What God has joined together?

I've been trying to reflect on the HTB conference on the Holy Spirit that I was at for the last two days. I'm thinking there may be several posts that go back to different aspects of the conference; to describe it as content-rich would be a gross understatement. And, of course, there was the opportunity to "bump into" people who you don't see very often who are on a similar wavelength.

The one incident at the very end of the proceedings that epitomised what the conference was about was when Graham Tomlin, who was hosting the conference (and himself gave an excellent talk) invited those who were involved in academic theology to go to the front of the church, and then invited those invloved in local church ministry to pray for them and minister to them; and then vice versa. There's plenty more to say, but if the conference marks the fact that (seriously high level) academic theology and the real life of local churches can, in the Holy Spirit, bless and benefit each other, rather than being seen as separate worlds, that has to be a good thing.

Ideas have legs?

Strangely enough this week I've seen two "peak viewing" type thriller programmes (Flashforward and Paradox) that have featured discussions about the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. I don't understand much about physics, but I guess the people who came up with this theory didn't do it mainly to provide plot material for sci-fi writers.

Having said that, it seems such a weird theory to me that only a story can make sense of it, even if the nuances get lost in the process. So what? Well, it seems to me that a lot of academic theology is about as far removed from the lives of most Christians as quantum mechanics is from most TV viewers. Most people simply don't get that excited about the Cappadocian Trinity, the new perspective on Paul, or the finer points of the doctrine of justification. That doesn't mean to say that it doesn't have value, of course. But it does mean that we need, among other things, to tell stories to make the relevance of theology clear; and that the risk for those who do the academic stuff is not knowing quite what it will look like when translated into ordinary life.

Perhaps even more pointedly, we need to realise that even a lot of our basic beliefs as Christians seem as far removed from your average unbeliever as the finer points of quantum mechanics too.