URBAN THEOLOGY

“Why do theological reflection?” Laurie Green invites us to reflect on this question. Green introduces Jesus’ inductive method insightfully reflected in His parables. Jesus’ parables always start with the situation of life relevant and understood by his contemporary but often lead to a surprised, twisted and unexpected ending. The Birmingham Group calls this “God’s Unexpected” (p.12). What is the purpose of such a surprised, twisted and unexpected ending? Or we may want to call it “The Divine Surprise”. On one hand, we do not comprehend God’s way whilst on the other hand it is His love and grace that often surprises us. This “divine surprise” demonstrates two different groups of people who may be equally surprised. The first group the sinners, those who think they are not worthy yet receive God’s invitation to His banquet. The second group is those who think themselves as righteous yet do not have any part in His Kingdom. I would like to call this as “spiritual heart-attack”, thinking that we know God very well but surprisingly the truth is that we not only do not know Him but also that He Himself did not know us. For He says, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” (Matthew 7:23).

Theological reflection provides insights to the questions of life. Life is full of questions and problems. The solution to the perennial problem of human beings is given by God in His revealed words. Theological reflection is required to provide insights as well as challenges to action, to transform minds and lives. “Theological reflection on a situation can be a subversive activity when it begins to point up the contradictions in this manner and then spur a group to social action” (p. 12).

Green affirms that the source for reflection is not limited to merely the Bible but also our Christian heritage. Looking into our Christian heritage can help to affirm our faith. However, we are to remind ourselves not to plunge deep into our Christian heritage and thus become irrelevant to our contemporary scene. Hence, our challenge is to “find the connections between our Christian heritage and our contemporary scene” (p.13).  Finding connection between faith and life provides is the opportunity to use our God-given creative imagination and reason or as Green calls it, “the creative double-edge of reason and imagination” (p. 13).

Green reminds us that theology may not have the necessary tools to examine and analyze the internal structures and causal relationship within society however “only theology can take the raw material unearthed by our exploration, and work with that material to look for the meaning of it and sense the relationship that the Transcendent has with it”. (p. 14). The purpose of this whole exercise is the “quest for the Divine” (p. 14). Only through the quest of the Divine, the very source of life and the very source of our existence, can we have a clearer picture of our problems and discover our identity as well as our purpose of life. So in our exploration and quest of the divine, we will have to constantly look at the biblical source, our contemporary scene and our Christian Heritage.

Green also reminds that we are not alone in our theological task. The Holy Spirit, our Advocate is ready and willing to assist in intuition work. Green suggests we do check our intuition to ascertain that our intuition is not an illusion (p.17). Green calls this checking-out phase as “exploration”.  In our exploration, we will need what Green calls as “New Witness” – a piece of biblical text, an event or happening in church history, a doctrine, a hymn, theological tools to assist our exploration process (p.17). After exploration, we will reach the next phase “reflection” which will no longer be taken as ‘a leap of imagination but as an authoritative new witness” (pp.17-18).