There is no word more contentious now than the word “God”. Think about the current religious marketplace and half a dozen books on the New Atheism, Emerging Church/Theology, popular spirituality, interfaith dialogue, currents and trends in the Islamic world and on the diet of Jesus pop to mind.
If you hold this with the uncertainty of the religious marketplace, which continues to search out the world's great wisdom traditions and reduce them into products of mass consumption, then the word “God” and its network of implications and connotations begin to make themselves clear. As liberation theologian says: ‘Not Theology. Poetry. The poet is the person who speaks the words that are not to be understood, they are to be eaten. And his stove is his own body lit with the fires of his imagination…’
What Is a Theopoetic?
A theopoetic is about telling the story of faith in a way that opens a longing, a healing and a reconciling, but that does not assume anyone has the answers. It is telling a story that invites new story, new telling, new wonder. In this way the gift of the Jewish midrash can be understood: the collection of interpretations that overlap, compete, contradict and all of which are true. Or in simpler terms: theology is in the argument, or in the story.
In this God (or the universe, or the mystery) becomes the story people tell not only of the ‘w/holy other’ but of themselves. They understand that the story they tell is not about something disconnected from them, but something that is rooted in their being, in hungers and desires. God becomes the event of their own being and longing. This theopoetic becomes a place where both atheists and religious become co-creators, companions on the journey and conversation partners in the search.
Nomadic Generation
Maybe this is the place where the New Atheists and the emerging and postmodern religious can meet. When God stops being the definition or the answer and instead becomes the grand question that is placed at the center of being then dogma can fall away and humanity may be able to find itself face to face with a faith that is rooted in the wonders and awe of the universe without having to defend the crimes of the past. One can be religious again, recognizing that traditions contain multitudes of competing beliefs over shared narrative, holy texts, holy places, saints, mystics and pilgrims but is never any one of those things, never fully defined or done becoming.
Religious Atheism
Maybe this is the place where the New Atheists and the emerging and postmodern religious can meet. When God stops being the definition or the answer and instead becomes the grand question that is placed at the center of being then dogma can fall away and humanity may be able to find itself face to face with a faith that is rooted in the wonders and awe of the universe without having to defend the crimes of the past. One can be religious again, recognizing that traditions contain multitudes of competing beliefs over shared narrative, holy texts, holy places, saints, mystics and pilgrims but are never any one of those things, never fully defined or done becoming.
