Posted by SK at 03:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

This series, Telling Tales, represents my journey from being a well-honed theological student raised in a strictly evangelical paradigm of life and faith to being a more critical thinker and communicator of the story of my life and faith.

I wish to end this series in a way that does not impose the reality of my journey upon anyone else. It is not something to be universalised. I think the present intellectual climate tends to universalise too much, and often, unnecessarily. I seek to avoid that in the communication of this change that has taken place in my understanding.

I am not denying the benefits of my evangelical upbringing. Neither am I reacting with disdain towards the prevalence of the intellectual climate within the Christian tradition I have grown up in. I understand that it is precisely such an intellectual unbringing that has enabled me to critically examine and acknowledge its own limitations. Perhaps I am simply seeking a better way to view my faith. And my life.

Finally, I do not desire to engage in open challenges and debates with my friends who may have settled on the position of primacy in the role of expository preaching. I understand that there are wonderful and effective expository preachers out there, and they have blessed many Christians. Just not me. My life was radically changed when I discovered the power of the story.

But if you, like me, are wondering what is still missing in your passion for the word, then I wish to invite you to embark on a journey of unlearning what you have been comfortable with for years, and relearning the story of God. Your story. Eventually, you will no longer find a need to quote chapters and verses. You will simply tell the story as it is, knowing that the significance of your story has been found in the greater story of God. You will tell tales. You will be a storyteller.

Posted by SK at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

To be sure, the thought of storytelling invokes the disdain of many expository-minded Christians who think that this is the only one best way to know God’s word. They are able to tolerate – maybe even appreciate – very brief stories that illuminate sophisticated articulations, but not the telling of stories as entire sermons in themselves. Embracing the simplicity of stories that seek to drive messages without confounding complications is “Sunday School stuff”, they say.

But I have decided that this isn’t the way I want to communicate the story. I want to communicate the story in a way that makes a little child sit in my arms and an elderly man hang around me, simultaneously, both listening to the same story and identifying with the message of the story.

Some will say that this makes a sermon shallow. It has “no standard” (local expression, meaning “lacking in quality”), they claim. They crave profundity, for profoundly abstract thoughts are what determine the depth of a Christian. What a presumptuous assumption! Besides, one should never confuse complication for profundity. Profound depth can be communicated in the simplest of ways.

I have begun to draw away from the paradigm of expository preaching that I so highly exalted since having gone through vigorous theological training. I now gravitate towards the art of telling stories. Rather than being known by the literati as a keen expositor of the word, I want to be known by the simple-minded listeners as the man who tells tales. But of course, if expository preaching is your cup of tea, I’ll keep cheering you on. As for myself, I’ll keep “telling tales.”

Posted by SK at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

With a degree of guilt-ridden confidence, I must confess that I no longer believe in expository sermons. I believe in expository preparation, for it is a tool that helps me to understand the message in deeper measure. But it is not to be held as the hermeneutical arbiter.

The hermeneutical arbiter of the story (including scripture, which is the documented part of the story) is the entire community of saints, both past and present. And future. Hence, I do not believe in expository preaching, but I believe in expository preparation as one of the many creative methods of rediscovering the story.

I see expository preparation as the easy part of any sermon preparation. It is the presentation of this preparation in a form understood even by an illiterate child that is trying for a preacher who sincerely seeks to communicate the story of God.

It is far too easy to present a systematically constructed sermon and to dramatise it at certain points. The challenge lies in moving several steps beyond that by constructing day-to-day stories which speak into the fragile hearts of one’s listeners. When they remember the story, they do not forget it. At critical situations of their lives, they do not remember three-point sermons or anything the pastor said when he “expounded the word of God.” But they remember stories.

Posted by SK at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m glad that many of my Pentecostal-Charismatic friends have not lost that tradition of storytelling. Whilst there are some who tell stories that are less than beneficial, I find that the tradition generally has done well to preserve the power of a story. Perhaps we can seek to learn from them once again how to tell stories.

In fact, I’m wondering if this is perhaps a main reason for our mainline denominations’ inclination to proclaim a gospel that befits the middle-class mind, thereby marginalising those who are intellectually less keen and cerebrally less inclined. The Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition has shown itself to have reached a world beyond the zones of evangelistic comfort. Much of this has been done through the telling of the story that is understood by even the simplest of minds.

