Understanding Theopoetics simply means using poetic forms to practice theology, and I have been reflecting on this a lot lately.

Poetic Theology – When Prose Fails

Sometimes we don’t have the right words to explain what we believe. Sometimes we are confronted with the infinitely unknowable, uncontainable person of God, and find our response utterly lacking. We cannot fully comprehend or contain who God is. We know God in Jesus as the perfect revelation of God. But in our daily lives, we often end up either lapsing into silence or resorting to handy catchphrases to try and explain our experience of God.

This often frustrates me. I like words. I find my connection to God through words and thoughts and ideas. They help me reflect on and experience God in a way that I cannot do emotionally. Yet, there I have to admit there is a limit to my capacity to speak about, think about, know about, God. There is always more that can be said, but there is always a hiddennes, an unknowability in the heart of God.

For some, this results in a kind of silent mysticism which tries to find and know God in the silence. For others, it results in a different kind of silence. A kind of silence wrapped up in metaphor and beauty and the depths of language that goes beyond declarative phrases and instead goes towards something much richer, much harder, much more fulsome than what normal language makes possible.

Understanding Theopoetics – Going Deeper With Metaphors

Sometimes, poetry and metaphorical language can express something at a deeper level than analytical words or phrases. Whether it’s the lyrics of a song, the words of a poem, or the phrases of prophecy from scripture, sometimes we need the power of metaphor to help explain our experience of God. Our pain and our joy, the good and the bad and the plain unspeakable, can all be engaged with through poetry and drama in a way that cannot be done through plain or technical language.

This is what Hans Urs von Balthazar called theopoetics. He wasn’t the first to use that phrase, but it’s from his work that I learned it. Theopoetics, or theodrama, is the idea that theology, the reasoned study of God, needs metaphor, music, and performance to fully express the fundamental mysteries at the heart of the Christian faith.

There is a need for these things. A need which I sometimes resent, as they are far more difficult for me to grasp and wrestle with, because they demand from us the kind of attentiveness and engagement which transcends our capacity to contain and instead throws us into the dazzling darkness and blinding brilliance of transcendence.

However, theopoetics can also perform a different function. Understanding theopoetics means we can not only engage more fully, more directly, with the experience and knowledge of God. It can also bring alive texts that have become boring to us—or at least texts that we have become familiar with.

Understanding Theopoetics – Reading the Bible’s Poetry

So often the texts of the Bible are reduced to an almost text-book like quality rather than the richness of life which they contain. We brush over them, walk past them, allow them to pass us by as if they were little more than a passing fancy between worship song and sermon. Pádraig Ó Tuama wrote:

Part of the concern in re-reading a text often is that in so doing you read less and recognise more. You glide over familiar words. Or, to be more particular, you glide over familiar presumptions, and so, with time, you aren’t reading what’s there, you’re reading what you think is there.

With theopoetics we are required to go over a text again and again. To sink down into it and wrestle with it with all of our capacity and being. The language of metaphor and performance, theopoetics and theodrama, can bring back to life those texts that we sometimes skip over without really paying attention to. It makes us pay attention.

I think more than anything else this is the biggest blessing that theopoetics and theodrama can bring to Christian discipleship. It makes us pay attention. Psalm 23 is one of those texts which, when we allow ourselves to take time and not simply brush past it, we can find so much coming alive again.

The Lord Is My Shepherd

The Psalms are a good example of understanding theopoetics. Psalm 23 is perhaps one of the most well known chapters in the entire Bible. It’s used at funerals, weddings, TV shows, and on greetings cards. People have turned it into artwork and songs and countless sermons. The language of the psalm has a unique power of engagement for us. John Goldingay writes in Psalms Vol. 1:

Its previousness derives in part from its lyricism and metaphor. One cannot tie down any aspect of some concrete situation that its author had in mind. Everything is imagery. The consequence is that readers can directly access the psalm through their own experience of (e.g.) lack, provision, darkness, fear, and trouble. This may be especially easy for people who (e.g.) have experience of shepherding or dark canyons, but it is also quite possible for people who have no such experience, because the metaphors themselves have a capacity to transcend cultural and experiential gaps. Interpreting a psalm such as this cannot focus on seeking to establish the specific experience out of which it came. It focuses on the metaphors the psalm uses, so as to enter as deeply as possible into their content and resonances.

Again, this is the power of theopoetics. The language of metaphor enables us to learn something different each time we read the psalm. We can find ourselves located in the narrative of the psalm throughout the different stages of our life. We can participate in the performative drama of the psalm when we read it and sing it and find its resonance in our lived experience.

Where To Begin With Understanding Theopoetics

Psalm 23 is a great place to start exploring the importance of theopoetics for worship and discipleship. Whether in personal study and reflection, in congregational worship, or small group sessions, psalm 23 has the capacity to enable everyone to engage where they are. I think this is a key part of theopoetics. Everyone starts where they are. There does not need to be prior knowledge.

There is obviously huge value in wanting to understand what the original author meant when they wrote about valleys of death and safe pastures or overflowing cups at a feast table. But there is also great value in just allowing ourselves to ponder what those images mean for us today and allowing the Holy Spirit to speak to us through those images.

I think we need to give more time and space to theopoetics, ensure there is space in our worship for creative responses, understand the role of performance and drama in connecting us to God, and allow the immanence of the poetic to connect us to the transcendent.

What You Can Do

Maybe try writing your own psalm? Or just allowing the creative and imaginative prose of our childhoods to play when we are trying to describe our experience of God. Sometimes, rather than trying to find the right word to pin down what we are thinking, we need to allow words to convey meaning beyond exactitude. Sometimes, metaphor will take us further than analytical concepts.

I hope this inspires you to write something, paint something, sing something, play something, make something, or do something a bit creative to explore your faith and the way you have experienced God in your life!

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