Is theology irrelevant in modern life?

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.