Of course, one may say that the anti-intellectual inclination of the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition and its emphasis on the experiential are the very things that have caused them to rely on the art of storytelling. There may be mileage in this argument, but it is a different concern all together. The point to be noted herein is that they have captured the art of storytelling, and it is something the rest of us need to recover.

Expository preaching seems to assume that we can capture with almost absolute accuracy and almost in totality the messages of the biblical authors. How is that possible if the methodology itself was born of a modern system of thought and is fraught with modern presuppositions?

Proponents of expository preaching often criticise storytellers’ sermon as not being “biblical” enough, not being “word-based” enough, and not “expounding the word of God” enough. Underlying such criticism is the unobserved presupposition that the only way to communicate the word most powerfully is through a series of suggestively propositional sermons. But the bible itself is a story, isn’t it?

Posted by SK at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

His early followers - they were storytellers too. They went from town to town, city to city, just telling the story of their encounter with him. They simply related their experiences of having lived with him: what he said, what they talked about with him, who they discovered him to be in their encounter with him, and what they did to participate in his dreams.

Basically, they related everything about him that had engaged their senses throughout his time with them. In a way, you may say that they were living in a memory. But living in memories is all right if they are living memories, isn’t it? After all, it was a story they would never be able to forget for the rest of their lives. Hence, they just moved from place to place telling it like it was.

They had seen by now that in telling the story of their lives with Jesus, they were also telling a story of themselves. They were, in that sense, inviting others to come and find their places and significance in that great story too. I believe they learned from the Master that the best way to communicate a story is by telling the story as it is, over and over again. So they told a story like it was a story.

I’m afraid we have forgotten how to tell our story like it is a story. We have dissected our large, large story and confined it into a book consisting of chapters and verses. We no longer believe that stories contain the message. Instead, we believe in abstract articulations of the message, and we use stories only when they illuminate the message itself. Now we exalt the scientific hermeneutical method of “expository preaching.” The place of storytelling itself has become marginalised and it is now belittled as something lesser than expository preaching. We have forgotten that the story itself is the message.

Posted by SK at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

He was a storyteller. For he knew his listeners consisted not only of those who were thoroughly learned but also those who were accorded little or no privileges for formal education. But there was one way in which he could communicate such that both the learned and the illiterate would be able to grasp his message – stories. He believed in the power of stories. So he told them many stories about everything relevant to their lives. He used objects and roles that they could readily observe around them.

How they loved his stories. They would sit in humungous crowds, in the heat of the day, just to listen to him because all their lives nobody had ever told stories so powerfully. The strange thing was that his stories seemed to summon a kind of a hunger from within them that almost “obligated” them to desire to keep following him everywhere he went. They craved his stories.

Perhaps it was because these stories were stories of themselves. He was telling them stories about themselves. It was as if he was taking each and every one of those people in the multitudes and giving them beautiful roles in these stories he was telling. And they simply had to know how the next story was going to unfold, for in listening to these stories, they were also finding themselves. His stories satisfied a deep hunger they were experiencing.

The young and the old, they all loved him. Even the little children loved his stories. As he told them tales about life, he also asked them questions which they answered very well. They understood these stories, you see. Strangely, it was the learned people – the thoroughly educated and cognitively esteemed – who often failed to understand these stories the way they were meant to be understood. But these stories never failed to engage the “foolish”.

Posted by SK at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Not much reflective thinking has been done in the past couple of days. There are sporadic seasons when the creative mechanisms of the mind seem silent. Or even worse, sluggish. Nothing abstractly conceptual seems to be churning in my mind. But still, within the heart, there's a quiet confidence and knowing that it's all right.

In the past couple of days, I've been preoccupied with the fixtures and the tweaking of my new car. Guilt threatens to grip my conscience, hehe. But I figured, with all the intensive work that I've put into thinking in the past couple of months (since the year began, actually), what's a man gotta do to get his well-deserved break?!

Anyway, I'm uploading pictures of my new car here only because friends from afar are asking what it looks like and what its look has mutated into since it got into my hands. So I gladly oblige...

