It used to be said: theology is faith seeking understanding. Today, more and more of us would put it differently: theology is experience seeking meaning, purpose and faith, writes Kevin Liston.
Think about the last time something actually changed how you saw your life: falling in love, the quiet after a separation, the first time you held your child, a diagnosis, a redundancy, a friendship that flourished or one that ended, or a creeping feeling that the old explanations no longer satisfy.
Chances are it wasn’t a sermon or a Church teaching that got you through it. It was the experience itself, sat with and slowly made sense of. That has become the place where many of us get a sense of how life works and how we find our purpose. It is where faith starts to grow.
That is the change a lot of Catholics are living through right now, often without a name for it. Fewer people are content to receive a ready-made answer and file it away. More of us want a spirituality that actually fits the life we’re living; one that takes seriously our place in the world, the sense we’re making of what happens to us, and our own part in shaping how we respond.
It helps to understand why the older model made sense in its time, and why it doesn’t resonate the same way now.
For centuries, faith rested on someone else’s authority. Scripture was treated as settled, final truth, handed down from God. What Jesus said, and what Paul and the other early writers said about him, were presented as rules for belief and behaviour; full stop, no further questions needed.
If a miracle was reported or an authority spoke, that was taken as proof enough. It’s a tidy system, and it still works for people who grew up inside it and never had reason to doubt it. But it asks you to take someone else’s word for it, and for a lot of us, that’s no longer where trust in faith begins.
Modern biblical scholarship changed the picture. The people who study Scripture closely now see it less as a rulebook dropped from heaven and more as a set of very human testimonies: real people, in real times and places, trying to put words to their experiences, what they’d lived through and come to believe.
Once you start reading Scripture in that way, alongside everything we now understand about the history, culture and psychology behind it, faith starts to look less like inherited certainty and more like a shared human search, which is closer to how most of us actually experience it.
None of this came from nowhere. It’s part of a bigger understanding shaped by science, by the Enlightenment, by centuries of learning to trust evidence and lived experience over handed-down authority.
The Second Vatican Council rode that same wave: it emerged in a world already being remade by movements for independence, for liberation, for women’s equality, by wider education and rising prosperity, and by a culture newly willing to talk openly about what people actually felt and needed.
The spirituality stemming from all this puts your own experience, your own sense-making, and your own sense of purpose at the centre, without losing sight of the relationships that make a life worth living.
You could think of it as part of a wider cultural move toward what Carl Jung called individuation: becoming more fully, distinctly yourself rather than a copy of what you received.
It is not that the old story was wrong, or that your story has to reject it. It’s that the search for God is increasingly starting where you actually are – in your own life, on your own two feet – rather than somewhere determined in advance and presented to you.
How we make sense of life – the explanation, the rationale – how we come to our values and what we regard as worthwhile become the story of our lives. As we refine our thinking and articulate our intentionality, it becomes theology.
The full potential of life is revealed in faith. It is personal for each of us but also social when we find affirmation in sharing with others.
