Sometimes learning is fun. Sometimes learning is boring. Sometimes learning means unlearning. And nearly always unlearning is inconvenient, disruptive, disturbing, scary. And learning theology, which is learning about God, can be all of the above and a blessed lot more.
Fun because theology deals with a subject area that drives to the core of life's biggest questions; boring because sometimes we have to do the hard stuff before we experience the benefits, and we are used to instant benefits, as if the work needed to possess knowledge could be put on some intellectual credit card. And theological learning can be inconvenient because it gets in the way of our comfortably familiar take on what we call our faith; disruptive because when you're dealing with God and who God is you shouldn't expect life to be a tidy, predictable routine which includes worship, fellowship and the odd bit of witnessing; scary because God is - I mean both God is scary, and God IS.
As we work to act a little less clumsily, less inhumanely, less thoughtlessly; to speak a little less ignorantly, less dishonestly, less inattentively, there is always much to say and even more to do. Only God speaks one Word which says everything, which makes and heals the world...
Good learning calls, no less than teaching does, for courtesy, respect, a kind of reverence; for facts and people, evidence and argument, for climates of speech and patterns of behaviour different from our own. Watchfulness is, indeed, in order but endless suspicion and mistrust are not.
There are affinities between the courtesy, the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship; the single-minded passionate disinterestedness without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done; and the contemplativity which strains,- without credulity, - to listen for the voice of God - who does not shout.
To which I can only say, Amen!
(The quote is from Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, London: SCM, 1992, pages 2,10-11).
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