There are so many terrible things happening in the world, how can I justify spending my time thinking about theology? Surely there must be more urgent things to do?
In the little church I go to, we have a self mocking slogan: Cafechurch: We talk about stuff. The sting here is a sort of feeling that rather than thinking about stuff – talking, arguing, making jokes about – we should just be doing things. Some of us, of course, do in fact do stuff, but most of us… well, we do our jobs, and talk about things, and feel a bit guilty about it.

I’ve been thinking about this recently (and yes, I am aware of the irony of that statement), and I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that perhaps this isn’t such a terrible thing after all. In a world full of people rushing around doing stuff, often with strength of feeling taking the place of actual thought, perhaps there being some more thoughtful people in the world.

At the most basic, there are good pragmatic reasons for being more thoughtful – that the more clear you are on where you are going, the more likely it is you will get there in the end. There is a bit of quietistic tendency in my church, which has a bit of a pentecostal history, which says that we should just wait for God to make his will known, and then do that. I have a number of problems with that:

• Is that really how we see God acting in the Bible, and throughout history? People seem to be doing things – seeking God’s will certainly, but not waiting for special leadings all the time.
• It is a way of killing discussion: no-one wants to be seen as being presumptuous enough to pre-empt God.
• When people want to build a church building, they don’t lie around waiting for God’s instructions – they hire an architect and builders. They seek God’s will, but obey his general instructions of “make disciples of all nations” and consider that that covers what they are doing.

However, I think that this goes beyond the purely pragmatic. I think that to think about God is central to the Christian tradition. At the start of John’s Gospel, you find the following phrase: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Greek word which is translated as “Word” in English is logos – which is the word both for “word” and “reason”. What the apostle is saying is that self expressive reason is at the centre of God – and that puts it squarely at the centre of Christianity.

(This is the point the Pope was making in his recent famous speech. It wasn’t primarily about Islam at all, but about the faith vs. reason dichotomy in the West. I am lifting a lot of it for this article, but I recommend reading it.)
Further, we are directly commanded to think about God – Jesus said Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (Mt . 22:37)
The traditional Christian teaching is that not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. This is in contrast with the approach which emphises the transcendence of God to the extent that it rules out though about him (Islamic teaching, apparently says that God is so transcendent that his will is not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality (I’m not an expert in Islamic theology, so I’m open to correction here.))

There is an equivalent school of hyper-Calvinistic Reformed thought which says that our natures are so sinful, that we are unable to approach Him in any way at all, and all our thoughts about Him are ruled out of court from the outset;God’s sovereignty is such that he could have made murder right and mercy wrong, and the very act of reasoning about God is an affront to that sovereignty .
Leaving aside the question of whether the term “could have” has any meaning in relation to God (how can absolute necessity have any contingency?), I think that this idea does serious dis-service to the Christian tradition.
While accepting that any of our thoughts about God are necessarily going to be inadequate, limited, but that is not to say we can’t say anything about God at all.
But how can we talk about God in a meaningful way? We can always bear in mind the inherently limited, analogical nature of what we are saying. We have experiences of God, which can provide data. Finally we can check our ideas against of those of others through the years – that is, we can make use of tradition.
Lewis talks about a conversation he had with an RAF officer during the second world war, who contrasted the reality of his experience of God, out in the desert, with the sterility of theology. Lewis described theology as a map, put together with the reflection and experiences of those who have gone before us, many of whom were far more in touch with God than us.
Of course, a prime source of talking about God, for Christians, is His self revelation in the Bible. Of course, this isn’t as straightforward as some people seem to think – what are we to make of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? And there seems to be so much killing in the Old Testament. I’m not going to address the problem of what to make of it all here, simply to say that if God had wanted us to have a leaflet laying out for us in words of one syllable all the facts about him, He could presumably have contrived to do so. The difficulty of the Bible itself is part of the evidence, I think. God wants us to think, and think hard.
The opposite pit we can fall into is that, far from denigrating reason, we can fall into a rigid, legalist, dogmatic, dry faith which is all about doctrinal correctness. We always have to bear in mind that this is God we are talking about, and anything we say about God is always tentative, with an awareness of our limitations as humans.
Having said all that, I think that thinking about God is a way to get to know him better. Not the only way, and perhaps not necessarily the best way for all people – who can deny that it is far, far more important to really love your neighbour as yourself than to have a thorough understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, say? – but it is a worthy path for those of us who hunger for understanding, who can’t accept “just believe this” – and I believe that that is many of us in these days.
The thing about thinking about God is: where do we start? How do we know we are barking up the right tree? I think this is where community comes into it. In written form, theology is the testimony of the Christian community, and a living Christian community is an important prerequisite to good thinking about God. The Christian tradition is inherently community minded I think. We are called into community, not to brood in solitude. Jesus went around collecting followers, he didn’t just meditate under trees and wait for people to find him.
My final point is that our relationship with the non-Christian world is in some ways determined by the quality of our thought. Obviously the quality of our love is chiefly important (by this shall all people know that you are my disciples),but the quality of our thinking, I think reflects the quality of our love – if I love something, I spend real time thinking about it, considering it. I know that in a post-modern society, the Christian claim to absolute truth is seen as dangerous, but not everyone has abandoned the idea of absolute truth.
Frankly I think that we have lost our nerve as Christians. We too easily give up
defending the rationality of our faith, and allow people to get away with characterising it as being primarily about feelings, where as I think that a very important aspect of Christianity is that it defends the insight that the reason is a transcendent reality, not a purely human conditioned thing, and it is this insight which is the only thing which makes thought possible.. Our reason is the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe because it echoes, on an infinitely smaller scale, the transcendent reason of God.
G K Chesterton talks about “The thought which stops thought” (in “Orthodoxy”), which is the doubt that we can think anything at all. Lewis talks about the difference between thoughts which have grounds (in the logical sense) – I have grounds to believe that 2 +2 = 4 – and those which have causes – the paranoid’s belief that the world is conspiring against him. If we are only meat machines, with all our responses pre-determined by our genes, our upbringing and conditioning, then all our thoughts are predetermined – they have causes, not grounds. And if that is the case, then our thoughts are not valid – so we can’t think anything.
Only traditional faith in the transcendence of Reason, in the person of God, can hope to overcome the toxin of determinism, and I think that it is one of our great tasks as a church to defend this insight in our society.