It dawned on me a few years ago, that theology is a dynamic, living thing even though we treat it as a static, immovable set of ideas. By calling it a “thing,” I’ve already set the wrong tone, because theology is not a thing at all. Theology is a process of thinking. By the way, thinking qualifies as “believing” if one needs to expand the definitions. I have never felt the need to distinguish everyday thinking from believing as I generously include all such interior processes as one and the same. Somehow they are connected if I’m faithing and thinking honestly.

In regard to theology, we must have been taught in an earlier era to not think, not challenge, not accept our Christian freedom that claims we are free to study and think and reflect as part of our growth as believers. In truth, I think we are born as theologians and later cut off that part God created in us because we feel inadequate or unworthy. I believe children are born theologians! I love their sense of wonder … their sense of curiosity … their honesty about what they think and the gift of faith they sense innately. It’s later in life we become more cautious and wounded from shame. Some have consequently put a lid on their curiosity and given their brains over to authoritarian pastors who supply them with every thought they should be thinking.

But we can rediscover our need to theologize if we are willing to risk it. Theological studies began for me at Baylor when I was nineteen or twenty and early on I learned theology is way of thinking that pushes one to the fringes of what is known so that what is not known can be considered as a form of exploration. A starting point would be to recognize that the God of creation is a God who welcomes the questioner to ponder the depths of the universe. The risk of this way of living is the price we pay to grow and keeps the fires of thoughtful reflection alive.

When I say theology is “alive,” I don’t mean it’s not without its holding features. Theology is not untethered but is rather attached to every significant relationship. Theology is held by our responsibilities to live up to its meaning. It is held by Scripture although we must admit the Bible doesn’t sit still with its pronouncements and demands and because of that, we study hard to discern its deepest meanings and not get distracted by its superficial or simplistic meanings.

I would also add that theology is held by our commitment to community. This may illustrate our need to be in a community of believers with whom we trust and have deep commitments so we don’t drive the theology of belief off in the ditch of false-faith.

Francis Schaeffer in the 1970’s asked an intriguing question, “How shall we then live?” implying that issues of real life must be connected to faith in order to know how our living could be termed, “christian.” While there wasn’t much I found to agree with Schaeffer’s methodology in utilizing the tools of faith, I do think he got the question right. That’s why theologizing is important. It allows us to ask the questions and make critical decisions about how we will use the toolbox of faith in coming to conclusions.

Most of us don’t accept our status as theologians. We think that’s only for academic-minded persons who have committed their entire lives to diligent and arduous scholarship. Obviously such persons help stir the pot of ideas regarding belief, but even they don’t live in a vacuum. I look upon their work as those who have the power to stimulate and challenge our old worlds so we might then be free to do our work at a deeper level. Like most provincialisms, our home-grown beliefs need to be open to challenge from all corners of faith’s world.

Theology is an art that demands illustration …

Here are a handful of current issues I believe we as 21st century believers should be theologizing about. You will recognize that none of these issues are easy although you may have already done some good work in thinking theologically about them:

Poverty and Economic Injustice  The more we sense the leadership of God to meet our community at their point of need, the more we encounter the harsh reality of poverty. There are an assortment of attending concerns (as poverty never exists by itself):  education, single parent families, stigmas and prejudices, racism, and on and on we could go. At its core, poverty and economic disparities are issues of biblical justice. Read the Bible through the lens of God’s view of justice and you will sleep uneasy tonight.

Racism  Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. we’re still struggling to come to terms with the equality of all human persons. Racism is evidence of our fallen nature of sin that would withhold mutual respect based simply upon superficialities of skin color, or ethnicity, or some other notion that minimizes the imago dei (image of God imprinted upon every person).

Sexual Orientation  Every religious group I know of is struggling to deal with this pernicious issue. While the Bible has harsh words to say about this personal issue, there is also the noticable silence of Jesus about the issue and the assumption the Bible seems to make that sexual preference is the result of choice. The church clearly cherry-picks the issue while ignoring other issues. I believe the church will eventually level out and be less divisive in the future, but there is much work to do.

