I was driving home today watching the best redneck firework shows put on this side of the equator (those Brazilians…) and couldn’t help but let my mind drift off into something unintelligible. I hear “Christian” takes its roots in some translation of “little Christ”, and I’m left to wonder whether some language somewhere takes “Theologian” and to mean “little god”. That either takes on super or horrible connotations, I’m not sure which (yes I am, who am I kidding).

Eating chicken fingers with Jarad and trying to give off the “I’m psychotic yet in control” impression, he let me know that I have an unhealthy disdain for theology in general. Psychotic or not, I have to agree.

Something people struggle with in their studies of the giant squid is that you really can’t get an accurate picture of an animal from carcasses that drift onto the shore. You’re left guessing on a lot of things: where it hunts, how it moves, maybe even its true color or correct position (upright or horizontal). Yet the respectable observers of our ocean-bound friends appear able to admit their shortcomings and offer us amazing insight despite their partial blindness. Theologians, it seems, never got the hint.

Taking this analogy to another level, for me it’s fairly certain that it’s impossible to see God divorced from his context: life. If we can accept that from him and to him and through him are all things, it isn’t hard to take another step to point out the innate dependency of our definition of God on our entire lives. And within this context, he makes sense. But pull him to shore, drag him into the realm of human logic and words, and before long I think you’ll agree with Nietzsche that god is dead because this thing we’ve brought ashore is not what we’re looking for. I don’t know how we confabulate so well to convince ourselves that when we want meaning and purpose what we’re really looking for is good doctrine.

I think one of my favorite Theologians if he could be called that is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What most people don’t know about Bonhoeffer is that he was executed by the Nazis for conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and he spent most of his “Letters and Papers from Prison” kissing up (or lying) to the various officers in charge of his life. Bonhoeffer’s “theology” consists of a bunch of contradictory propositions centering around a conception of Christ that really doesn’t make any sense whatsoever until you see it lived. It works. And it’s beautiful.

Americans have some strange fascination with religious officials of today, who by each of their respective standards are leading everyone to hell. I think the reason most theology is so incomprehensible is not because it takes a college education to understand God, but it takes a college education to dissect a dead horse only to realize it wasn’t a horse and it wasn’t dead. In some ways I wish we could follow the “little god” theologians who are following God into righteousness and love instead of the “little god” theologians who are armed with nothing more than dogma (an anagrammatic word probably chosen around the phrase “I am god”) and this new air-conditioned sanctuary.

There is nothing more fruitless than to resist a change in worldview in a changing world. You might survive one generation, but you are doomed to irrelevance in the next. The spirit of Christ transcends generational vessels of all expressions, internal and external.