Is what you believe important? People argue about beliefs, but do they matter? Maybe you believe in an afterlife. Or maybe you believe in karma. Or maybe you don’t. While many people view theology and dogma as important, I want to explore what I think is much more important than theology.
The following is a text version of this posting.
It’s a question I’m asked from time to time. This time, the question was raised by a long-time friend. While having dinner with a few other people, my friend Joe, who has subscribed and watches the videos on my YouTube channel, Spirituality Beyond Borders, posed the question in this way: “You focus on spirituality. How is that different from theology?” It is true. Spirituality is important to me. Theology? Well, not so much.
Like others of my generation, because I was planning on ordination for ministry, in college I studied philosophy. I enjoyed the debates and appreciated the differences in philosophical assumptions rooted in epistemology and hermeneutics. It was intellectually stimulating and satisfying for me. Then I began studying theology. It was a lot like studying philosophy. I saw that the same tools in philosophy were applied to the study of God and God’s interaction with human beings. I realized that theology could be just as abstract as philosophy.
My essential problem with theology is this: if a deity exists, then to truly be God, this deity needs to be larger than our ability to define. Any statement we make about God must be inadequate. The only thing that we can be certain about God is greater than our ability to understand. Ultimately, God transcends our ability to define and understand because God is a Divine being.
What we can be sure of is our experience of the Divine. For instance, I can tell you that I know when I am in deep meditation, it’s as though I have moved into something like a different dimension of awareness. When that happens, I experience being present to something larger than life itself. I know that I’ve had this experience, that I’ve had it regularly, and I draw meaning and value from that experience. That’s the domain of spirituality.
Some theologians have had deep spiritual experiences. But too often, some theologians have used those individual spiritual experiences as the basis to state what everyone else’s beliefs should be. That’s the foundation for dogma. Once something is explained as dogma or in a creed, it’s often an intellectual statement people may agree with or not, but it’s removed from people’s experience.
One of the odd things about the study of theology is that it’s often taught with the foundations and early formulations first. Newer developments in theological thought are often left as optional. Imagine if in physics, students were primarily taught about Aristotle and Sir Isaac Newton but the work of Einstein, relativity, the Big Bang, string theory, and the stuff of physics from the last hundred years was left as optional add-ons. In theology, few students learn about contextual theologies like feminist/womanist theology, queer theology, or Latinx theologies until they reach advanced graduate seminars. Yet, the theology that’s emerged in the last fifty years is often the most engaging because it’s rooted in the experience of particular groups of people. Contextual theology is not theoretical but is grounded in real-life experiences.
I don’t regret studying theology. It’s a great intellectual exercise. But at the same time, I know that when I’ve been with people who are hurting and hurting deeply, whether it’s from the pain of abuse or abandonment, serious accidents or facing death, or from having experienced personal disasters or natural disasters, the theological categories I’ve learned don’t matter very much. They don’t speak to people’s experiences. What does matter is being present, sharing what I have found to be true about life and resilience, and supporting the possibility of hope rooted in living faith. That’s all about spirituality.
To that end, I think one of the most important ways to connect with people today is in spiritual direction. That’s because life is very confusing today and many of us are trying to sort out how to live in the face of things we can do little about. A well-trained spiritual director supports an individual in opening themselves to the experience of the Divine or the transcendent dimension of life while finding ways to walk each day through life’s challenges and discovering hope. For each of us, that’s not a process based on theological statements and dogma. Instead, it’s something rooted in that Divine spark within each of us.