Say Anything

When I first started studying theology, I found it really difficult to say anything.  My hesitance was born out of a very new and raw awareness of how much I didn't know.  I heard Middlers and Seniors use words like "sotierology," which spell checker doesn't even like, but which means one's opinion about salvation.  I didn't yet know what a hermeneutic or that everybody has one for better or worse (a perspective regarding the interpretation of scripture).
I feared at any moment my utter ignorance of Hegelian dialectic or Kantian ethics would be shamefully displayed by some naive comment I made.  And so I did very little talking, and spent a good amount of time looking things up, and eventually I learned to take my place in the conversation.  It was not an easy or very comfortable process, but it was necessary for a Seminary student.
Every now and then I try to get back in touch with that unknowing, to do as Yoda instructs Luke Skywalker and, "unlearn what I have learned," in order to gain new understanding.  That is a valuable exercise in humility and perspective, and often produces fruit of one sort or another.
However, there comes a point where this sort of deconstruction of one's assumptions becomes toxic.  Deconstruction is one of the distinguishing features of postmodern thinking; tearing apart the edifices of culture and the moral and logical assumptions we thought we had in the bank.
Deconstruction is particularly hostile to theological investigation because when you strip away the assumptions that we make in faith, you ultimately have nothing.  Deconstruction often leads to atheism, because God is intentionally a mystery, an unknowable reality at the core of everything that exists.
The value in being at that place, of having all of your assumptions on the cutting room floor, is debatable, but it's a place that I think students of theology and also students of human nature, need to come to.
We confront the void, the nothing, the big empty.
This is the set of conditions that exist in the beginning of the book of Genesis, and then something happens, even before God says, "Let there be light."  The Spirit, Breath, Wind of God is present in the void.  You can't prove or disprove this, there are no witnesses and there is no evidence, because, as of yet there was still nothing except the Spirit, Breath, Wind.  From our perspective, you either assign to that Spirit, a consciousness, or you don't, but you can't get around the reality of that condition, there is something there.
If you name that something God, there are many things you can begin to build on that assumption.
If you name it nothing, or deny the reality of it's existence, you have reached an intellectual dead end, and you lose all ability to say anything, because anything you do say will be a product of your own imagination.
Some would say our construction of God or gods is precisely that, an act of imagination, and I agree to this extent: we do tend to create God in our own image.  In any age you can see how the God or gods that a people worship is influenced by their specific, cultural and societal values.  Which is sometimes taken as proof that there is actually no ultimate reality, no ground of being behind all this.
However, if you choose to make the opposite assumption, namely that God is the ground of all being, look at where this assumption leads us:  creation is purposeful and as such contains underlying moral assumptions about good and bad, inasmuch as "good" advances the cause of the Creator, and "bad" tears down or destroys the cause.
This is not to say that atheism equals immorality, because it certainly does not.  But we should be honest that many of the motivating forces that create moral atheists, are in fact constructions made by a culture that evolved with the assumption of  a Creator.  Atheists then look at the construction of a purposeful deity and say, "we can follow the code, without actually believing in the programmer," and they can, and they do, and more power to them.
Whatever Calvinism I have left in me, tells me that I would probably not be a very good person if I didn't believe in God.  Maybe I would, but there's a good chance that I would be even more selfish than I already am.  I would probably not find many occasions even for the basic altruism of giving a hoot about anyone or anything that did not immediately effect me.
When I stand and face the void, I am not okay with there truly being nothing.  When I name it as something, even if that something is a tremendous mystery, I am better.  When I trust that the mystery is somehow a loving God, I am better still, and when I trust that, in Jesus Christ, the mystery calls me it's child, then I can say something.