The Movements Beyond Our Monuments

On why I sound like I do sometimes...

Theology as an endeavor is rich in both imagination and rhetoric. 

I cannot theologize about that which I cannot first construct in my mind. I bring my imagination to the fore every time I think thoughts about the Eternal. 

I cannot theologize about that which is beyond my reality without first wrestling with words, phrases, and figures of speech. To talk about God is to unwrap the gift of rhetoric. 

And that’s dope for spaces like these where I get to write a buncha words.

But that’s a lil’ annoying when I gotta walk em out. 

And this, as much as anything else, is a problem the Church must confront in this age. 

There is no shortage of research about the decline of people who identify as Christians (a decline that seems to be no respecter of denominations) in the West. I suspect that part of this is because people are struggling to find value in an institution that is at times rhetorically proficient, deficient in imagination, and not all that consistent in praxis. 

In the Church, we have spent a lot of time building monuments to ways of thinking. We revere the thinkers of times past, and train people on their thoughts. But we do not always encourage people to think their own thoughts. As technology grants us access to more thoughts than we’ve ever had access to, people are less attracted to monuments. 

We are in need of a movement.