Posted by SK at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Coming into my driveway tomorrow. Then in the next few days, it'll be put under a tedious process of dressing up and minor renovations, afterwhich it'll be my faithful companion for the next few (or many!) years of my life.

And, not forgetting...

My faithful companion for the past four years. Honey, I love you, but we're stifling each other. I'm growing, can't you see (duh)? Don't worry, mum will take good care of you...

Posted by SK at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The gift of relationships is also a discipline of balance.

If we clench our fists too tightly to sustain a relationship, we inevitably kill it. We suffocate the life and vitality out of the relationship. We find people having to distance themselves from us just so they can survive mentally and emotionally. Eventually, the inclination to control and manipulate creeps in unbeknownst to us. The impulse to hold relationships in this manner speaks of an insecurity and an intense emptiness within ourselves. To cling on to such a relationship is unhealthy because "the other" is no longer an "other." "The other" now exists primarily to fulfill our deepest longings. Even in our giving, we seek to receive.

If we hold the relationship too loosely, it invariably slips into an exercise of convenience. We tend to offer of ourselves when we do not ourselves require that which we have. In essence, we end up offering nothing except amusement to another person who also uses us for the very same purpose. A wise Lebonese prophet once remarked, " For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness."

We clench our fists too tightly, we kill it. We hold it too loosely, we discard it. Relationships are there as mirrors for our self-examination. They make us keep check of our deepest motivations and our secret longings. Healthy relationships reflect a centred soul.

Posted by SK at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It may sound like a sweeping claim that isn't supported by sufficient empirical methodological observations, but I tend to hold to the view that we live in a rather fractured world. People are fractured in different ways - some physically, others mentally, and yet others emotionally.

Those who're fractured physically rather easily invoke the compassion of bypassers, since the disabilities are observably apparent. Those who're mentally fractured may express different behavioural patterns; some patterns invoke pity whilst others invoke fear. But those who are least tolerated by the world are those who're emotionally fractured. The world doesn't have time to offer any form of compassion, let alone support, to the emotionally fractured. It's often assumed that those who're emotionally fractured are thus because they choose to be so. In actuality, no one chooses to be emotionally fractured anymore than one chooses to be physically disabled.

Healing is sometimes more difficult for the emotionally fractured than for the physically fractured. Because this world thrives on the visible; therefore infrastructures are established for physical wholeness, but not for emotional wholeness. It's too arbitrary for any benchmark to be established for the measurement of emotional wholeness, they say. I'm not sure if such a benchmark is necessary. In the first place, the human emotion defies every logical law of prediction. Thus, to even attempt to establish scientific methodology for the stewardship of human emotions is itself very defiant of the fact of humanity's emotional complexity.

But take the time to open your heart to listen to someone's story today. Don't judge. Just listen and learn, and accompany people in their emotional struggles. And perhaps you'll be able to stand with me and see that my claim (which is empirically unsupported) may actually be true. It's a fractured world, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.

And perhaps the best thing that we can offer to the world is our own journey towards wholeness. Of course, neither of us is actually completely whole. We are in many senses broken people, just like everyone else in the world. But we have stories to tell of how we're on a journey towards wholeness. Not triumphalistic stories of victory, but stories of a real possibility for hope; and together with that, the real acknowledgement that we too are still strugglers and fellow sufferers. So that others will be inspired to walk along with us towards that dream for wholeness.

Such dreams aren't mere wishful desires. They're real, for we know where they come from.

Posted by SK at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Sursum corda ... Lift up your hearts to God

Posted by SK at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been thinking about the interaction of science with theology. The dawning of the scientific era provoked much discussion on which field takes precedence over the other, and whether the credibility of theology is compromised because of the newly established benchmarks for the primacy of scientific standards.

I believe St Augustine mentioned something in his De Trinitate that relates with this discussion. He differentiates between sapientia (wisdom, represented by theology) and scientia (knowledge, represented by science). His explanation on the dynamics of these two dimensions of "understanding" is such that the sciences deal with temporal things, whilst wisdom relates to eternal matters. In order for knowledge to lead to wisdom, the former would have to be regulated by the latter. Wisdom therefore serves as an arbitor and regulator of knowledge.

Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas spoke of theology as the queen of the sciences. He held that theology is a derived science because it proceeds from principles revealed by God.

I'm not one who is deeply interested in speaking of theology as a science or attempting to justify the pseudo-scientific nature of theology. If theology is to be deemed by the scientific community as a mere religious language, I'm happy for it to remain so. But at the same time, the following case should also be considered...

Real science is discovery, not invention. The realities are there to be discovered. There isn't anything novel that can be invented that does not already exist.

The place of the theological community is found in its interaction with the source of those realities (which are discovered by the scientific community). Hence, should the scienfitic community disregard the theological community, it does so at its own peril.

Posted by SK at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Does studying Theology ruin your faith?

Please read the above entry. Especially if you're one of those friends/students of mine who think that theology is a big threat to the steadfastness of your Christian faith. Yeah, read it!

Posted by SK at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Me:
Bro, I want to pick up with you a bit more on our brief conversation at tea break this morning. About the "touch and go" approach.

Brother:
Sure...

Me:
Just a short one for your reflection. Look at the life of Jesus and his disciples. There were moments when he and his disciples went out to touch the crowd. But as they engaged, they also disengaged very often so that they could spend time in solitude together as a core community. Jesus refused to compromise the importance of spending time together as a core community. Lingering with one another. Why do you suppose so?

Brother:
Because there's no point spending time with everyone and having no deep friendship with anyone. Wide but not deep.

Me:
Yup. And a real change of life takes place only when relationships are deep, not wide. There is a time and space for wide relationships, but it is the core relationships that give meaning to the wider relationships. So our primary focus must be on core relationships.

Brother:
Understood.

Me:
Your ministry out there with the "crowd" is meaningful only if you have a life that is centred in core relationships. Then wherever you go, it's our spirit that you carry along with u. Otherwise, it's just you. And as an individual, you have nothing very much to bring to the world, do you? Then you'd just be out there as a busy "doer". That's the way with everyone of us. So if u find yourself very busy all the time and have no time to be with people who miss you, it's a sure sign of something gone wrong.

Brother:
Do me a favour. If you see me forgetting this, can you give me a gentle reminder?

Posted by SK at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm fortunate to belong to a faith community that embodies much of what it means to live a meaningful Christian journey in a community of grace. Hence, congregating with my other friends for a corporate gathering on a Sunday morning isn't such a butt-dragging affair. But picture the following scenario...

It's a Sunday morning. Again. The family members reluctantly tear themselves out of their beds for the weekly ritual that they call the "church service." It's such a chore to entertain the performance of a ritual that might have lost its meaning. And yet, one feels almost wrong for even admitting that going to "church" has become little more than a purposeless religious trudge. Which funny bloke actually stipulated that "church" had to happen on a Sunday anyway?

So to "church" we go. The singing. The sermon. The intercession. The impersonally superficial fellowship. The people adorned with beautiful attires that represent their need for superficial pleasantries and impressionistic facades.

Let's face it; the average thinking Christian doesn't feel that he needs to get excited over a series of singing accompanied by a band of overpriced instruments producing over-rated music. He doesn't need to listen to a monotonous sermon preached by a pastor who's trying to do his "Anthony Robbins" stunt. The least he needs is a weekly lecture on what to do with his life that he already knows he should do. He also doesn't need to exchange handshakes with twenty other people whom he doesn't care about for the rest of the week. If he does it, it's simply a gesture to appease his religious conscience. After all, most people (within and without the church) can't move beyond the need to perform.

"How negative", you may say. I know more than a few of my pastor-friends (including myself) who have stood at the pulpit often enough to know that what I'm describing are sentiments unspoken by many well-meaning Christians who're trying to do the best they can with the lives that they have. They feel this in varying degrees in various contexts, but are unable to express these sentiments for fear of grieving God. They love God very sincerely, you see.

In the recent past decades, a new way of doing church emerged. It was deemed a "relevant" and "engaging" way which sought to repackage the way church is done. Unfortunately, beneath this package lies an unchanged core. It therefore pandered to the creation of superficial anticipation through excitable music and inspirational talks, often dispensed with exaggerated thundering volumes to reflect the atmosphere of "anointing" that assures them that "God was here."

