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Can Theology be Creative?

 ‘But how can it not be creative?’    

 Isn’t it about

• from ethics to transformation
• from rules to becoming a person
• from obedient honesty to subversive truthfulness
• from respectability to adventure
• from self-control to self-sacrifice
• from mainstream to marginal?

‘But that is ethics, not theology.’   

 Well no, it’s about transformation, but anyway, why do you think theology is some place other than where ethics-as-transformation is?  

‘But theology is about God.’ 

What?! So ethics-as-transformation isn’t about God?  What God are we talking about? 

• The God who created something out of nothing – there’s creativity for you – giving being to what is not being
• The God who brought a rabble of slaves out of Egypt to make them a community of compassion and character
• The God who lay ‘mewling and puking’ in his mother’s arms
• The God who went about telling stories and giving people a story.   Isn’t forgiveness creating something out of nothing?
• The God who was trapped by the theologians and handed over to the military occupation forces and strung up as a convenient scapegoat because he was so inconvenient. He died, and that liberated us.

Theologians have been spinning theories about the meaning of his death ever since, and the more logical the theory, the deader the theology.  Just say: He died, was judicially murdered by slightly fairer-skinned imperialist thugs – and refused to lie down, according to his unbelievably transformed followers.  

And that death-and-refusal is what makes sense of the deepest darkness that human spirit can discover or experience, or construct with the help of bullying and bombs and the ballot box.  

But theology’s job is to stop those theologians who want to make a neat explanation of how that death-and-refusal works.  It liberates: it brings hope and the power to move out of stuck situations.  Therefore theology challenges all accounts of our world which freeze us into a frame from which we can’t escape: free-marketism, marxism (which can’t read Marx), liberalism which can’t make space for nuttiness – in fact any ism which constricts. 

And that engagement with the stultifying ideologies, to challenge them and question their inevitabilities, is where theology moves beyond being about the creative / re-creativity of God to being creative.

And it’s not just about being a buzz of bright ideas, a stream of consciousness without a firm channel: the freedom to be creative springs from and leads on to much hard work.  Thus behind Vatican II there were many ‘periti’ (‘experts’) who had been labouring for years and played an important role at the Council.    You need:

- Study of the Bible and biblical world

- Study of the history of Christian thought throughout the centuries

- Awareness of the history of philosophical thought and the movements in science literature and culture which have shaped human consciousness. 

Rigorous attention to these can give us the sinews, the suppleness, the sensitivity to speak of God and humanity and the ecosphere in ways which challenge the ideologies, which loosen our throats to sing, and our limbs to dance, and to offer hope and love in the midst of recession – financial and spiritual.