Every January I tell the same story.  I was taking a required religion class when theology entered and then immediately took over my life.  I think it’s fair to say it swept me off my feet and then dropped me on the ground.  If you have never taken an opportunity to question everything you know, you should totally do that sometime!

Fair warning: things will get personal right away.

I am forever grateful that I didn’t have to go through it alone.  Like that really great friend who doesn’t make you feel better, except in the way he seems to totally understand what you’re going through, David Gray was there for me.  By some coincidence, I discovered his music at the exact same time seven years ago that theology found me.  I can’t say which one has been more important.

Theology did not strip my worldview of mystery, but it did of superstition.  I no longer look for secret meanings in things or assume that they happened for a reason.  I don’t wonder why certain people have entered my life. I’m just happy they’re here and for some reason like me enough to hang around.  I like the freedom I have in creating my own future.

But I also like knowing that for all my planning and good intentions, things I never predicted will come out of nowhere and make themselves undeniable in my life.  They might even happen all at once with no care to space themselves out or give a girl time to process what’s happening.

So, as to the future: I have no idea.  January always reminds me of that.

I don’t believe that things happen for a reason.  I did when I was younger, but then I started studying theology.  I believe we are really free and nothing is determined.  It’s one of the few theological concepts I don’t doubt on a regular basis.

But things have happened that have at least made me realize I’ve grown arrogant in my belief that life is predictably unpredictable.  You don’t know what I mean by that?  Me neither!

There are just so many possibilities in every moment and a universe full of creatures making decisions.  So how does anything ever happen?  And how does it so often happen in a way that seems to make sense?  Make so much sense that you can look back and think it had to happen that way.

It’s just that this year has been the year of everything happening in good time.  Things happen and that makes it possible for other things to happen and that makes it possible for other things to happen.  It’s always that way.  But I had this weird year where it would be so easy to say that things happened the way they were meant to happen.

I would be struggling with something.  Something I couldn’t reason or write my way out of.  Thoughts I knew were destructive.  I would feel like I was getting nowhere, and then one day it would just click.  And then soon after something would happen that I didn’t see coming and don’t know how I would have handled if my mind wasn’t in the right place. There are a lot of ways to make really good sense of this, but I have considered all of them, and this still strikes me as strange.

My life has never made this much sense!

I wrote too much this year to fall under the spell of creeping determinism.  It’s hard to delude yourself into thinking you knew things would work out when you have pages of, “I DON’T KNOW!”  But whatever happened this year, it wasn’t that normal life thing of being thrown into the deep end and learning how to swim.

So I still don’t believe that things happen for a reason.  I don’t want to believe that things happen for a reason.  I want to live in a world where anything can happen.  I want to live in a world where I make my own decisions.  But if I thought the universe had autonomous power, I would be sure it was working some reverse psychology on me this year.

Gold star if you know what movie the title is from.

Really, it’s like all of life.  In every moment, you make a decision; you choose one possibility, thereby excluding all the rest.  Sometimes you’re not aware of those missed opportunities and sometimes you’re painfully aware of them.  Saying yes to one thing means saying no to countless others.  Not even apathy is an out, because not choosing has the same effect as making a decision.

This is an idea very important to theology and I’ve always drawn a parallel between it and writing fiction, dialogue in particular.  A conversation starts somewhere and then in the back and forth of it, you end up somewhere else.  What one character says determines how the other will respond.  As the author, sometimes there are certain beats you want to hit, but you find the conversation has gotten away from you.  It went a direction you didn’t expect and your character has lost her opportunity to say that thing that sounded so brilliant in your head.  It’s no longer relevant.

Fiction only made me aware of this, but it happens all the time in real conversation.  Perhaps especially to those of us who think about things carefully before we articulate them.  You have something to say, but you hesitate and then the moment passes.  So you walk home kicking rocks and replaying how differently the conversation could have gone.

It’s linear.  It has a direction.  You can’t go back.

Except, I noticed something in real conversation, which informed how I write dialogue, which changed how I think about life, which suggested I’d underestimated the importance of freedom to my theology.  It’s as simple as saying, “Can we just go back for a second to what I was saying earlier?”  You don’t have to follow the normal flow of conversation.  You can stop abruptly and stay there (while everything continues to change around you) or you can start on a new direction.

And it’s the simplest thing, but it is really hard to do.  It usually involves speaking up, quitting, admitting you were wrong, apologizing.  And all acted out of uncertainty.  It’s one thing to take a big risk when it’s an opportunity that comes flying right at you, but it’s another to stop where you are and try to go back or forge a new path where there wasn’t one before.  I can’t count the times I kept walking in one direction, because I was too scared to stop and try another.

