“What Do I Love When I Love My God?”

Theology as Critique; Theology as Prayerful Imagination

August 8, 2021 •
11th Sunday after Pentecost •
Reading: John 17: 20-24
Dr. John Thatamanil
Associate Professor
of Theology and World Religions

You can view the worship video recording, including this message, at: 
https://youtu.be/A_KSTFIUJBk

Like it or not, there’s no avoiding theology. Thor would know. Every Christian has ways of imagining and understanding God. Most often they are passed down to us through families, church communities, and the culture at large; we acquire our working theologies largely by osmosis. Taking ownership of and responsibility for what we believe about God, the world, and ourselves—that’s what it means to do theology. Sadly, Christian communities have received the message that theology is best left to the professionals. “People, don’t try this at home!” We have come to believe that only people with PhDs in theology are theologians. That professionalized understanding has done incalculable harm to the church and the world.

So, let’s get to it: what is theology, and why does every Christian have an obligation to do theology? Theology is the work of asking St. Augustine’s great question, “What do I love when I love my God?” What do I love when I love my God? Here’s St. Augustine:

But what do I love when I love my God? Not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love Him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.”

Woo, that is some steamy theology, no—stunning in beauty and poetry?! St. Augustine is profoundly sensual in talking about God even he says that loving God is not like loving material things. What can we learn from Augustine’s way of imagining theology?

First things first. We often think that theology is a matter of the head and not the heart. It has something to do with how we critically analyze God-concepts. But that is not where Augy begins. Oh, sure, he gets pretty heady too. He can mix it up with the best of them. But his core question is meant not for the mind alone. Instead, he puts a question of the heart. He asks, “What do I love when I love my God?” For Augustine, theology is a matter of critical desiring not critical thinking.

What you desire, that is the object of your worship. That is your God. So, we had better be sure that what we desire is worthy and true. Theology, then, is the business of critically investigating our desires so that we can be sure that it is really God whom we are desiring and worshipping.

We do theology not just when we write theology books. The most basic form of God-talk is talking to God, what we say to God in our prayers and liturgies. Prayer is theology’s first language. And that first language deeply shapes our hearts. When we speak to God in prayerful yearning and longing, who then do we imagine God to be? Who or what are we longing for? Can you see why that is so crucial a question? Theology’s first and foremost task is a matter of tuning our hearts so that our praise, our prayers, and our longings are worthy rather than misdirected. The 4th century theologian, Evagrius, put it this way, “The theologian is one who prays truly; the one who prays truly is the theologian.” Theology asks, “Am I praying truly?” When I say that I long for God, what am I really desiring? Is the object of my devotion not God but an idol? If it is an idol, I better smash it!

Another observation: Augustine’s language about God is not far removed from the language he uses in speaking to God. That is why it is so sensual, erotic, and poetic. Think of the difference between the language you use when writing a love letter and the language you might use to describe your beloved to a stranger. Love letter language is the language of poetry. Description language, about-language, is the language of concept. To-language sounds like Romeo singing praises to Juliet in Act 2, Scene 2:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.

The first language of theology is symbolic, mythic, and poetic. Juliet is not the Sun, but to Romeo she fairer than the envious moon. God is not Father or Lord, but we use these words to speak the longings of our hearts as they respond to God’s parental and directing care. The first language of theology is the poetic language of intimacy.

But even poetic language can fall short and become idolatrous. A poetic symbol can be mistaken for a concept. Say “Father God” too often, and you might forget that you are speaking in poetry. You might come to believe God is, in some sense, literally and conceptually male. Say “Lord” too often, and you might come to think that God is like an earthly Lord who exercises controlling and sovereign power. The end result: we worship not God but maleness and controlling power—destructive idols that have the power to consume us and disfigure our common lives. That is why we must keep asking the basic question of theology, “What do I love when I love my God?”

But smashing idols is only part of theology’s job. Repeat any poetic term too often and it can grow stale and lifeless. So, theology also stands in creative need of new poetry. Good theology reforms the concepts we deploy in speaking about God, and good theology also refreshes the poetry in our prayers and liturgy. Process theology does both!

Process theologians believe that both our poetry for God and our concepts about God are likely to go awry for a host of reasons. Let’s focus on just one: many of our core symbols for God come from an age in which the only form of political power was ruling power. Any wonder then that many of our symbols of God are pre-democratic? Kings do not share power. They wield it unilaterally. Democratic life—at its best—is about shared power. Kings tell us what to do; we cannot return the favor. They can influence us; but they remain above the fray, and we cannot influence them. Is this starting to sound familiar? Because kingship plays so much a role in our imagination, we have come to believe that God creates the world; the world does not in turn create God. The world needs God like a kingdom needs the king, but God does not need the world. The world is really related to God; but God is not really related to the world. These core theological claims rest at the heart of many classical theologies. Do you see how these ideas are rooted in a vision of unilateral, controlling power, power from on high?

  What does it mean that so many of our core symbols for God are pre-democratic? How might this penchant for royal symbols be misshaping our hearts? Might we need serious symbolic rehab to wean us from our addiction to the symbolism of sovereign power? Process theologians are absolutely convinced that we desperately need to rethink our ideas about power! Despite what we say about love, Christian symbolism leaves us vulnerable to the love of power rather than the power of love.

