To the founder of Theopoetics.net

I am very excited to be included on your website.

The occasion of your website is a cause for celebration. The website its self is an Theopoetic – an event of God-Speak situated within the language by which our ages hopes and dreams are voiced and using technology by which future thinking is shaped. A quick, and not thorough I should add, glance around the internet shows that there is no liberationtheology.com, processtheology.com or constructivetheology.com. While there are innumerable websites that reference, debate or by which articles in this field can be accessed I have found no single site which attempts to rally the movement of that theology to its self. Your website, a rallying point for the Theopoetic community, is a first and a rarity.

This it’s self is interesting and allows us to further understand why the Theopoetic endeavor is important. The crime of much of what is called the ‘academic’ is that what we construct as ‘academic’ is its self a part of the capitalist model that much of our theology seeks to critique. The ideas and theory constructed in the academy are done so by individuals who produce, consume and discard their theories as new fads, trends and theories come into view. I am not criticizing this as such; it is important to be in touch with the latest thinking and theories. I only bring this up to recognize that theology has tended to be a ‘solitary’ act and an act dependent on the consumer moods of the academic world.

What we can come to here is that the Theopoetic is a post-academic theology, or at least allows for it. And you are correct, I have criticized the faddishness of most theology and I have jumped into the trend of putting a ‘post’ before a word. And by calling it a post-academic theology I do not mean to say that is a theology outside or beyond the scope of the academy and the academic theologian. To borrow a phrase from Ken Wilber, the force behind Integral Philosophy – the Theopoetic ‘includes and transcends’ the academic.

To illustrate this I will turn to Marianne Sawickis concept, mentioned in passing in her book ‘Seeing the Lord’, of the three tables of theology. Sawicki says that theology should be constructed from a meeting of the academic, the worshipping community, and the hungers and desires of the poor. Not as three separate forces working in isolation but as a communal event. A theology born in such a manner escapes the consumer market mentality of the academy and returns to its roots as a source for communal life and provocation towards justice. The Theopoet would remind Sawicki of a fourth table as well – the insights, hungers and articulations of the artist.

The danger for both theology and poetry is in its ineffectiveness and its retreat from the world into specialized fields. Poet/essayist/farmer Wendell Berry point out that poetry has become a specialized field of a few with a self-generating audience of MFA students and former MFA students. The danger of this is that poetry then becomes art for arts sake exercise with no responsibility to the world beyond the impulses – an erotic urge so to speak – of the artist who created it. Poetry becomes a sort of self love, an intellectual and emotional masturbation.

The application to theology is obvious. MA and M.div students, theology Phd students etc become consumer-producers for a self generating market. In the meantime the masturbatory nature being as it is, the pews for which theology is generated become increasingly isolated from the thinking of the churches/communities theologians. We become a field of ‘theology for theology’s sake’ with out considering our communal responsibilities. This is why theology – why a Theopoetic working from a 4-table model – is a post-academic theology. The 4-tables is about lovers embracing.

The Theopoetic by its nature – which says our stories and symbols have meaning, our hungers have meaning, our dreams have meaning, the life and death of our communities have meaning, that the God whom we focus on but is never finally definable (thus, poetry) - has an implication. When we resort to a ‘theology for theologies’ sake, if our theological endeavors become a race up an academic career ladder or a career instead of a vocation and divorced from the community’s life, we have just insisted to the world that theology and poetry have no gift or implication for the world.

The Theopoetic challenge before people like ourselves is to insist to the world that theology and poetry (by which we can/may/do mean the mythic and narrative hungers of our age) still have a role to play. Plato’s republic was threatened by God-speakers, theologians, poets who spoke about the Gods. Plato could say this because he knew poetry, and God-Speak, contained the voices of those power trampled on. Likewise he knew a good poem, good God-Speak, could pose a question so powerful that the people would swerve, change their course, lead into a new life and a new way of being.

In the Theopoetic world our primary source documents by which we construct our theologies do not exist primarily in the peer-reviewed journals (include and transcend). Instead the Theopoetic can choose as its primary documentation vandalism, chapbooks, editorials, alternative newspapers, poetry, film, advertising etc. For example the Theopoetic task, I hope, will work like the video art of Diane Derr (this authors sister). Diane Derr presents screens of ordinary objects – three women with lollipops – and allows us to be impacted by the underlying sexual implications of ordinary objects. The publications of the Theopoet, I am hopeful, will move into such work. The web provides an opportunity for us to deliver multi-platform publications integrating scholarly research with artistic delivery, feedback from communities etc. Storytelling nights in public venues, poetry nights etc also function as publications of the Theopoet – though again I insist we avoid any ‘art for arts sake’ and ‘spectacle for spectacles sake’. I’m sure that Theopoets of the future will discover other multi and single platform opportunities for publication.

We are the future of Theology.

Jason Derr

MA in Theological Studies, Vancouver School of Theology (on leave)

Chaplain Assistant, Lutheran/Anglican Campus Ministry – Simon Fraser University (lamm.ca).