The great and erudite and sometimes not easy to read Jaroslav Pelikan, once wrote a book called The Melody of Theology. A Philosophical Dictionary. It is both a dictionary and an autobiography in which Pelikan discusses alongside philosophical theology his own faith and convictions. The metaphor of music for theology, with the appeal to composition, melody, harmony, disciplined originality, precision and improvisation, provides a wonderful range of possibility in the thinking, writing, speaking, listening, conversing and praying that is the theological life.
I can hear already some sighs of impatience with such an apparently self-conscious and self-indulgent phrase – what on earth is a theological life? Anyone who leads one or wants one needs to get a life. Aye, but what kind of life? Because at its most creative, transformative and fruitful, it is a well lived theological life that not only helps us get a life, but helps make it a life worth getting! And no, I don't want to turn everyone into amateur dogmaticians, two words that should never be juxtaposed outside of an irenic spirit. Nor do I think everyone should give up other life pursuits, intellectual interests, family commitments, cultural experiences, leisure and entertainment pleasures, personal development for work, just to waste the time saved doing God stuff.
The theological life is life lived with God always on the horizon, and often in the foreground.
The theological life is a worldview interpreted through what we believe about God.
The theological life is what we believe about God being brought into conversation with our lived experience in our daily world, from the personal to the global.
The theological life is a way of listening to our lives, the world and the voices of all the others we encounter in the I-Thou of our living relatedness to all around us.
The theological life is to take with both committed seriousness and creative openness, the central truths of Christian existence and experience through which God has addressed His creation with the I-Thou of eternal love.
And thus the theological life is to live and learn, to give and take, to wonder and worship, to desire and enjoy, the great symphony of purposeful, precarious yet persistent love that has as its dominant theme what God has said and done in Jesus Christ.
And so the theological life is to see our lives, our world and the future of all creation as that symphony moving towards its thunderous, rapturous and sublime finale.
And so the theological life is to get a life, and one worth getting – and giving in love and service to one another, and to the Triune God, Father Son and Spirit, One God, Blessed forever.
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