Helm, Warp One Engage!

Hello World, my name is Josh and I am a geek.  I'm also an ordained minister serving in the Penn Central Conference of the United Church of Christ.  I have a BA in Philosophy and Religion and a Masters of Divinity degree.  And I mention this only to point out that I've spent an awful lot of time thinking systematically about God and faith and what I believe.

Did you know that there isn't just one theology that all Christians ascribe to?  I'm aware that consistent news coverage of the Westboro Baptist Church and other, ever so slightly less extreme Christians may lead you to believe otherwise, but it's true!  There's Feminist Theology and Womanist Theology (yes, there is a difference). There's Liberation Theology, which is a Latin American response to poverty. There's Process Theology, which has some similarities Quantum Physics—if I understand either of them correctly. There's even Queer Theology, which comes out of the culture and community of our queer brothers and sisters in Christ.

These various theologies have come about because we cannot think about our relationship between ourselves and God from a neutral position—we think about that relationship from our own perspective.  Our own personal experiences will always shade our understanding of God.  And this is a good thing!  You see, God is so much bigger than we are, that we couldn't possibly wrap our minds around God's entirety.  But if we add my experience to your experience to Martin Luther's experience, to Bono's experience, and so on and so forth, we come a little closer to understanding God more fully.

So...  that begs the question; what culture shades my understanding of God?  And if I'm honest with myself, when I read Mark 13:1-2, for example:

As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’ Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’

 The first thing that pops into my head is this:



And that's just one example.  So somewhere along the line I came to the conclusion that "geek" is probably the best term for the culture that I most closely identify with.  And of course there are many, many shades of geek—but I believe that they have enough overlap that geek is still the best overarching term for what I'm getting at here.

So that's what this blog is going to be about—thinking about God from the perspective of Geek.  A Geek Theology, if you will.  My hope is that my geeky musings here will foster discussion and—ultimately—add just a little more to the pile of experiences of God so we can all understand the Deity more fully.

Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
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