How God Speaks through Us

This is my last engagement with Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God. 

 After many conversations about this a/theological approach to our faith, we cannot help but beg the question, "Which interpretation is the right one?"

After all, my dis/belief might be very different from your dis/belief.

Are they equally valid?

Am I right?

Are you?

How do we determine what is a helpful look at a/theology that allows God to speak to us where we are in our lives?

Peter Rollins posits that we look through all of these questions through a lens of love.  That is, is our interpretation of an experience/text done in such a way that love is the primary message being conveyed through our interpretation.

However, it is impossible for us to define how to interpret through a lens of self-giving and Christ-like love.  The Christ-like love we are to emulate in our interpretations is one that is charitable "above and beyond" what any instruction manual could ever say.  Trying to pin down precisely what is required - to turn the "above and beyond" into the norm - fails to recognize the radicalness of self-giving love.

This means, that we aren't able to concretely nail down one correct way to interpret scripture and ethics.  Instead, it's something that we must be able to feel through and work out on a case by case basis.

Our interpretation in love in one situation isn't always going to be our interpretation in love in another situation.

This brings us to the importance of the community's role in faith.  We must continue to talk through our struggles with one another - to continually be re-interpreting our faith through the lens of love.  And we must continue to hold up all of these interpretations together in a dis/unity that allows us to embrace the mystery that God presents to us through scripture, tradition, and experience.

As one thinking about how to accompany people as we all continue to walk on our faith journey, this presents a tremendous challenge but also a wonderful opportunity.

The challenge is that simply talking about people about God is not the solution.  It never was, isn't now, and won't be in the future.  Instead we must listen to where people are; we must listen to where God is working in the lives of those around us.  We start our conversations about God where the other person is - and not from the belief that they should be where we are now, but rather that we can find a new direction together.

Finding that new direction together is the wonderful opportunity that we have been given.  We are on the frontier of a new conversation about God and it's one that will allow us freedom to play and explore God's mystery and hypernymity together.

We need not speak of God, but rather allow God to speak through us - our thoughts, words, and deeds.