Realizing freedom is scary, so it’s no wonder we let it get lost in the flow of things.  The past wants nothing more that to repeat itself, but sometimes it’s worth it to fight the tide.  What I mean is that you’re not stuck even if it feels like you are.  All you have to do is change the conversation.

Any honest person contradicts herself regularly.  It’s okay.  You don’t even have to quote Whitman as a way of pointing out your own inconsistency.  We all contain multitudes and we understand.

Maybe I don’t want to be that bold.  Contradiction is a powerful thing, but it’s really only meaningful if you encounter it in the pursuit of consistency.  As soon as you stop fearing contradiction, everything becomes relative.  There’s no point in searching for the truth when you can settle for contradiction.

But you can go too far with consistency too.  You can force conflicting evidence to match your own logic or you can ignore it all together.  You can develop a perfectly coherent system that has no relevance to the living world.  But what good does any of that do you?

In theology there is a big emphasis on being systematic.  There are many ways to be critical of this, but it is still what most of us strive for.  What we’re doing is trying to explain everything in the universe and how it all fits together.  The wrong way to do it is to create a system and then explain how everything fits into it.

The better way to do it is to develop a system with the evidence you have and then change and grow that system as you gather more and more data.  You’re going to need the help of other people, because your perspective is limited.  But, even still, you’re going to have to accept that you will never have it all figured out.  It’s optimistic enough to think you can explain anything.

The assumption is that the world makes sense, which means that any contradiction is not really a contradiction.  It only seems like a contradiction because perspective is limited and we don’t know enough yet to explain it.  Maybe this is actually true, but I’m starting to think that contradiction should not so easily be dismissed.  There’s something of importance there.  This is where I get stuck, though, because I’m trying to explain what can’t be explained. I’m trying to say there’s something of value there, but I don’t know where or what there is.

I just have this sense (and I’m not alone) that we shouldn’t rush to explain contradictions away.  It’s not all that revolutionary to claim that we can learn something by studying the point where two things come into conflict, but I think it’s more mysterious than that.  Maybe even mystical.  The tension between two things that matter.  The allure of the paradox.   Ah, maybe if I read more philosophy, I’d have the words to at least makes sense of how some things don’t make sense.

Conflict is not at all the same as contradiction or paradox, but it’s related, and in my mind it’s all part of the same conversation.  Conflict is something I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to avoid.  I do not tolerate it well; it makes me physically ill.  So sometimes I don’t say how I really feel or I bend my will to save a relationship or I just go running in the other direction.   The least worst thing I can say about avoiding conflict is that it’s horrifically boring.  The worst worst thing is that by avoiding conflict you avoid all of those other things that constitute really living.

There is beauty in contrast. And, really, everything that matters happens when two or more things come into contact.  Unless they’re self-same, there’s going to be some level of conflict.  Maybe even contradiction!  I’m all for peace, but maybe we don’t have to rush it.

Some conflict can’t be avoided.  Some contradictions can’t be explained away.  That makes for pain and awkwardness and disappointment and not knowing, but some good things require walking through the fire.

I used to be frustrated by this pattern I noticed on the internet where every downer of a post was accompanied by an apology for being emo and followed up the next day with a list of reasons why the blogger should actually be happy instead of sad/lonely/anxious.  I always wanted to say, you don’t have to apologize for feeling the way you do or being honest about it and maybe you should just let yourself feel that way instead of trying to convince yourself you should feel differently.

But I kind of knew then and I certainly know now that I am a hypocrite in a number of ways.

I apologize all the time for feeling the way I do.  I soften things with language.  I say something bold, but then back down.  I try to force things into perspective.  In part because I don’t want to seem sad/anxious/lonely; I don’t want people to worry about me or think of me a certain way.  But also because it doesn’t feel entirely true–it’s not entirely true. That one feeling does not define me, but it’s hard to write in a way that makes that obvious.

In the very second that I am writing this, I am incredibly anxious.  And irritated by everyone and everything. I just snapped at a coworker for daring to talk to me.  I will be over it in a few hours and even right now it wouldn’t be that hard to make me laugh.  But I don’t want to be this person, so do I really want to share that I’m this person?  Plus, on the whole I have been dramatically less anxious than I was last year, and I would rather you know that.