Even so, if we're honest with ourselves, I suspect that we will find ourselves acknowledging our need for something deeper. Such superficial experiences can bring us only so far. Our church services, no matter how excitable they may be superficially, are dry and wanting. Even when the atmosphere seems exciting, it's often more than not engineered by human hands. It's almost as if we can tell exactly how the Holy Spirit is going to work today, because he does exactly the same thing all the time, every week, at every service, to the same people.

The faith of our Fathers is one that is rich with a sense of authentic anticipation because it preserves its sense of the mysteries of God. It is one that engages the human senses in a way that excites one from within, beyond the superficially engineered sensationality created by human devices.

I have no model answer, and it's likely going to take a while before we - God's people - come up with something concrete. But we need to begin recovering that "other" reality again. Now.

Posted by SK at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

A good entry - packed with theological thought - on how right sportsmanship may help enhance one another's participation in the dream of God. Read Daniel Ng's entry on the Beauty of Sports.

Posted by SK at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The past couple of days has been, well, ordinary. But even in the ordinariness of life, amidst the mundane routines and the uneventfulness of the days, there are still thoughts to be gathered and spiritual lessons to be learned.

Some years ago, I remember having gone through a journey of seeking something spectacular every day (primarily because this was how I was taught to view my Christian life). Without the daily attainment of this "something special", it felt like my Christian walk was weak and uneventful; that somehow, God was far away. Perhaps I just wasn't doing enough to allow God's presence to fill my life, or perhaps I was just closed to what the Holy Spirit was trying to do in my life. Or maybe I had just pressed the wrong button or applied the wrong formula, and everyone knows that when you don't get it right, the Holy Spirit just doesn't show up!

Dry spells, we call them; when life is uneventful and nothing spectacular takes place. When you dwell in a state of ordinariness. And because of what I had learned then, I had to somehow try to "create" that intimacy all over again, to assure myself that I was all right and that God was not as far as I thought he was. I needed to know I wasn't abandoned. But the more I tried to engineer his presence through prayer, fasting, and countless other disciplines, the more miserable I got. God didn't show up.

Disillusionment set in. Maybe I was just one of the spiritual outcasts who'd never taste the sweet presence of God in my life. It was intriguing how some people could be so excited about God all the time, how they could easily "fall" when they were prayed for, how they easily expressed themselves when they participated in the corporate worship of their communities, and how they openly prayed in such volumous voices. I mean, God seemed so real to these people! And I? I'd ever been in a prayer meeting where everyone who was prayed for was "slain in the Spirit" (as they call it), whereas I was the only one left standing. Something was wrong with me!

There was only one way out for me - that was to give up. And to start from scratch all over again. Perhaps I had been expecting God to show up in certain ways and to perform in accordance with certain expectation of visibility. And now, it was time for me to learn to allow God to show up in ways that he wanted to, and for me to learn to recognise these ways by which he had made himself known.

That was then.

Today, it's an ordinary day. And I'm at rest. Because God has left his vestigia Dei (footprints of God) everywhere... all over my world and all over my life. Everyone I meet seems to be confronting me with an image of Christ. Every blade of grass I tread upon seems to shimmer with the unspoken creative powers of an ever-abiding presence. There is life all around me, and I know that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of life. Where there is life, I know, there is God's power to sustain the existence of life.

It's such an ordinary day, and God is just as present as any other ordinary day. I've lost the desire to seek anything beyond the depth of this day, because this is where I have found my God... in the ordinariness of life. My soul is at rest. How spectacular.

Posted by SK at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I taught my students to blog at the tutorial class this morning. Reason? I gave them an extended blogging assignment that spans throughout the entire semester. It's structured in such a way that those who choose to participate in this assignment have everything to gain, but those who choose to not do so stand to lose nothing.

For some, it's daunting; for the others, it's exciting - really depends on what sort of personality one is, doesn't it? I mooted this idea of getting them to blog because I felt that it's a tremendously effective way of disseminating information and ideas to the world in as short and as (almost) costless a way as possible. A couple of them have already begun their blogging exercise (for examples, see here and here and here and here). I'm really happy with what I'm seeing so far. I hope they have as much fun as one should have when communicating theology to the world.

