2024-07-09 A Meditation on Errant Theology
“16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (Acts 17:16-21 ESV)
Even though there is so much that seems automatic about something so trivial, benign, as our faith, in fact sacrament and thinking along its lines, reveals a hasty compromise followed by reassertion, affirmation, completion of the Actual Faith as revealed to us. Individually to each of us: that plain eluding more treacherous theology, it turns out that the treachery is front and center, our “obvious” course of life in community is to accede to the treacherous doctrine.
Meantime to contemplate lofty matters is never to get too far from the actual Pain in our lives, the Pain of literal war and opposition: a sad day, for everyone, when the battle is first joined. A sad day when someone puts their foot down, someone in our camp or perhaps someone who has something meditative for us to reflect upon if it is us who are bending unto something evil. Is it us, or is it a vast conspiracy underlined by a vast sleepwalking estate? That we are befuddled, mystified, perplexed at the patient infamy of the sleepwalking church. How, could no one have heard the alarms as sounded in each and everyone’s ears? How, could we lump everything we don’t like under the rubric of “laughable”, “oh no, not more of THAT kind of talk”, somehow we have been trained in extremes, and do not allow self-corrective lenses, steering at the helm of the ship, towards retrospection.
Therefore people properly mourn a day of war, because it is tedious thus to have our minds occupied; it is sad for sure, but tedious as well: the expanses of a liberal society, which society we forget not to take for granted, have acclimated us to space and time and prospect and contract, fairness and duty, justice and earnings, purpose and entitlement.
The hard facts of errant theology, then, are cause for concern but not alarm: that sacrament called Affirming, called Nodding Towards, called Voicing, does erase all harm done… but see! See how easy it is to have begun our faith walk on the wrong terms. No, no, no, that won’t do: here I thought I could take something for granted, but it calls for an Alert and a Purposeful tack.
And then notions of Holiness, of our personal hygiene, of our spiritual pains taken not to confuse the yes and no of a fast with the spiritual yes and no of proud thoughts or manipulative reactions: we are some of us so mightily inexperienced by way of contrast, yet also are therein invited, hearing an invitation, to dabble just a bit in retrospective repentance, in forgiveness, in reaction to a world that does after all convict us.
And all this as we pray to erase from our theoreticals the People, the Name, the Person: in this sense: that we not lump bad theology with named entities, except to address any public exhortations of course to ill theology; but to love and care for each individual, and see a tandem, group-enacting, Hope and Discovery and yes Sacrament of acknowledgement. All this in the faith that each day and each hour we are newly recreated, and it does matter with whom and how we speak: we are Available, big or small as we are, to be Present to the company.
The distractions, then, after knowing that on some level all things are related to each other; our day of sad news is met with our haste to Acknowledge and pray up a storm unto Afterwards Afterlife. Of joy just in today’s Believing. Of sincerity around speaking truthfully of what has the capacity to Heal we ourselves, not being ironical in what most matters, but sincerely trying to make a difference, having concluded that One has died for all, so all have died (2 Cor 5:14).
All are just trying, on some level, to get by; and we are turning outwardly away from the infamy, the weird and awful rumors that have taken us so long to hear ourselves, and of course not neglecting the duty of responding to some things, yes, but also to know our chief response is that Christ has done it for us, so we join the battle prayerfully: it shall indeed be a New Season; it shall indeed mean No to some things customary or temporary, some Experience of Peace; but we shall find our homebase with the company, and there see something of life springing eternal.