Being sad is even more complicated, because I find it incredibly difficult to just let myself feel that way.  It’s awful and unromantic and only seems worthwhile when I’m looking back later from a better place.  I know the good advice is to just let yourself feel the way you do, but instead I do back flips trying to talk myself out of it, change whatever it takes, and always keep moving.  None of which is bad, but I don’t want to hide from the way I feel.

It’s hard to walk that line between letting yourself feel the way you do (and being honest about it) and actively working to change the way you feel (because you want to be a happier, better person).  But maybe that cheerful post you write the next day is not a way to make up for the emo one the day before, but a way of expressing all of the other things you feel.  Like, right now, I am so engaged in things I am reading and listening to and studying that I overflow (all over the internet).¹

1. Even though I don’t explicitly blog about theology that often, I’m trying to draw more attention to the way it’s actually at work in everything I talk about. For example, I seem to always be wrestling with this idea that you can be many things at once–not a mixing of them all, but seemingly contradictory things in their integrity at the same time–which is actually an important debate in philosophy and theology.  Christianity provides a model for how you can be two or more things at once.  That Jesus guy.  He was supposedly both human and divine.  Not half human and half divine, but fully human and fully divine.  This gets complicated with substance metaphysics, which I won’t explain, but even if not literally true, the whole idea that you can be fully something and fully something else is significant in philosophy.

I have two things to write about and I’ll try to make the case that they’re related.

The first comes from Conan O’Brien.  He was on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast and they were talking about everything that happened with The Tonight Show.  Conan said that he has tried not to settle for the simple story.  In the simple story, it usually happens that you were right and the other person was wrong.  The way things happened was inevitable and you saw it coming.

Of course you want to accept the simple story, because then the past is settled and you can move on.  I mean, if you were right and there was nothing more you could have done, because the future as it happened was inevitable, then you can wipe your hands clean of the matter and skip on your way.

But the reality is that nothing is inevitable and you were as much a participant in that past as the other person, who may still have been wrong, but is probably not an evil genius.¹  As Conan said, if the story is too clean, then you know it’s false.

I find it pretty easy not to accept the simple story, which if I can be honest, is sometimes maddening.²  My interpretation of that thing that happened hours/weeks/months/years ago changes all the time.  When your perspective is limited and your memory biased, there is no objective take. You have to accept that things will remain unsettled.³

This brings me to the second thing. A quote I came across on tumblr (via robot-heart):

“Even God cannot change the past.” –Agathon

Ah, a chance to talk about theology.  The thing about that quote is that I disagree.  God cannot change what has happened, but while what happened matters,⁴ what matters a lot more is what we think of what happened.  In the specific kind of theology I study, God is not omnipotent, but God is persuasive and through persuasion, God can transform the world and even the past.⁵

It doesn’t have to be a tragedy, but maybe that’s the easiest example.  Something truly awful happens to you.  There is no denying the suffering.  You can even call it evil.  But, over time the way you think about that thing is transformed.  Maybe good things come out of the bad.  Maybe you are able to forgive the person who wronged you.  Maybe the experience makes you stronger.  These things don’t make up for the tragedy, but they transform the tragedy so that its meaning becomes something more complex than simply evil and suffering.

The past  is not settled.  Meaning changes.  To accept the simple story is to deny reality and  limit the  meaning that the past might have for your life.

1. What’s simpler than an evil genius?!
2. I am more often guilty of the second part of that.  The creeping determinism that make you think you knew what was going to happen. But I believe we are free, so I don’t think things will inevitably happen a certain way. What a boring life that would be; not really living at all.
3. It’s more likely that you will stop caring than that things will become settled. Ahem, personal experience tells me.
4. I’m not arguing that either reality or meaning are strictly relative.
5. This kind of transformation does not require God, but if you are a theist, this is a way you might see God working in the world.

When I first started studying theology, I immediately fell head first into crisis.  That’s what happens when you question everything you believe for the first time.  Without the certainty I once possessed, it was a slow climb back to my feet, but I had the amazing fortune of ending up at the exact right school for me. The best place in the world to study the kind of theology that helped me find meaning again.

That was five years ago and a lot has happened since then.  Not everything that once brought me meaning now seems so convincing.  The content I still find beautiful and engaging, but I am no longer so confident we can really know all the things we claim to know.  There was no crisis this time; just the slow erosion of the ground under my feet.

I didn’t want to acknowledge it at first, but when it came time to write my Master’s thesis, I couldn’t ignore it any longer.  So I started at the beginning and questioned whether it really made a difference if there was a personal God or not.  I concluded that whether this God exists is ultimately unknowable, but that the constructive idea of a personal God still held a lot of meaning for me.  In other words, I am agnostic.  But, as for now, I still consider myself a Christian.

