A Practicing Theologian

I’ll be finishing my dissertation soon.  In just a few months I will complete the process of researching a particular area of theological discourse, with the goal of establishing myself as a professional theologian.  But what sort of theologian am I? 

 

By definition, a theologian speaks from within a particular religious tradition, and I can certainly say that I think and work within a Christian framework.  Most theologians speak from a particular ecclesiastical community as well – Catholic, or Reformed, or Orthodox.  Here, I fit less well.  I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, spent some very fruitful time as an Episcopal priest, and now belong to an independent neo-monastic community.  We have some wise and thoughtful theologians among us in the Lindisfarne Community, but I don’t know that the wider world would recognize us as a ‘school’ or ‘movement’ quite yet.

I don’t speak ‘to’ or ‘for’ any particular church.  And my work is not engaged with the cutting edge research valued by the academy at the present time.  I’m not a Moral Theologian, or a Systematic Theologian, or a Pastoral Theologian, or a Historical Theologian.  My work is about making meaning, and the ways that narratives have created meaningful encounters for Christians throughout history.  For a narrative to do that, the reader needs to develop the tools to interpret the story – the technical term for that is hermeneutic.  That’s what I do – I interpret religious stories.  And not just the ones from the seventh century, in Latin, from Ireland or Brittany or Anglo-Saxon England, although those are the ones I write about in the dissertation.  Religious stories are everywhere!  But we’ve lost the ability to ‘hear’ them happening around us, and we no longer know how to interpret the ones that we do know.

Rising in the morning and resting at night, that’s a religious story.  Opening to the light, and releasing into darkness, those are religious acts, and we do them every day.  Taking food and drink – growing vegetables and grinding wheat and gathering water and salting meat – those are religious acts, if we are willing to look at them that way.  It all depends on the story we tell ourselves about what we’re doing.  If we tell ourselves that light and dark and plants and water are the end result of scientific processes that do not require conscious interaction on our part, then we will experience the natural world as something separate and impersonal, dead and therefore exploitable.  But if the alternation of light and dark, the presence of water in our bodies and in our planet, the ability of humans and other animals to survive and flourish on exactly what the earth provides, can be seen as the play of Life constantly renewing Itself with us and through us, then it all becomes a religious enterprise. 

I am not a Church Theologian.  Nor am I an Academic Theologian.  I am a Practicing Theologian.  The story of daily life is my narrative, and the work of bringing a hermeneutic of reverence to it is my calling.  Perhaps there will also be an opportunity for paid employment doing what I’m called to do.  For now, at least I know what I am.