A theology of reality & the human condition
A theology of reality describes the human condition instead of creating dogmas about what we think it should be. It looks at the realities of the human condition to try to understand them in the light of understandings that have developed through medicine, through psychiatry and neurobiology, and shape our theology around the way humanity actually is instead of the way we fantasize it to be.
Without a theology of reality, we deprive people of their authenticity—of life—with some of our dogmas and doctrines. We need to accept the authenticity of human life and then shape our theology around that because otherwise, we end up excluding certain people and certain conditions from God's love… as if we ever had power over dispensing God's love ourselves.
A theology of reality also includes a theology of the world condition or situation.
We now live with a whole new set of realities—things we've learned are the realities of humanity. But much of our theology talks around the realities of human existence and the realities of social structures in the world. And we try to impose an almost fantasy idea about what society and culture should be and what humanity should be. But we don't talk about what humanity is.
A theology of reality & “the evil one”
We've discovered so much more about the human condition and about the human brain. Yet we talk about evil as some kind of abstraction… We tend to give evil an ontological status as if evil is a person. But when we talk about the “evil one,” we're really talking about a condition, not an ontological being.
To understand that we also have to take into account, for example, that psychopathy is a dysregulated orbital and medial prefrontal cortex and a dysregulated production of dopamine in connection with it. Ultimately, that means evil is a complete lack of empathy because that condition in the brain makes empathy impossible. That is why people—psychopaths—can do horrible things. Sometimes they don’t do the horrible things overtly—there are politicians who do evil secretively. But we ought to realize that it's not something you can turn on and off like a toggle switch.
A theology of reality & the limitations of free will
If we have free will, it's extremely limited. A theology of reality recognizes the limitations of human free will because there are so many factors that impair free will. Free will is so dominant in theology but it isn't true if it's not real—if it's not the reality of the human condition.
A theology of reality would also include a course on the theology of ecology, but that's something we can kind of get a handle on.
But having a theology of the realities of the human condition and the realities of what shapes the human condition—it's not just a matter of making a free choice between good and evil. Sometimes what is required is a clinical intervention. We can't say, “Oh, that person is evil. He should repent” when he may really have a psychiatric condition that makes or shapes him that way.
We have this, of course, in the “prosperity gospel” quarters where they treat people as cursed by God, which is why they're poor or on the street and it’s never worth listening to their story—to hear what's really happened, what's really occurred. But let’s have a discussion at least. What are the actual realities of the human condition?
But if you have that discussion, the fundamentalists are going to say you're a heretic because you're allowing that there's something besides a free-will choice. People may understand that free will is limited if you're schizophrenic or bipolar. But no. Your free will is limited by almost everything. Clinically, we can say that free will is a fantasy. We can take certain decisions that we struggle toward but that's a superficial examination of free will. We say we can make a choice about this or that, but really there are so many things about which we cannot make a choice. There are so many aspects of our personhood where you can't flick a toggle switch on or off.
So, we need to take a serious look at that and actually change the way we interact with humanity at large. But we have a theology that includes late Iron Age knowledge—or medieval knowledge of best—and medieval concepts from a specific culture, a specific place.
A theology of reality & Greco-Roman culture
I know I've said this many times, but there's no such thing as “Judeo-Christian culture.” We have a Greco-Roman culture with a Christian overlay. And we're still involved in the Greco-Roman culture. Then we go to Vietnam or China or Japan and want to impose Greco-Roman culture on them instead of bringing actual Christianity. Our grasp of the gospel is shaped and distorted by Greco-Roman cultural roots, and we seem to be so locked into that—and it has to be ancient Greco-Roman, you know—or medieval at most. It has to be something shaped by the dialectic of the Roman Law Court and the rationalism of Aristotle. It's something very difficult to get people to want to come to grips with because academic theology is just recycling old ideas with new words and new phraseology but not coming to grips with the realities of human nature and the realities of the clinical dimension of human activities and passions.
