To be honest, after a week or more of Matthew on the kingdom I still don’t know what or where or how it is. I’m sure I’ve learned something along the way with all those metaphors of sowing, planting, growing, reaping. From the people who nurture the crop or maliciously mess it up. From the …
Monthly Archives: July 2005
Theology and Experience @ Liverpool Living Theology
This end-of the-day slot and its title, ‘Talk on Theology and Experience’, poses a bit of a problem: isn’t there something contradictory or at least a bit disjointed about ‘talk’ and ‘experience. We talk before an experience and we talk after it but when our experience is underway we are somehow too busy to be talking about it–we are doing it, being it, living it. If we keep stopping to analyze our experience we never get to have any. But if we never talk about our experience we never really understand it, we never grasp its significance, or let its significance shape our lives.
Anyway, it’s my task to introduce the sessions that will follow on the other afternoons this week by saying something today to get you thinking and talking about theology and experience and the relationship between the two…
Wednesday Week 15 Year I
Where should we look for our own epiphanies? Should we wander the far side of the wilderness waiting for a bush to burn for us? Should we shun learning and cleverness and strain to be mere children ripe for revelation? Elizabeth Barrett Browning sees God hidden in plain sight under every interested nose: Earth’s crammed …
Friday Week 14 Year I
Promises, promises… Both our readings promise a lot to those who do not fear but act boldly and decisively. To Jacob and his tiny tribe straggling into Egypt. To the Twelve and the little band who will come after them struggling in a hostile society. Do not worry—you have God on your side. Do not …