Replace “God” With The Word “Love.” It Changes Your Theology.
There’s that wonderful old adage, which also happens to be scripture, that “God is love.” It’s found in John’s first letter, and it’s something people repeat to one another often without knowing that it’s scripture. God is love.
When I taught high school, there was a prayer class offered to juniors and seniors as a religion elective. I taught it all five years, but one particular class session from my first year of teaching stands out to me the most, and laid the foundation for an exercise I would walk my students through when it seemed like they needed it.
A student was asking the tough questions, questions having to do with theodicy and the ways that humans manipulate statements about God to give them authority to treat other people terribly. Her questions were about people who do terrible things to others in the name of the Christian god, and how it doesn’t make sense.
So we talked about having consistent theologies, and how a lot of people don’t have consistent theologies at all, and how that can be damaging and require a bit of mental gymnastics and intellectual dishonesty in order to hold it. We decided that we wanted to have personal theologies that were consistent. But how could we check it?