I had words to put with intuitions, but I was otherwise lost.  I grew complacent in my uncertainty.  I was in no hurry to fill the void and none of the obvious paths were attractive to me. With no clear perspective, it became difficult to write papers; sometimes I had to play the role of the girl who still held close to what she used to believe.

My love for theology faded and I began to doubt more and more that I would ever again feel strongly enough about a position to argue it authentically.  This didn’t make me the best PhD student, but I faked it with good grades.

Now, finally (okay, it’s only been a year or two), I’m starting to make meaningful connections again.  I’d like to think they are only more significant because I’ve been through this experience, but it’s frustrating to take two steps back with every one step forward.  It’s annoying that every one statement requires several qualifiers.  It’s easier to say nothing, but that’s boring and not an option in this field of study.   It’s a complicated world and my perspective is limited, but I’m finding my feet again.

I know it would make sense with as much as I talk about writing to assume that I study English.  I used to.  It was always my thing and even though I considered every other option, it was the obvious choice for a college major.  But half way through my junior year of college, I got distracted by theology.  I finished my English degree, but I added Religion as a second major and when it came time to decide what to do next, I knew I wasn’t done with theology.

I’ve always had a hard time articulating how theology so managed to sweep me off my feet and make me believe that a life spent studying anything else would be inferior.

The classical definition of theology is “faith seeking understanding.”  If I had to give an even simpler definition, I would say, “figuring out why you believe the things you do.”  Theology almost always refers to Christian theology and it’s different from philosophy or the sociology of religion in that it’s done by insiders.  That’s the faith part of “faith seeking understanding”; you’re starting already with some kind of commitment. I am a Christian and I do theology.

I get myself into trouble with people who hear I’m a Christian and then assume they know what I believe.  I’m a progressive Christian who studies liberal theology.  I probably have more beliefs in common with atheists than a lot of Christians.  And if I’m being intellectually honest, I border on being agnostic, which means that I don’t think we can know if there is a God.  It’s hard for me to say why I still identify as a Christian.  Maybe I won’t forever.  For me it is partly cultural, but it certainly goes beyond that.  My thought is so shaped by Christian theology and even if there is no God or even if I’m not convinced we can know if there is a God, you don’t have to be certain of something in order for it to have meaning for your life.

I could go a million directions from here, but I’ll try to limit myself to the question of why I study theology.  The absolute best answer I can give to the question of why I study theology is that it’s completely changed the way I view the world.  And there really is no shift more fundamental than that.  Theology is not just about what you think of God or Jesus or the after life or homosexuality or science; it’s about how all of those things fit together into a systematic worldview.  It’s like a Rubik’s Cube where you change one thing and it affects everything else.  You say God is all powerful and then you have to explain why bad things happen to good people and why you act like you have freedom and power of your own if you’ve just said that God has it all.  But, unlike a Rubik’s Cube, there’s no solving it all; you do the best you can and sometimes that means admitting that you’re not sure if Jesus is really God or not and you have to sit with that uncertainty.

It’s maddening to pursue questions to which you will never find absolutely convincing answers, but pursuing them anyway will change the way you think.  It will force you to question everything you know.  It will reveal the subtleties of the world.  And it will force you to be creative.  I’ve never written much about theology on my blog, but it has so changed the way I think that it underlies everything I say here.

One of the most valuable things about theology is the way it breaks down constructs. Everything you do, you do based on some kind of belief, but the truth is that some of those beliefs are crap and you will realize it the minute you apply reason to them.  But, that’s just in the breaking down, and theology does not stop there.  It’s not simply destructive.  It’s constructive too.  You question everything you believe and it hurts and you’re not left with much when it’s over.  But, you start building again.

You start looking for answers, but everything is so much more complex than before.  It’s nuanced and subtle and dynamic and hard to hold onto.  You wade through all of that and find things that feel right to you, that don’t bend logic, that make sense with the world you actually experience.  Often that means being creative, viewing old ideas through new eyes, redefining words, making things up.  You build from there, but this time with the humility to know that your perspective is limited and the things you’re describing are always changing.

That is the point when the world comes alive and you realize that in every moment, you are presented with uncountable possibilities and whether you take the path of least resistance or make the biggest leap possible, you’re never the same this moment as you were the last.  And everything around you, from the humans you share your space with to the atoms that make up that rock are making similar choices, defining themselves by the choices they make.  Maybe God is there, persuading you to choose the possibilities best for you and every other organism, feeling your pain when you experience it, but your decisions are your own.