Our bad ideas about power are rooted in a far deeper problem. The root of our trouble rests, well, in how we think about everything or every thing. Let me be a bit cryptic: process theologians affirm that there are no things anywhere in the world. Sound crazy? Sure. But give it a moment. Process theologians hold that the world is composed of events not substances. We know even the most solid seeming things in the world, rocks, mountains, and tables, are actually composed of subatomic particles. And those particles are not particles—they are not bits of tiny stuff. Particles are themselves nothing but complex patterns of energy. From Einstein on, we know that matter and energy are not two different things. Matter just is energy in a stable configuration. If a pattern endures, it gives the appearance of being a thing. But scratch the surface, and you can see that every “thing” is actually a community of processes nesting inside processes inside processes and so forth. Hence the term process theology.

Why does it matter to theology whether the world is made up of events not things? Why should people of faith care? You might say, “This sounds like physics or philosophy to me, not theology.” I’ll simplify and say that it comes down to one word: relation. If we think that the world is made up of independent things, substances, then it is natural to fall into a billiard ball worldview. Each of us and everything in the world is like an isolated billiard ball sitting independently on a pool table. The 9 Ball sits next to the 8 Ball, but each is what it is quite apart from the other. The 8 Ball has no effect on 9 Ball. I might use the cue ball to knock the 8 into the 9, but all three balls are only in “relationship”, if you can call it that, at the moment of impact. They are what they are in splendid isolation. In a billiard ball universe, relationships are external and optional. Things are what they are apart from relationship. In a universe of things, the power of a thing depends on its capacity to affect without being affected. Imagine a billiard ball that is so dense that when another ball strikes it, it does not move. Or imagine an enormous billiard ball just mowing over and crushing all the others. That’s what power looks like in a world of things.

But what does power look like in a world of events and processes? Oh now, that is quite something different. Events feel and respond to other events. A process is richer, more interesting, and more complex to the degree that it can include other processes into its own identity. One repeated note may be beautiful but not very interesting. But a symphony that includes a variety of instruments each offering its own distinctiveness into a larger whole—now that it is intriguing, subtle, and complex. The conductor who can hear, feel, and respond to each note and each instrument and bring them together is the richer conductor. In a relational world, power is response-ability, the power to respond.

Things sit next to each other. You can only affect them from outside. And you can affect them only by pushing them. The power to push hardest and the power to be impervious to pushing—that’s what power looks like. Processes/events are energy flows. They can enter into each other. They are never to be found in just one location, and they are what they are only in relationship to each other. The power to feel, the power to include, the power to respond—that’s what power looks like in a process universe.

The more complexity a symphony can include without descending into chaos, the richer it is. If the world is more like a symphony in which we all play our part than it is like a pool table, then we must reimagine power. Each musician doesn’t just play her own note or instrument oblivious of others. Musicians offer their part in responsiveness and in relationship to compose something larger than each can do in isolation.

In a symphonic universe, or better, in an improvisational jazz universe, the power to listen, to feel and to be affected—that is true power. In a universe of events, the ultimate power is the power of relationship. The power to let oneself be affected, to be responsive, and then offer your own creative contribution is more important than the power to push. In a process universe, each event is what it is only because of its capacity to feel, take in, and respond to every other event that has happened before. In a process universe, relationships are not optional; to be is to be in relationship. In a process-relational universe, I mask up because you are in me, and I in you.

In a responsive and relational universe, the power to pull is more important than the power to push. If every event in the universe is a relational response to the rest of the universe, then, the power of persuasion is more important than the power of coercion. We are creatures embedded in a network of relationship; coercion can only rupture that network. In any case, there is no standing above it barking orders from on high.

Now perhaps you can see why all this matters for how we think about and imagine God. To live with an antiquated and obsolete view of the world is sure to result in an antiquated and obsolete view of God.

In a world of things, God is the unmoved mover. God is utterly unaffected.
In a world of things, God is omnipotent. God can do anything He wants. God does not share power.

In a world of process and relation, God is the most moved power. God has the great power to be deeply affected and enriched by what transpires in the world. The world can contribute to God’s life because God has the power to feel all events and then creatively respond. In a relational world, power to feel and the power for creative response is greater than the power to push and to control. Now that is the kind of responsive power that God possesses.

In a world of things, God can only exercise power by controlling them. In a world of events and relations, God exercises the power of appeal by persuading and luring us toward greater beauty, goodness, and truth. God’s power is like the power of a candy bar over a child. The candy bar does not push the child. The candy bar pulls and lures the child. But only the child, exercising her own power of choice, can decide whether to eat the candy bar or not. Likewise, God lures us by the power of love that leads us into our own growth into life abundant. But only we can say yes or no. We are free creatures and responsive creatures living in a relational world with and before a relational God.

In introducing process ideas, I have largely been speaking conceptually—about language. But let us conclude by returning to to-language, the language of intimacy. Holy One who came to us as the Lowly Galilean and not as Caesar, who lures us by your beauty into lives of rich relationship and mutual love, we know that you are One who lives in relationship and is relationality itself. We know that you are in us and we are in you even as you, the Word abides in that Primordial and Spacious Silence from which all things unfold. We know that you are no unfeeling rock but instead one who tenderly feels our joys and our sorrows. Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer and Life-Giver, you are the Fellow Sufferer who understands. We pray that you lead us into richer and more beautiful ways of speaking to you and about you. Deepen our desire for you and our desire to serve the world you so richly love. Amen! 

(c) 2021 John J. Thatamanil
All rights reserved.