This reminds me, next month marks the one-year anniversary of my blogging career. It's therefore in order that I acknowledge some people who have been propelling factors in my participation in blogdom. Thanks, Sivin, for encouraging me to embark on what has now become an almost daily spiritual discipline for me. Thanks also, Irene, for being the ever present help whenever the blog technicalities get a tad too tedious for my fat fingers - and remember to have your meals regularly; I mean it!

As with anything else, blogging can be and has been used for the most nonsensical purposes. But at its best, I think it has revolutionised the dissemination of beneficial information.

Got blog?

Posted by SK at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Theology without artistic creativity is rigid and arid. But art without theologicality is equally insipid, especially for the thinking. When art becomes an industry, it loses its integrity; its soul is whored to the exploitations of profit-oriented materialists. Art thereafter takes on a different form. It begins to reflect a coarse vanity that speaks to the sensualised inclinations of the unthinking.

Even in the "Christian" world today, art exists (at worst) without theological considerations or (at best) with shallow unconsidered theology. As such, much of the music that we have come to express and the songs that we write and sing are brash and lack a quality of fine artistic value. It may appeal to the sensual sensibilities of the modern Christian, but does not necessarily reflect the artistic nature of God.

What follows may be deemed to be a derogatory statement, but its intent is not so: the soul of Christian art (or what seems to be Christian art) is also whored to the exploitations of profit-oriented materialists. When art, Christian or not, is produced to be sold to the masses for a profit, the value and integrity of Christian art is compromised.

We need to recover the understanding that art and theology are two sides of a same coin. Our incarnational theology is the foundational basis for the artistic expression of the faith community. In this context, art should have nothing to do with the capitalistic greed of church institutions that thrive on sensualised inclinations rather than on a well-thought theology.

Posted by SK at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Asking “why” is risky business. We are creatures conditioned by cultural forces to act in accordance to perceived norms. To ask “why” is to question the authority of normative patterns of life and to challenge the source from whence come those norms.

Asking “why” often presents the possibility of casting the questioner in bad light. At best it gives the impression of an anti-establishment spirit, and at worst it arouses the misunderstood notion that the questioner thinks himself to be more credible than the integrity of normative values.

But asking “why” is a necessarily prophetic exercise. It keeps an unthinking culture thinking. It alerts reluctant thinkers to remember where they have come from and where they are going. The prophet himself may often be a hated personality, for he slows down the efficiency of a community. He hinders the ease of pragmatism (the disease of simply doing “whatever works”) and the inertia of simplistically preserving the way things have been done all along. But the prophet keeps the community thinking; it may do so reluctantly and at times grudgingly, but it thinks.

Ironically, in some cultures, asking “why” itself can simply be a product of cultural conditioning. In such given conditions, “why” is necessarily asked for the sake of asking, since criticality in thought is exalted as an expression of the human intellectual capacity; hence also the necessity to ask, “Why ask ‘why’?

Posted by SK at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Theology is an art. In some ways, I’ve tried to explain it to some of my friends. It’s about explaining our encounters with God in as creative a manner as we can. It’s about saying things about our encounters with God in a way that inspires the world to desire such encounters too. Theology is what a community of friends says about God as they journey in intimate friendship with one another and with God.

A problem was posed when theology became a “science.” It preserved its disciplinary dimension (like all sciences) but lost its artistic inclinations. Because of that, theology has now seemed to become a somewhat dry and arid exercise. In theology today, we speak and write in intellectually empowering abstractions, but we have forgotten how to paint or sing theology. We have forgotten how to embody theology as an art of life.

This is not to discount that theology begins as a discipline. It’s a discipline of the acquisition of a language. Just as the painter begins by immersing himself in the mastery of paint strokes, colour mixtures and canvas textures, and the musician immerses himself in the mastery of musical notation, composition and harmonisation, theology begins through the learning of the methodologies of theology, the language of theology, and the inter-relatedness of theology to all of life and faith.

As the mastery deepens, theology becomes an art. It finds its various forms of creative expressions in painting, drama, words, and music from the deepest depth of the human expressive capacity. We need to recover that.

Posted by SK at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)