War and Militarism  Terrorism is not new to our time, but its effect upon our world is felt more deeply than ever before. But what shall Christians do with our moral struggle of waging war in order to protect our energy interests in the Middle East? There are many talking points to be sure, but one of the issues that has emerged in our war in Iraq is the discussion among Christians over the use of torture on prisoners of war. The newspaper just this week carried stories about the support of torture by leaders of the religious right. While I cannot fathom how one can support torture of prisoners of war from a Christian point of view, I do recognize there are other Christians who somehow believe this is a position that faith can support.

See what I mean?

Theology can be a moving target and who can say with absolute certitude that one holds the high ground? How does one come to believe their beliefs are Christian while other points of view are what we might call sub-Christian or even false belief?

In the end, I would encourage you to push the boundaries of what you think and allow yourself the right to call yourself a “theologian.” Faith is not meant to be something taken out of the closet and worn only on Sunday like a sport coat and tie that’s never worn anywhere else. It’s meant to be lived but in order for it to be lived, you must be alive and aware and curious. You must engage faith and think deeply about what it means to be Christian.

Sunday before last, Dith Pran died. I’m guessing you don’t recognize him by name, but that doesn’t matter as he became famous for his actions in his own native country of Cambodia in the years following the American war in Vietnam. The aftershocks of that tribal war reverberated throughout Southeast Asia no doubt stirred by our secret bombing of Cambodia in a vain effort to intervene in a Vietnamese civil war that had been going on for decades. The French gladly stepped aside in the late 1950’s to allow the U.S. to attempt to complete what they had not been able to do. Thus, the war continued on for another decade and a half.

Under extreme conditions, Pran bravely navigated the merciless rogue troops of the Khmer Rouge that killed nearly two million of their own citizens in a bloodbath not widely reported until after the slaughter was mostly over. He himself was held captive for four years and watched countless numbers of persons who were massacred and left in what he termed, “the killing fields.” It’s an incredible film to watch and it tells in pictures more than I am capable of describing in words.

Isn’t it odd how we in America can blithly know that such mass murders are occurring but turn away our eyes to this knowledge until it’s over, only then to ask “why?” When intervention is too late, we are like onlookers at a wreck on the highway craning our necks to see but unwilling to stop and help.

Dith Pran would have been another of history’s obscure asterisks had it not been for his partner, New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg, who was in Cambodia to record the story of a nation’s massacre of its own citizens. Pran was Schanberg’s assistant, translator, and photographer. Nevertheless, Dith Pran became famous in America because his story was told first in The New York Times and later in the 1984 Academy Award winning film, The Killing Fields.

One day, Schanberg and two other foreign journalists were seized by the Khmer Rouge troops. Pran sensed what was about to happen and told the soldiers the journalists were not Americans but rather French reporters. He told them they were not there to write anything bad about the soldiers but to record the glorious triumph of the Khmer Rouge. After hours of this kind of negotiating, the journalists were released to safety.

After being forced to flee Cambodia, Schanberg lost track of Dith Pran. He had been captured by the communist regime and endured four years of starvation and torture. In 1979, he miraculously escaped and told a story of despair beyond words and imagination. Through Schanberg’s efforts, Pran immigrated to the United States.

Pran’s son, Dith Titonath, talked on his father’s behalf in speaking about the Cambodian genocide by admitting to his childhood fear, “I never thought I was going to see my father again.” Pran’s son had been a small child when his mother and other siblings escaped on one of the last helicopters out of Cambodia. They eventually relocated to the United States without Dith Pran who remained behind, lost in the fierce storm of the Khmer Rouge. When they were reunited in 1979, the children didn’t recognize him as he was frail, stooped over, and missing teeth. But he had survived.

Last fall, Dith Pran contracted pancreatic cancer. Schanberg traveled to be with him through the last stages of his illness. He spent weeks with him, laughing and talking as brothers bound by their survival from the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge. One evening Schanberg overheard a night nurse call Pran “(an) effervescent soul.” Having faced death so courageously, he became someone filled with life.