Theology is deeply personal, because the things you believe are always personal.  Literature would sometimes challenge me in that same way, but it was easier to lose myself in other worlds and academic jargon.  Making up words is a favorite activity of theologians as well and we can debate things of seeming inconsequence for centuries, but it’s always connected to something bigger–to the questions in life of the most significance.  Like, why are we here and where are we going?  I study theology, because I think few things are more important.  What you think about yourself, what you think about the world you live in, and what you think about the people you share this world with shape how you live, whether you’ve ever stopped to dissect them or not.  You’re always acting on a set of assumptions.

If this all sounds cold and academic, then I haven’t explained myself very well, but if it seems watercolory, one color blending into the next to make beautiful and ugly designs, then I probably have.  It is nuanced and uncertain, but real and important.  It is not about one sphere of life, but rather underlies them all and motivates us in everything.  Theology is also about real world practicality (like how do we share this world with each other) and ancient logic problems (mostly having to do with Jesus, like how is the bread really his body and how can he possibly be both human and divine), but those things I could find elsewhere.  It’s this experience of the world like an artist experiences a painting that makes me think that even if I never do anything with these expensive degrees, my time spent studying theology could never be wasted.

For as long as I’ve blogged, I’ve intended to write more about theology. It’s what I spend my days studying. It’s what I’ll spend my life studying. But, I just never seem to get around to it. There are a lot of reasons. One is that, well, it’s what I spend most of my time doing, so it’s not always what I want to spend my free time writing about. Another is that when you study something so closely, it can be surprisingly difficult to step far enough back from it to explain it articulately to people who don’t exist in that same bubble. Laziness is yet another reason. But, probably the main reason I don’t write more about theology is that I’ve had a really hard time finding the right tone.

Growing up, I spent most of my time in my mom’s kind of religious household where we went to Lutheran church most Sundays. But, I spent every other weekend in my dad’s non-religious household where we never went to church. My mom remarried when I was 10, and we switched to my step-dad’s First Assemblies of God church where the old ladies wore flashy clothing and the youth group kids raised their hands in song. It wasn’t what I was used to and I didn’t belong, but I went to make my mom happy and because I had this strange belief that it mattered somehow that I’d made the sacrifice to get up early and make it inside that church building.

As a teenager, there was a part of me that wanted more. Sometimes I’d pick up my copy of The Adventure Bible with my name engraved on the front cover. I’d received it as a gift at my Lutheran confirmation. I’d flip it open to random sections and read for a while. I gave the youth group another try, but it didn’t feel right. Then one day I was in a used book store and I came across the first book of the Left Behind series. I read it. It didn’t scare me quite like it seems designed to. I didn’t run away screaming about the Antichrist or the Apocalypse, but I did learn something. All you had to do was say that you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior. That was it, but it seemed important. I wondered why no one had told me this before!

I read the rest of the Left Behind books that were available at that point. I mean, they’re pretty interesting books, but I didn’t totally buy into the whole thing. I wasn’t raised as an apocalyptic and I found it hard to believe that any God who could be called good would really torture people with locusts and evil leaders. I still wanted more, but I fell backwards into apathy again.

Then I moved away to college. Something happened to me in that first year. That feeling of wanting more went from a vague inclination to absolute desperation. I started reading the Bible from the beginning. I went to campus church services. I tithed my 10%. I talked to God constantly. My beliefs were a strange mash up of things I’d learned growing up, of general Golden Rule-type ethics, and supernatural/fundamentalist stuff I’d picked up from the First Assemblies church and the Left Behind books. I wrote obsessively in my journal about how I just had to have more faith, about how God had a plan, about how God wouldn’t give me more than I could handle. I was always saying that God was the greatest author of all.

I was unhappy that year, so I moved home to finish school. I was a lot less desperate and I slowly became a lot less religious. But, I continued to go to church with my mom and step-dad. There were a few things along the way that didn’t sit right with me. A tangent from the pastor about the ills of Harry Potter. An off-handed remark from another of the pastors about homosexuality. But, it wasn’t until the 2004 Presidential election that things really started crashing down. By that point in my education, I’d stopped pretending to be anything but a full-fledged liberal. I didn’t think this to be at odds with my religious beliefs. I was naive, and I could hardly imagine a Christian being anyone who didn’t support helping other people out through whatever means, including government.

