Theological Outlook

Theology is God-talk.  What we think about God and how we express what we think must always be in process or “on the way” because we are always in process, our discoveries always emerging and our understandings of God, ourselves and the world always evolving.

God-talk must always by nature be an open-system.  It is why we use metaphors for God.  Father, Rock, Fortress, Breasted Provider, etc... but we can't confuse the metaphors with the reality we can barely know.  Metaphors aren't static pictures of the reality.  They are efforts to name traits of the vast God we are coming to know...the God that is "becoming" to us.

The world of modernity was concerned with tested truth claims and the certainty that could emerge from such statements.  Debates over absolutes and the nature of truth were/remain commonplace in the church.  Modernity wants to assert a set of truths about God when God-talk, theology, is a truth process.

Our emerging postmodern world is more suited to “InVia:” experiencing God “in the way.” This necessarily means we have to have a theology that emerges “on the way.”  Mystery, paradox and uncertainty are “on the way” and are fine places for us to allow “becoming” to arise.  Such a “becoming” presupposes a place of deep quiet and silence.  This primal silence, we believe, is the starting point of coming to know God.

“Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46.10) Is not an invitation to sit still, but to be still, to come to an interior space of quiet where the most fundamental of all knowings can come into being. 

This is the beginning.  It was the beginning of the universe story, it is the beginning of our story, it is the beginning of following Jesus and being the people of God