Near the end, Schanberg told Pran he believed in an afterlife. Somehow he wanted to keep their relationship intact even beyond the inevitable. “You know,” he said, “we’ll have to find a way to communicate with one another.”

Pran thought about that for a moment and said, “I’ll send you my dreams.”

And Schanberg replied, “And I’ll send you mine.”

“Preacher, can I confess something to you?” Birdie seldom uses the word, confess, in any association to her own sins, so I was skeptical of her question. More likely she meant, “Can I tell you something you might not want to hear?” Birdie and I have a long friendship so I felt free to cut to the chase: “Is this about one of your sins or one of mine?”

“Well, it’s not certainly not one of my sins, I reserve that for my higher being and you don’t qualify.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

“I’ve got something I want to tell you that might be of interest to you about your profession as a pastor.”

“That’s what I thought, it’s about one of my sins!”

“Rev, be quiet and let me get on with it! What I want to point out is how absolutely weird you ministers can be. I think being in the ministry pushes some of you right to the edge of sanity. What’s especially strange is when you get to the edge most of you jump. No one pushes you from behind. You jump on your own. What I’ve noticed is the more insecure some of you are, the more likely you are to carry a big Bible. The way I see it, the bigger your Bible, the more insecure you are. ‘The Big Bible Boys’ are the ones we call, ‘all blow and no go.’ In other words, they want you to think they’re spiritual giants and have a direct connection to God Almighty. They want you to think that when their lips are moving, God is speaking.”

“But that’s not all. Sometimes just the opposite happens. If you’re insecure about your identity as a God-called pastor, you might carry a small Bible. That’s if you carry one at all. I call these ‘the Little Bible Boys.’ Most of them have something useful to say on God’s behalf, but they don’t think of themselves as God’s mouthpieces. They have their ego in check but it’s overkill because sometimes they don’t have enough ego. You’re one of the latter and not one of the former.”

“That’s your big confession? That’s what you wanted to say to me?”

“Yeah. What I was worried about was how you would take it coming from me.”

“Well, I can see how you’d worry about that. But maybe you’re on to something. Reminds me of one of those pastors standing on the brink of insanity as you so clearly describe. Instead of jumping, he did something so odd and unusual it rattled the cage of everyone around him. Instead of carrying a Bible, he picked up one of those pictures of Jesus we all grew up with. You know, the one by Werner Sallman, the painter. It was a life-sized picture of Jesus looking beatifically up at God and there’s a light from above shining down on him. The spooky thing is he looks like one of those hippy figures from the 60’s … brown hair and beautiful blue eyes.”

Birdie nearly jumped out of her seat. “That’s one of my favorites! I remember it from my childhood. Jesus always watched over us kids. For the longest time, though, I thought Jesus grew up in California because no one in my church would let him into our sanctuary with hair like that!”

“Exactly! Well, this pastor friend of mine got so weird, he started carrying this bigger-than-life portrait of the blond-haired, blue-eyed beatific Jesus around with him everywhere he went. He never said a thing about it; he just carried Jesus under his arm. When he rose to preach, he would gently sit Jesus up in his chair on the podium looking out over the congregation while he preached. I heard some deacons were so spooked they started tithing. One deacon stopped smoking. He even carried Jesus with him to the mall one day. People looked at that preacher and were so startled they sized him up to see if he was packing heat. The mall security came and asked him a lot of questions. Turned out, he was carrying Jesus around with him to make people nervous. It worked too. That pastor scared the bejeebers out of the whole town. Wasn’t long before the chair of deacons had to ask him to tone it down. Know what he said to them?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Told him he wanted to have more of Jesus in his life. That deacon looked at him like he was from Mars.”

“How’d that go?” she asked.

“He’s happier now than ever with his new job selling boats down at the Marina. Seems he wanted a chance to do something else besides carry around with him the guilt he had over his little Bible and his life-sized Jesus and his inadequate feelings about being a pastor but he couldn’t think of a good reason to make his break. He was afraid his church members would think he was a quitter.”

“Dang. I thought I had a good confession. Didn’t know you had one of your own!”

“Confession is a mighty powerful thing, Sister Birdie. You should try it sometime!”