If we did that, we could, in the first place, be much more compassionate. We could be much more loving toward humanity in general. But we're always trying to sort out which human beings are decent and which human beings are ‘write-offs.” But no human beings are write-offs. It seems like we can't treat or cure psychopathy or pedophilia (and conditions like that) but we can't keep thinking that those are free-will choices because they are not. As long as we think they are making free-will choices, we can never respond to them. And without developing a theology of reality, we just spout slogans or repeat old phrases.
But of course, I can't get anybody to even talk about it. Everyone is afraid. But unless we can do that, we're heading into a cul-de-sac. And we can't reach the younger generation if they know we're lying to them; if they know we're telling them things that they know very well are not true. And that's part of tension.
A theology of reality & divine punisher
I remember [Alexandre] Kalomiros saying that a lot of modern atheists believe in God, but they hate him. And they hate him because that God is the Grand Inquisitor—always watching you so he can find something he can punish you for.
I remember reading about a hurricane headed toward part of Florida and this Christian group said, “Oh we prayed, and the hurricane missed us.” Of course, it killed a couple of
thousand people just north of them. Was that really God's intervention?
They will say, “Oh, that's God's will or that's God's punishment.” There was a light earthquake on the east coast and Pat Robertson said it was God's punishment for “metrosexualism” but God was only mildly irritated, otherwise the earthquake would have been worse.
All of this stuff is not only blasphemous. It is plain old pagan. Again, it’s that Greco-Roman culture that keeps coming through the actual gospel of Jesus Christ.
A theology of reality & Paul’s epistles
We forget that the Apostle Paul was writing in the Greco-Roman culture and so much of what he expresses is either a response to Greco-Roman culture or his own penetration with it.
We need to recall that even the letters to Timothy and Titus (which we know very well Paul didn't write) reduce women to household servants for her husband. That's something directly from Greek culture. That's the way women were treated in Greece, you know. They didn't even go out into public to do the shopping; the men shopped for groceries. The women weren't allowed to. Whoever wrote Timothy might have been a disciple of Paul, but he projected a deep penetration with his wrong Roman ideas (or especially Greek in this case).
We even need to read the epistles of apostle Paul, realizing that he wrote about the realities of his day, but they don't necessarily respond to the realities of our day and the realities that we know through education, research, medical science and neurobiology— the realities that we know to be realities. Paul was writing in the context of the realities of his day and trying to respond to those. And Paul’s responses aren’t always valid when they come into contact with the realities of our day.
And that's why we need to re-examine the whole structure of our theology and say, “Okay, somebody said this in this fourth century. Does it mean anything in the 21st century? Is it valid in the 21st century?”
A theology of reality & the Eastern canons
It's like the canons of the church. The canons were never considered law until the scholastic era. Through scholastic influence, we talk about “canon law.” But a Canon is not a law. It is a balance beam or a scale—it's sort of balancing life in the conditions and circumstances we’re faced with.
So now you have a wonderful priest but if his wife dies, he's a widower and he has small children. But he can't remarry without losing his priesthood, without being laicized. We have cases like! So, he's left with four small children, and he can't provide a mother for them without resigning from the priesthood because priests can't be remarried.
We had a perfectly good candidate for the priesthood. There were circumstances that really didn't involve his actions or his feelings that led to his divorce. He was remarried so now he can't be ordained because he was married twice.
But take a look at what the verse says that they're basing that on—that the priest be the husband of one wife. That means he can't have two or three wives and still be a priest, but then we understood it to mean that he couldn’t even be widowed. This is some kind of almost idiotic superstition that we're still trying to impose in the 21st century. It's just senseless and mindless and it's not law. From trying to balance life in the church, we've turned it into absolute law—legislation—and we can't do anything with it. We can't even discuss it. We can't even develop a theology of reality about these circumstances anymore.
We need a theology of reality—of life the way it actually is.
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