Transcendence, Poverty and Loneliness: Psalm 113

Who is like the Lord our God,
who is seated on high,
who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust,
and lifts up the needy from the ash heap,
To make them sit with princes,
with the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a home,
Making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the Lord! (Psalm 113:5-9)

One of the connections often missing in our theology is the link between worship and social justice, a link that is strongly made throughout the Bible (e.g. Isaiah 58; James 1:27). At first reading I thought that was what was going on here in Psalm 113. But then I realised this psalm isn't directly addressing human justice but God's. God's transcendant otherness is described analogically here as being 'on high,' above both the 'heavens and the earth.' This might suggest that God is not concerned with such earthly and material issues as poverty and social exclusion.* But that is not the case. Instead, from God's transcendant perspective ('who looks far down') that which is important is the poor and needy and those without the structures of support that enable human living. God's agenda is to elevate the lowly and to place the lonely in loving families.

There is a tendency among the religious that the more otherworldly, 'spiritual,' and 'holy,' our beliefs are, the less concerned we are with the material and human. Psalm 113 shows how far this misses the mark. Who is like the Lord our God? Those who are most like God are the ones whose transcendant perspective (Spirituality) causes them to love and serve the poor, needy and excluded. And this is what the God we worship is like. Praise the Lord!

* In the historical context of this psalm childlessness implied both social stigma and economic insecurity.

Doing theology like it matters

In the modern western world Christianity is declining fast. Although some churches are growing they are not growing fast enough to offset all the shrinking that is going on. What is the point of doing theology? How can theology matter when most our world believes belief is a private and personal matter, 'up to the individual,' isn't theology just a matter of trying to enforce your opinions on others?

Someone, who wasn't a Christian, once asked me what I was studying. When I told him 'theology,' he was impressed. I was surprised, I expected it to be a conversation stopper. But he was interested, he told me 'everything comes back to theology in the end, who we are, what we do, good and bad, the meaning of life, I would love to study theology... but I have to make a living.' I thought, 'wow, and this guy isn't even a believer and yet he understands why theology matters better than most Christians I know.'

You see, whever we make statement about something that we consider to be true, or good, or beautiful, we are really making a theological statement. We are refering to something which is outside of the physical material world, some quality that is transcendent (beyond).

Whenever we choose to accept a fact (scientific or otherwise) as reality we are making an assumption about reality and our own ability to accurately perceive it. This is a theological assumption because only by their being some objective truth beyond the material universe (i.e God) and us being somehow related to this truth (e.g. 'made in God's image,' see Genesis 1:27) can we expect our perception of the material world to actually connect us to reality in any meaningful way. The same goes for statements of good and evil, whenever we (rightly) state that child abuse, or genocide, or rape, are evil and wrong we are comparing them to an objective good which cannot be measured by the natural sciences, but which none of us doubt exists, because we all intuitively know somethings are just plain wrong (evil) and some are just plain right (good). Likewise, when we find beauty in a face, or sunset, or work of art, or event, we are recognising in that coincidence of physical properties and happenstance that there is a resonance in this beautiful thing with something other, with something that is capable of bringing purpose, meaning, wholeness, and peace to the world which otherwise appears to be random, meaningless, incomplete, and disrupted.

So my point is this: we all do theology all the time. The problem is we often dont know we are doing it and we end up doing it badly. Theology isn't about me imposing my opinions on you, but about us all learning how to do theology better; to do theology as best we can, because it really matters.