Theology is a strange animal. It appears to have a bit of genus confusion, particularly as popularly practiced and understood in my context, that of the American suburban church with its usual ties to seminary and denomination. I think the confusion results from its attempts to masquerade as a science. Even the name, with its serious and professional-sounding "-ology" suffix, lends credence to this misnomer. The theology that I am familiar with too often looks like a monkey who thinks he's a dolphin, a beast out of its natural habitat who has mananged to convince itself that it belongs but who cannot comprehend its difficulty in adapting to its environment.

When I graduated from college in 1996, I marched down the aisle and received a rather fancy certificate, clean and white and very official-looking, like something telling me I had won a million dollars or a free magazine subscription. As is typical for one who has paid his dues, I hung my million-dollar certificate on my wall in my office, never bothering to consider the irony of what it conveyed - the title of Bachelor of Science in Bible. I often wonder now what Bacon would think of my title, whether he'd be impressed with how far his method has come so as to include even the deity, or whether he'd merely shake his head in incomprehension, wondering how these people had confused observation, experiment, and hypothesis with story, art, and faith.

The problem, I think, with understanding theology as science is that the tools of scientific inquiry do odd, and sometimes bad, things to our search for meaning (which I believe lies at the heart of most theology). Think, for example, about the way in which we approach scripture - we dissect it, cutting it up into the smallest components possible, so that we can describe its systems and connections. Unfortunately, dissection usually involves killing the dissectee. Something irreplacable is lost in the process. In attempting to reduce scripture to its component parts, we have robbed it of the life and beauty and grace that it rightly possesses.

What if we approached theology more as caretakers of the stories of our people and less as scientific authorities? What if we became excited about the grand story of God and attempted to simply live within and articulate that story? What if our theologians became artists and poets and bards rather than scientists and technicians? What if the tools of the trade were not just reason, but also imagination, not just systems, but also stories, not just inquiry, but also mystery?

What if, indeed.