As I’ve said before, I was devastated when Bush was reelected. And when we went to church that next Sunday and the pastor said condescendingly that those who’d voted for Kerry weren’t bad people and we shouldn’t judge them too harshly, I was in tears. I walked out that day knowing I wouldn’t be back. But, I didn’t question my religious beliefs. I’d reached them independently of that church where I’d never belonged.

That January, I was just an English major trying to meet her degree requirements and I found myself in Introduction to Theology. Truth be told, I didn’t even know what theology was. I probably looked it up in the dictionary before going to class; too bad I didn’t know then that every intro theology class ever begins with the question, “What is theology?” I don’t know what I was expecting, but by the end of that very first class session, I’d been thrown head first in a major theological crisis.

I’ve heard people describe beliefs in layers. There are the things you believe with little consequence or investment: that Dr. Pepper is the best pop (not soda), that boy bands are legit musical groups, that Fridays are for eating out and not for left overs. There are the things you believe more deeply: that women should have the right to choose, that pizza is really the best. Then there are the uncompromisables: that God is good, that I have a responsibility to other creatures, that I am free. The surface beliefs aren’t hard to question. Faced with convincing evidence, I didn’t have any trouble changing my mind. But, questioning the deeper beliefs was painful. People, especially non-religious people, often make the mistake of thinking that religion is something that can be relegated to its own sphere. But, theological beliefs get at the core of what you think about the world and how you live in it. That’s not the religious sphere–that’s everything!

There were things I believed deeply, but even as a junior in college had never thought about critically. You don’t just give that stuff up without a fight, but I could no longer believe honestly in some of the things I’d clinged to before. The crisis comes when you think, “what’s left to believe in?”

I survived the theological crisis more than I overcame it. I’d completely deconstructed my beliefs and building them back up again has taken years. I kept studying theology, because it felt more important and engaging than anything I had ever encountered before. Now, nearly five years later, I still find it just as engaging. I don’t regret for a second having questioned and broken down my beliefs, but I also haven’t forgotten how difficult and painful that was. It was like leaving one world behind, not knowing if there was anything on the other side.

That brings me back to the point of this post. I’m going to say this knowing that I risk sounding like I’ve got a superiority complex. That’s the point, actually. It’s hard for me to write about theology without very possibly offending some of the people who read my blog. Sure, faith is personal, but it’s not just personal, and I can’t pretend that when I argue for one thing, I’m not at the same time saying that I think a bunch of other people are wrong. It seems like I should be able to just share what I think and leave it at that, but every time I attempt, it comes across much more aggressively than that and the only way to soften what I have to say is to add all kinds of disclaimers or say what I don’t believe: that this is just my opinion and it has no bearing on your opinions. To be clear, I think there is a ton of room for different and even conflicting religious experiences;  I’m just saying that we can’t pretend that what we each believe doesn’t have consequences for other people.

The classical definition of theology is “faith seeking understanding.” To me, that’s where it’s at and in many ways, I’ve intellectualized my faith more than a lot of people. Maybe I’ve read too much Tillich, but I don’t buy that definition of faith that it is somehow at odds with reason. To believe something in the face of overwhelming evidence is anti-intellectual whether we’re talking science or religion. Reason is not the enemy and I don’t believe people should leave some of the most important things they believe unexamined because they know they can’t stand up to scrutiny.

Faith isn’t just emotional either. If there’s no substance to back it up, then it will not be powerful enough to motivate change or a certain way of life. What I’m saying is that faith is by no means just an intellectual pursuit, but you shouldn’t have to check your brain at the door either. For years and years, I checked my brain at the door, believed things that lacked logic, and ignored my experiences in this world–all so I could hold on to these ideas about God and the world that had been handed down to me.

That’s why I want to be a professor of theology. I want to challenge my students the way my professors have challenged me. To me, nothing is more important or exciting.

But you’re not my students. Not everyone is comfortable having their beliefs challenged, especially when they weren’t expecting it. At this point, I’m very used to it. There is almost nothing left of my uncompromisables. But, I remember how painful that process was for me. Maybe some of you don’t get that and you think I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but if you’re highly sensitive like me or if you’ve only ever been taught to believe one way, then you might take offense even if you know I didn’t mean any. Make no mistake, I want to push people and I think we should all examine our beliefs constantly, but I don’t know if this is really the best place for it where there’s not really a conversation unless you initiate it.

The reason I worry about offending people is not because I think my beliefs or methods are offensive, but because it’s so hard to get the right tone. Religion is a unique field of study in that no one is comfortable leaving it up to the experts (rightly so). Religious people (and, surprisingly, many non-religious people as well) hold their beliefs close to the chest, but, as I’ve noticed since I started studying theology, many people don’t know how to talk about what they believe, especially with someone who believes something else. What I want more than anything (for the simple reason that I enjoy it) is for people to talk about theology.

