“Theological reflection puts our experience into a genuine conversation with our religious heritage,” write Patricia Killen and John de Beer in The Art of Theological Reflection. To see God in our own lives, guided by our Christian tradition, is to live more authentically, more abundantly.
To see God in all things through the lens of our rich theological history is to discover what God is doing now, in our time. For the Spirit is always doing new things. This “questioning and questing after” is a marker of my Lutheran tradition, which obstinately refuses pat answers. In faith and doubt, we seek a deeper truth of a paradoxical God who hides in plain sight, suffering with the broken and laughing with the the joyful. A God who is–and who loves–beyond all space and time and reason. A God who grows ever larger as our own limited understanding expands, whose story is told in the still-unfolding cosmos as well as ancient wisdom.
It’s good to ask questions we can’t fully answer. Who wants a God as small as that?
