From Stories to Theology
Many years ago I met a man in a wine bar who told me that he had just finished building a beautiful bridge over the River Shannon. I asked him how he had reached that position and he went back to his Meccano set, recounted the exams he had taken, graduating in engineering from university and making his way up through a series of ever more challenging projects.
I often think of him when I am faced with a congregation, many of whom have not graduated from the Bible stories, mostly told in pictures, which they encountered before they left primary school. If, I say to them, you are as serious about Jesus as you say you are, why don't you take Jesus as seriously as you take your job?
Now there is, of course, a neat answer to this which I have given myself which is that Christianity is a community of faith, not a never-ending seminar; but that does not free those who have the skills the broaden and deepen the kind of language they can use towards each other and themselves in order to be more deeply enfolded into the mystery of God. I'm all in favour of simple faith for the simple but I'm not in favour of the intellectual and perceptive equivalent of meteorologists waving a wetted finger in the air and making their pronouncements. So there is the final task of the librarian which is to enrich the impoverished. As I pointed out right at the beginning, there's no shortage of contemporary material from the esoteric to the populist and popular. I suspect our problem is that we have frightened so many people off because of the over claiming I talked about earlier because it is precisely that over claiming which has led to conflict; and people don't want any part of it. The average congregation knows little and cares less about the tensions at its Diocesan Church House, let alone the growlings at the General Synod of the Church of England or the ructions inside the Vatican but it suspects intrigue and bad faith and stays away; and the problem is that the politics of bad faith have come to tarnish what is loosely thought of as theology even though almost all of it is open minded and open hearted, constructive and encouraging, sceptical and uncertain. But, like the media's chronic misinterpretation of scientific processes and statistics, the pure realm of theology is interpreted by partisans in an unfavourable way. We have to understand enough of the initial sources to explain to possible enquirers what they are in for. It is a statement of the obvious but one that I think bears repeating: everybody is better than they think they are; it just requires some persistence to discover it.
God is not easy and ought not to be; to think or say otherwise is to mislead - and there has been quite enough of that through the two millennia of Christianity - but the complexity has to be put into perspective. We are, after all, theologians and librarians alike, simply the mats on which people wipe their feet before they kneel to pray.