Highlights

The walk and the discovery unfold together

the narrative journey of the Old Testament is an ongoing travel narrative in which this very walk figures as explanation.

The walk and the discovery go together as journey and sustenance must.

always on mission, always journeying, never having arrived.

The mission and the theology unfold together and the mission is ongoing as is the movement of the theology.

Paul's eschatology may allude to boxing and running, but his soteriology is walking -- as Jesus walked.

He arrives at this understanding in Romans 8, which stands in contrast to the agonistic disembodied cognition of Romans 7 in which he is portraying his pre-Christian self. The "walking" of chapter 8 arises due to "a mindset of life and peace" which puts to death the agonistic inward struggle characterizing the "body of death" of chapter 7.

To walk as Jesus did is to embody his life so that the salvation is inherent in the journey.

as the body is brought into harmony with self through walking, so too walking as Jesus walked is to overcome the alienation that is sin.

perfect, heavenly harmony is a good walk on a good path.

The God/Man walking makes Aristotle's philosophy, centered as it is on the Unmoved Mover, positively static and Platonic in comparison.

Theology, likewise, that does not have a walking, moving, God cannot have the Creator God.

The Unmoved Mover housed at the center of the Universe -- is an indoor God who is going nowhere.

But the Creator God walks in the garden in the cool of the day precisely because no Universe and no building contain Him.

The "grand" problem addressed by scholasticism and the early Church councils was the attempt to reconcile two notions of deity. In the attempt to avoid the idolatry of a too earthy god, they may have missed the fact that idolatry for Jews was not that God might be brought to earth, but that he would be put at an infinite distance.

Every good idolater understands that the idol, as Paul says, is nothing, but it is precisely this reified nothing, an infinite gap that cannot be bridged, that constitutes idolatry.

The static, stationary, idol is a displacement -- a reified negation. One communes with this god through dissolution, disembodiment, and melding into the likeness of nothingness.

The Greek Unmoved Mover was simply a sophisticated summation of the supreme deity of every idolatry. Every high Brahmin and sophisticated Buddhist would agree with classical apophatic theology that god is without passion, without suffering, without emotion, and he is known only in what he is not.

The walking God in the garden, the "three men" walking and talking to Abraham, the God who led Israel on a walk out of Egypt, and the frightening God of Sinai, is a God who comes too close and is too uncontrollable. He is a God one wrestles with, sups with, and walks with. Better are the distant "eternal mysteries" of a self-forming Golden Calf emerging from the fire than the consuming God who bids to come into the forge itself for a walk about.

Anselm's "Greatest Thought that Could Be Thought"

the name of the legless god housed in the human mind

in the _Proslogion _Anselm claims that his meditation has only produced "nothingness and darkness" and yet he equates this with God.

As long as theology had feet and the sense of pilgrimage it adhered to an embodied salvation, but where heaven is pictured as discontinuous with earthly embodiment the walk became secondary.

the great contemporary American Calvinist theologians centered around Calvin College are mountain climbers, most interested in ascent. They are Nietzschean in their attempt to attain rupture and departure.

Stanley Hauerwas has labored so hard on an incarnate theology that he has worn out his knees. His running theology may not have produced the breadth of a slower paced thinker but in his single-minded notion that Christianity is an ethic, a way, or walk, he has returned a great deal of American theology to its earthly depth. In this he is the heir of the first modern walking theologian, Søren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard was concerned with the practical lived reality of Christianity, its ethic, as opposed to the infinite abstractions

"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die" (Kierkegaard's Journals & Papers).

Kierkegaard, perhaps more than any other "modern" theologian would return theology to its feet -- as he describes it in Fear and Trembling, to walking in Abraham's shoes.

Quotes

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Collations

References

Axton, Paul. “Why ‘Walking Theology.’” Forging Ploughshares, 2 Aug. 2018, https://forgingploughshares.org/2018/08/02/why-walking-theology/.