Thomas Mann once said that a writer is simply someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
I wonder if it's the same in theology. Theologians are people for whom the Christian faith is especially difficult, incomprehensible, infuriating. As a rule, we aren't especially talented or spiritually adept individuals. We're people whose minds have been hurt by God, and we're restlessly searching for -- what? Healing perhaps, or catharsis? To expect so much from the study of theology would be futile or even dangerous. At any rate there's no lack of opportunities for theological catharsis: Often our worship services seem calculated to remove the difficulty of believing, to make God easy and accessible, more a cure than a wasting sickness.
I was asked recently to help craft liturgies for parishes whose focus is to be God's grace. So I've been wondering lately where that grace is most tangibly, most realistically real. And the word that keeps recurring to me? Friendship.
Perhaps then we should define theologians like this: They are people for whom even the Christian worshipservice doesn't provide adequate catharsis of the hurtfulness of God.
That is why, as a general rule, you should try to show kindness to theologians. Not because we are necessarily exemplary personalities. Not because we necessarily know what we're talking about. Not because we are necessarily people of great faith. Instead, you should show us kindness because our faith is so weak and so vulnerable; because we're burdened by the difficulty of God; because we're driven to think about God the way some people are driven to drink. You should take care of your theologians the way you would care for the widow and the orphan.
Jurgen Moltmann has somewhere remarked: "We are not theologians because we are particularly religious; we are theologians because in the face of this world we miss God".
What does it mean, to "miss God"? Surely we're not talking about "God's absence". We "miss God" in the world only because God is revealed in the world, only because God is so devastatingly near. It's in the company of an intimate friend that one experiences the true depths of loneliness. Theology springs from the joy and the loneliness of God's nearness.
Thus one of the proper goals of theology is not so much spiritual catharsis or intellectual mastery -- clearing up every difficulty so that one can sleep at night -- as the cultivation of theological friendships. Friendship sustains the difficulty of thinking about God. I warm myself by the fire of a friend's loneliness. God is near, and so we are lonely for God. Friendship is the small room in which we share together the loneliness and the joy of God's nearness.