One of the sad things in our current situation is that the dogmatic and intolerant stance taken by some prominent figures creates the impression, promoted by the over-simplifying media, that all Christians or all people of faith adopt such a stance. It is difficult to show a more open and inviting attitude.

With time and broader experience, Robbi Neal came to name this ‘complexity’ in what I think is a really helpful way. Her book tells of a very difficult pathway, in relationships, caring for her children, engaging and disengaging with churches, artistic achievements and failures, poverty, and major health issues.

She concludes her work with the assertion that all this means that life is ‘messy’. She and many of her contemporaries had been shaped by Scott Peck’s opening sentence in The Road Less Travelled, ‘Life is difficult’.

Robbi Neal had abundant reason to affirm that, but her concluding assertion is that through it all there is love, a God known far beyond the strictures of religion: love and messiness.

I have half my life yet to live and I dance and sing with my husband and the children I adore. No one tells me to stop singing and I think how blessed I am by God to have such love in my life. For here is the real miracle, the real spirit of God. It is right here inside each one of us, in our ability to love and be messy.  

Theology can liberate us for such singing, dancing, and the loving embrace of all our messiness, and in it all to sense the spirit of God.