Being open minded doesn’t mean keeping what we believe to ourselves. It also doesn’t mean accepting everyone else’s beliefs as equally true. It just means being willing to entertain ideas other than your own. But, of course, it’s hard to entertain alternative ideas without having your own challenged. Thank goodness, because what’s the point in believing something you can’t talk about or challenge? My beliefs about God and the world are ever evolving as I learn more and experience more.

So, I’m going to try to write more about theology, skipping the apologies and disclaimers, because I know you don’t need any of that. You might disagree with me. You might even be offended. But, I hope you’ll be willing to talk, because talking about theology is what I love to do.

Just this afternoon, I successfully defended my Master’s thesis. So, I’m an MA now. Ashley M.A. You can call me that from now on. Just kidding. But, you will have to call me Dr. Ashley for at least a few weeks when I finally get the PhD. By have to, I mean that I won’t respond to anything else.

I know it probably seems to some of you that I must have completed this thesis twelve times over already. It feels that way to me too. And, okay, I technically do still have to make a few revisions, but this time few doesn’t mean 30 hours worth. Few means I hope to finish all the revisions tonight. And, the important part is that I have already passed!

Several people have asked me what my thesis is about, and I have kind of answered a few of those people, but my thesis has changed many times and I haven’t always felt like talking about it more than was absolutely necessary. But, now I’m more in the mood to talk.

I totally understand if some of you want to stop here, but if you’re interested in the details of my thesis, then, well, continue!

As most of you know, I study theology and philosophy of religion. Studying theology has always seemed to me like an exceptionally weird thing to do, even though I do it myself and am surrounded by others who have also made this weird choice. Truth be told: we are a strange bunch.

My school, together with the school across the street that I will be attending next year, is the place in the world to study the kind of theology I do. I avoid naming that theology on my blog, because it’s a tiny academic world and I don’t want to be that searchable (but, let me know if you’re interested).

I study this kind of theology, because, well . . . I believe it. I think it paints an accurate picture of God and the world. It’s a pretty radical picture, especially of God, but after you study for a while, what once seemed radical starts to see quite normal. Radical as I may be, I still consider myself a Christian and I still believe in God. But, over the last year or so, I’ve inched a lot closer to being agnostic; it’s not that I think there isn’t a God, but rather that I question how much we can know about God. So, for my thesis, I decided to look into a non-theistic strand of thought that exists within the theology/philosophy I study.

This strand of thought it called naturalism. Naturalists believe that this world is all that there is–there is no transcendent being who exists apart from the world who we might call God. Naturalists are mostly radical empiricists, so they do not speculate beyond what we have the physical evidence to support. There is little or no empirical evidence to suggest the existence of a transcendent God, so they don’t posit belief in one.

In my thesis, I explored the limits of naturalism, so I asked, what’s missing if you take God out of theology. My first conclusion is that radical empiricism is not the best epistemology (way of knowing). It’s far too limiting to stick to only what you have the physical evidence to support. Empiricism leaves no room for imaginative thinking–of exploring ideas. You don’t have to know that something is undeniably true in order for it be a powerful idea. It’s important to always keep in mind that our knowledge is limited, but we can do this, even while exploring new ideas and regularly testing them against our experiences of the world. This is a difficult concept for people to grasp, especially when it comes to religion. I mean, religion is supposed to provide certainty about the world, right? Isn’t that why it’s so appealing to people? Yeah, that probably is why it’s so appealing, but people who dismiss religion so simply as something to lean on to calm their fears about the unknown, well, those people fail to understand the complexity of religious experience.

My answer to the big question is that a personal God is missing from naturalism. A God who knows me and understands me and laughs with me and grieves with me. Maybe this God cannot intervene in the world, but I talk to God and God understands and wants what’s best for me in every moment. While I can’t conclude that a personal God definitely exists, I maintain that such a God provides existential meaning and serves as a powerful symbol for religious experience. Without such a symbol, I think religious naturalism is lacking. So, for now, I continue on as a theist. Certainty is overrated anyway.

I’m talking about my post on God.

More specifically, I’m talking about people not agreeing with me. That was a first. I thought it might happen when I brought politics to the blog, but it turned out I was pretty much preaching to the choir.

Let me say that I’ve secretly been hoping to post something where people would disagree with me, and secretly scared of posting something where people would disagree with me. There was no reason to be scared.

