Is theology irrelevant in modern life?

This week I heard someone on the radio describing another's opinions as "theological" and hence having no connection to reality. It is not an agreeable thing to hear relegated to the realm of fairy tale the subject one has been fascinated by for 30 years. This must be the consensus view, for hardly anyone - except the enthusiast - talks about religion anymore other than a brief foray into denominational allegiance. Of the big three - sex, politics and religion - it is the latter that has been dropped from conversation.

There are many reasons for this but among them one stands out. It is felt that religion is dangerous because, on the global scale it has and is producing huge bloodshed and social disruption. For the individual, any conversation about religion has the potential to produce hurt feelings. So religion is not discussed. We shy away from such an unsafe topic and there is a general consensus that such conversation are unwise.

Our educational institutions have followed this lead and theology has been almost totally excluded from the curriculum. The separation of church and state is given as the warrant for the neglect of the one tradition that has formed Western culture. Consequently we have lost the theological stance.

This is an orientation towards the world and human life from the point of view of biblical narrative. These narratives are similar to the serious literature of our own time that deal incisively with the human predicament. They deal with slavery and freedom, humanity's relation to the world, love and hate, peace and war, faith, idolatry, betrayal, abandonment, birth and death and the consequences of the accidental.

In the absence of studies in theology the study of literature is the closest discipline we have. However, the latter lacks the systematic organisation and the means of expression of the former.

The theological stance is that stance that is informed by the ancient stories that have been included in the canon because they continue to speak to us. It is not only that they are memorable but that they cut through our delusions about ourselves and about life, they subvert our religious leanings, they beckon us into a richer world.

For example the book of Job is a profound commentary on misfortune and the religious attitude to life. Jonah is a story that cuts away at the nation's understanding of itself as having a special relationship with God. (Did not the Nenevites repent after such a small cry from Jonah?) The gospels tell us about the humanity of God.

The loss of the theological stance leaves us truly at a loss in the world because none of the secular disciplines will help us orient our lives. The young man who peddles pornography on the Internet justifies his behaviour by saying that he just wants a nice lifestyle. This is what liberalism is, it is the pursuit of happiness sans value.

There is another downside of the loss of the theological stance and that is we lose the ability to analyse culture, both our own and others. We fail to recognise that metaphysics shapes culture because we have been told that metaphysics - how we view the world - is irrelevant.

This is where we really get nervous because we are tempted to make unfavourable comparisons between Western and other cultures and that smacks of ethnocentrism and the incitement of inter-religious hatred. We would much rather talk in the abstract about the "World's Great Religions" as if that abolishes any difference. We also are apt to say that there is, after all, only one god worshipped in many different ways.

But this high-flown language will not hide the deep rifts that exist between the religions of the world. Neither will cultural relativism smooth over the cracks or the romantic attitude that we are apt to take towards traditional cultures that makes everything seem of equal value. The argument of this essay is that we cannot afford to abandon the theological/critical stance either towards our own civilization or towards others.

At the present time the West is engaged in a war against an Islamic country. Our leaders have pressed the case that this has got nothing to do with religion and in the case of Iraq this is partly correct. However, if we fail is to understand how Islam has shaped the culture of Islamic countries then we will never see a large part of the picture. Let us take just three examples of differences between Judeo/Christianly and Islam.

1. Creation.

Islam, like Judeo/Christianity understands God as the creator of all things. The difference between them is that for Islam God cannot be contaminated by the human, God is pure, unknowable all powerful etc.

This is why Islam can accept Jesus as a prophet but cannot believe that he is the son of God. This would threaten God's purity. Such a metaphysic does not affirm the existence and importance of the world and human life that the creation stories and the incarnation do so strongly.

While both Islam and Christianity are tempted by Neoplatonism, in which the reality of the world is reduced to an emanation of the divine and the only real things are the heavenly, this is subverted in Christianity by the incarnation - God becomes a man. This is one of the reasons that the West is so ascendant in the material sciences, because its metaphysics affirms the reality of time and the world as the arena of human destiny. The world cannot be reduced in favour of heaven.

2. Law

Christian fundamentalism and Islam both agree that salvation comes by obeying the divine law. St Paul argued that our efforts to obey the law and to be justified by that are futile. He opens a new way of being that takes into account our frailty of purpose and puts revelation in its place. We see what human life is in the history of the nation of Israel - and the stories it told - and in the life and death of Jesus. We find our way via story.

So instead of slavishly obeying a text that tells us how to behave we are set free to make the journey into the human mystery. This has enormous implications for culture because it is always open to the new thing and is able to search the depths of the human heart.

3. Sin.

Both Judeo/Christianity and Islam deal with the story of Adam and Eve and the fall. However, Islam says that God forgave the human so that we did not carry the fall into the future. While Christianity affirms that there is something up with us, that there is something broken at the very basis of our lives, Islam projects the existence of evil onto Satan. The logic of this difference produces self examination and confession in the Christian tradition and the disowning of evil in the Islamic. Private admission of sin is necessary for public reformation.

There is a criticism of this kind of analysis and that is that it all seems like self justifying hand waving on behalf of Western culture. The connection between belief and behaviour needs to be teased out. Does the absence of the belief in personal brokenness stifle personal and therefore public reformation in the Islamic world? Do the metaphysics of creation really stifle the practice of natural science in cultures whose religious systems make light of the reality of the world?

Just because it seems logical does not necessarily mean that it is true. There may be, and obviously are, other sociological factors involved. My argument is that we have become blind to the theological factors because, for various historical reasons, this kind of investigation has been closed to us.

The theological stance is even-handed in its function. All religions and the cultures that they affect are grist to the mill particularly, perhaps, our own. In the film, "The Tracker" the Aboriginal character can state that the white man has no dreaming without there being one voice of demurral. Indeed many nod in agreement. We do not acknowledge that we once had a powerful dreaming that propelled us into supremacy over nature and over other cultures.

Of course we decry the cruelty and the devastation that that produced, both accidentally, in the spread of disease, and intentionally in gunshot and poisonings repeated in many lands and towards many peoples before "ethnocentric" was a word. However, we are approaching a time in which it will be true that the West has no dreaming. It will be the case that we will live off the benefits of that dreaming long after it has faded from our memory and present practice.

What will happen to a society that owes its success to a religious tradition that provided an accurate view of human life and the world but which then forgets? We approach the malaise that we see all around us, the dilution of culture, the general anomie, the boredom in the midst of plenty and above all, the trivial distractions provided by the sporting life. A football player pulls a hammy and it makes the front page!

Metaphysics cannot be voided; it is rather the case that one displaces another. The radical Enlightenment of the 17th C with its emphasis on the objective and on freedom from all creeds, and the subsequent reorientation of life towards the pursuit of happiness, thanks to the Americans, has displaced the dreaming that was at the base of Western civilization.

For my money this is a thinner narrative of the human and produces thinner lives and thinner culture. If the West is to find itself exhausted, economically, culturally and politically, then it will be because it has grasped to its bosom an inadequate narrative of the human.

It seems that we have out-paced ourselves. We find ourselves with increasingly powerful new toys and we do not know their import for us. And so we invent things called "ethics" that purport to tell us. But ethics cannot be derived from an inadequate narrative of the human; all you get is inadequate ethics. The solution to all this? That is another story.