renaissance and relevance 1: the living God

I'm having something of an "old-school" renaissance at the moment. For me, old-school means the evangelical authors I read lots of during my time at Uni in England, particularly John Stott.

At college in Germany, we're thinking hard about how to make our theology relevant, often that means trying to understand the way other people think - studying the views of all sorts of different theologians, particularly those who are in no sense evangelical.

Although I've still got most of my last year left, there's a sense in which this renaissance and reflection is causing me to weigh up what I've heard from all these dissonant voices and try and work out the direction I want to go in.

There are several criteria which seem to me to be helpful in expressing how my thinking is, regarding these various theologies.

Is it about the living God?
Does it resemble the bible's witness and "take in all the data"?.
Does it build up the church?
What sort of people does it produce?

These questions are not as direct as simply asking "is it true" - but they are more appropriate because human theologies do tend to be a mixed bag - no-one's got everything right. Nevertheless there's a sense in which you can judge the flavour of a theology by asking these sorts of questions.

I'm going to try and talk about these questions over the next few posts. First up is:

The living God
I understand the problems caused by people trying to prove God's "existence" as if he were just another force in the laws of physics. This "force-god" ended up becoming incredibly small as scientific knowledge increased (which is why I think "Intelligent Design" will end up creating similar problems).

I also think that prolonged study of God from a birds-eye view makes you think that God is unimpressive or even non-existent. If you have a sort of "table-football" way of looking at God and the world then there's a sense in which God becomes just another plastic figure on the pitch.

There are all sorts of theologies which result from this table-football god. Most of the time it means that the "Managers" doing the theology are incredibly clever and impressive having studied the table-football pitch for so long in all sorts of languages. They certainly seem more impressive than the table-football god, who is merely another plastic figure, and as a result, their "schools" are full.

The difference between these sorts of theology and tasty, full-flavoured theology is that theology proper is about knowing the living God. The more biblical way of putting it is perhaps "being known by God" - that's better because it gives you the sense that the knowing is first and foremost about being taken up into something - someone bigger than oneself. Theology is not about studying table football. Theology is about being on the pitch and smelling the grass, heaving and panting after the ball and feeling the sting of the mud in the graze on your knee. You know nothing about the world outside the game. You're playing. And God encounters you. You don't see him coming, but when he speaks or acts it rearranges your world.

Considering all he has done to awaken my heart to love hearing him speak through the bible, answer specific prayers and confound me with sovereign coincidence, all the rebellion and self-centredness I have to offer seems incredibly ugly. But that's not the point - we are ugly and warped without him, but he is a God who loves to give grace.

Theology has got to be about the living God - the God who might just pull the rug from under your feet - the God who might make a bush burst into flames before your eyes (forget the table: you're on the pitch...) - the God who might raise someone from the dead.