Of course, I would never post anything just to be controversial, but I like talking about serious issues and I love to debate.

But, just to be clear, I’m telling you what I think. I’m not attacking what you believe. I don’t necessarily want you to believe what I believe. And, I welcome you to question or challenge me.

Okay, back to puppies and rainbows and gum drops for now! Thanks for your participation everyone!

I hear this a lot: “If there is a God, then why does He let bad things happen to good people?”

I don’t blame anyone for thinking this. If you are a Christian, then this is a legitimate question to ask of the tradition you know, and if you are not a Christian, then this is a legitimate question to ask of the Christians you know.

But, I have a couple problems with it. First, that glaring He; yeah, it cuts right at my soul. Second, it’s that word “let.” God lets bad things happen.

Maybe it would surprise you to learn that I don’t believe in an omnipotent God. I don’t believe that God is all powerful. I don’t believe God knows the future. And, I definitely don’t believe God is a he!

I’ve thought this way for more than two years of very deep study, so it’s sometimes hard for me to remember how radical it sounds. Some people ask whether a God who is not all powerful is worthy of worship. I mean, you can’t pray to this God and then expect some kind of intervention. God does not have that power.

I don’t completely buck tradition. This God I talk to is all loving. And, I don’t need to accept contradiction in order to believe this. I don’t have to somehow explain to myself why a God who is all loving lets people suffer. I don’t have to explain why God intervenes to save some people and not others. I don’t have to marvel at the miracle of one person surviving that plane crash when 200 other people died.

God does still have power. It’s just persuasive power, and not coercive power. God cannot force you to do anything. You make your own decisions. You are free. But, God loves you. God wants what’s best for you, and in every second, God is working in the world to persuade you to make better decisions. The question is whether you’re listening or not.

When you suffer, God suffers. When you cause others to suffer, God feels their pain and yours, and works to persuade you to make the best possible decisions given what you’ve already done. Sometimes God can only persuade you to make the least worst decision. And, always–ALWAYS–you can say no!

This might sound completely radical to you. Or, it might sound a little too warm and fuzzy. I understand.

I can’t believe it’s taken me six months to write a post about theology. But, here I go. I hope not to offend anyone, but I welcome any responses. I can’t explain my own theology in one post, so I will tell you that most assumptions you might make about what a Christian believes (especially if you live in the United States) are not what I believe. If you don’t want to wait around for me to explain myself, feel free to ask me questions.

You know when you feel something–have a sense of it–but you don’t really understand it until you find the right words to explain the way you feel? That happened to me a couple weeks ago.

I was talking to one of my professors. He was asking me questions, trying to get a sense of where I stand theologically, so that we could figure out what doctoral programs would be best suited for me. Most people who study theology academically are far more progressive than your average Christian. Even within the academy, I study with the more liberal folks. Many of them are what you could call post-Christian.

I stand at the boundary of Christianity. My professor asked, “the boundary between Christianity and . . . what?” This was easy for me. Agnosticism. I am on the boundary between Christianity and Agnosticism. That’s it!

What does that mean? It means that I call myself a Christian (though many Christians would not consider me such). I stand within the Christian tradition. I talk to God as if God exists. I see the influence of God in the world. I act as if there is truth to my Christian claims.

But, often I feel like there’s no way to know if there is a God, no way to affirm Christian truths, and no way to prove anything. That’s what Agnosticism is. It’s not that you haven’t made up your mind about theism yet–it’s that you think whether or not God exists is not knowable.

That’s where I stand. I’m a Christian who isn’t sure she can really know what she claims to know.

There’s a similarity between Fundamentalists and Atheists that neither wants to acknowledge. They both think we can make ultimate claims with at least some degree of certainty. Claiming God absolutely does not exist is really not that different from claiming that God absolutely does exist. Both groups think this is something we can know. I will give atheists the fact that it’s easier to believe something isn’t there than it is to believe that something is there, but I don’t know that they always acknowledge the implications of their certainty.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with atheism. It’s a legitimate point of view, I don’t feel threatened by it, and I might end up adopting it one day. I only object when atheism become fundamentalism–when the certainty of atheists becomes arrogance that makes it impossible for them to even listen to people with other theological positions.

I am suspect of anyone who can’t talk theology with people of other opinions, because that would threaten their own beliefs. I think we should all be suspect of any beliefs we hold, but would not be willing to question. It’s risky to hold onto anything so tightly that you can’t acknowledge dissenting opinions or change circumstances.