First, theology is an endeavour of metaphysics dealing with the absolute as absolute and it is a critical examination of the practice of religion. Theology is always claudicate if it attempts to be one without the other.
Second, religion is theology in act, in practice. It applies a vision of life, a valuation of life, and a systematic format for the presentation and enforcement of that vision and valuation, the system of masks and rituals, dogmas and liturgics.
How do I understand the absolute?
Is it random and is my place in the universe a matter of blind chance?
Is it determined wholly by laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics and is my place wholly a determined matter, a matter of fate, of unfolding laws of nature?
Is it all open to interpretation, to being acted upon by me, by my mind, and is it, thus, something in which I have an active role?
Christianity claims a “yes” to the third question. It avers I am a child not just of the universe but of the underlying creativity, and that that childhood is a matter of nature, that it is vocation, and it is gift, and that it carries with these honours (graces) the responsibility to the fruition of these honours, a responsibility to create, to make life. This responsibility to make life is not a crude call to the preservation of the species, but something far greater in essence and existence; it is the responsibility to come to full possession of my own mental, spiritual, physical capacities, my life. It is about being fully human, about being with and for others, about being for me and for the world as an intimate unity.
It is to this understanding of the foundational creativity and my relationship to it, with it, and in it, that the masks of Parent and Child are applied. If this is my life, my home, my world, I am not the source; I have come into them. I am the issue of the creativity that gives rise to me and the world, and if I can call myself child, I can call that absolute my parent (father/mother). This is not a question of definition; it is a question of relationship and concretizing the understanding of that relationship. No image of the divine can do justice to the absolute as absolute, but I can justifiably express my relationship to the inexpressible.
Theology must critique how religion applies the masks to the foundational vision. The more pellucid and integrated the vision and its enunciations, the more functional the instruments of (spiritual) holistic formation of the individual and society. Crystalline purity of vision and logic are absolutely necessary for not only dogmatic formulae, but for every extrapolation from them, for every puff of smoke, for every bow, for every robe. These formulae and actions constitute the charactery of the most sublime language, and cannot be allowed to be bollixed by the whim of beadledom.
Third, this practice of masks and rituals constitutes the heart of the cult.
If society is taken as a network of relationships among individuals, that network rests on some underlying shared values and visions (even if only subliminally, unconsciously) which provide the groundwork for the interrelations.
Those shared values and visions are not merely the groundwork of the society, they are also the groundwater of the society. They slowly permeate the upper layers of social cohesion, nourish it, and gradually emerge onto the surface where they form the core of the cult, the core values and visions that simultaneously root the society and lead it forth. (In this analysis of the relationship betwixt cult and culture I am in the debt of Josef Pieper and his work in Leisure: the Basis of Culture.)
Fourth, every cult is about sacrifice, about the purposeful giving up of resources for the reconciliation of the society and its ideals.
Fifth, it is this sacrifice of resources that creates the cult-ure.
It is obvious by this that a religion need not be “religious” in the normal usage of that word. Socio-political entities and economic systems can be manipulated to cult status and provide a basis for a culture, but, in so far as they have a material and not a metaphysical basis in the absolute as absolute, fail absolutely to do that which cult and culture ideally exist to accomplish: the full formation of the human as a being with and for others. If God is envisioned as absolute creativity, as an outpouring of joyous self-giving, then the object of the cult is to replicate that in the human and the world. If divine status is given to growth, profit, social order, or any other mundane goal, the object of the cult is still the reproduction of the divine image in individual and society, and here that is some mundane, earth-bound clod characterized ultimately by either unbridled greed or obsequiousness.
It might appear that cult and culture are in some sense enduring, but a society’s resolve of values and vision are always under the test and temptation of ego-centricity and the influx of contradictory values and visions. Thus, cults, and their epiphenomena, culture, are always malleable, always under threat, always living with temptation and the devil within and without. This is as true of Leninism and Maoism as it is of Christianity and Islam. Societies are inseparable from the cult and culture that in-form them; and being foundational, cults and cultures do not, cannot, mix without impacting the societies in which and through which they operate. