BEYOND THEOLOGY: TO THE SPIRITUAL, TRULY RELIGIOUS, MYSTICAL AND SACRED AWAKENING OF OUR SOULS. BEYOND THEOLOGY INTO THE SPIRITUAL AWAKENING OF TRUE SOUL HEALING. AND WITH THIS AWAKENING, SO SHALL COME OUR SPIRITUAL HEALING OF OURSELVES, OF EACH OTHER, OF OUR COMMUNITIES AND OF OUR MOTHER EARTH, OUR HOLY GAIA.
OUR EVER-CHANGING SELVES
Scriptures must be reinterpreted, because humanity’s consciousness evolves. As we evolve, so we enter new depths of understanding. With new depths of understanding, our scriptures must be known anew.
Scripture is unchanging.
The Word is the Word entire: for ever.
But we are not unchanging.
We are ourselves: learning, evolving, growing.
We are ourselves: child into adult into sage.
And we are the whole host of the world entire:
Age upon age; generation upon generation:
Learning, evolving, growing.
We are the whole host of the world entire:
Tribal into national; national into global; global into universal.
The Word is unchanging.
But we are not.
What we make of the Word must change,
Must be re-interpreted:
Age after age, generation after generation.
For the unchanging Word only lives through us:
Our ever-changing selves.
Article from Wikipedia n.d.
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the Divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analysing the supernatural, but also deals with religious epistemology, asks and seeks to answer the question of revelation. Revelation pertains to the acceptance of God, gods, or deities, as not only transcendent or above the natural world, but also willing and able to interact with the natural world and, in particular, to reveal themselves to humankind. While theology has turned into a secular field, religious adherents still consider theology to be a discipline that helps them live and understand concepts such as life and love and that helps them lead lives of obedience to the deities they follow or worship.
Theology is derived from the Greek theologia (θεολογία), which derived from theos (Θεός), meaning "god", and -logia (-λογία), meaning "utterances, sayings, or oracles" (a word related to logos [λόγος], meaning "word, discourse, account, or reasoning") which had passed into Latin as theologia and into French as théologie. The English equivalent "theology" (Theologie, Teologye) had evolved by 1362. The sense the word has in English depends in large part on the sense the Latin and Greek equivalents had acquired in patristic and medieval Christian usage, although the English term has now spread beyond Christian contexts.
Greek theologia (θεολογία) was used with the meaning "discourse on God" around 380 BC by Plato in The Republic, Book ii, Ch. 18. Aristotle divided theoretical philosophy into mathematike, physike and theologike, with the last corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.
Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Augustine, followed Varro's threefold usage, though Augustine also used the term more simply to mean 'reasoning or discussion concerning the deity'
In patristic Greek Christian sources, theologia could refer narrowly to devout and inspired knowledge of, and teaching about, the essential nature of God.
The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used theologia to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a subject of academic study, dealing with the motionless, incorporeal reality (as opposed to physica, which deals with corporeal, moving realities). Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.
In scholastic Latin sources, the term came to denote the rational study of the doctrines of the Christian religion, or (more precisely) the academic discipline which investigated the coherence and implications of the language and claims of the Bible and of the theological tradition (the latter often as represented in Peter Lombard's Sentences, a book of extracts from the Church Fathers).[22]
In the Renaissance, especially with Florentine Platonist apologists of Dante's poetics, the distinction between "poetic theology" (theologia poetica) and "revealed" or Biblical theology serves as steppingstone for a revival of philosophy as independent of theological authority.
It is in this last sense, theology as an academic discipline involving rational study of Christian teaching, that the term passed into English in the fourteenth century, although it could also be used in the narrower sense found in Boethius and the Greek patristic authors, to mean rational study of the essential nature of God – a discourse now sometimes called theology proper.
From the 17th century onwards, it also became possible to use the term theology to refer to study of religious ideas and teachings that are not specifically Christian (e.g., in the term natural theology which denoted theology based on reasoning from natural facts independent of specifically Christian revelation,) or that are specific to another religion (see below).
"Theology" can also now be used in a derived sense to mean "a system of theoretical principles; an (impractical or rigid) ideology".
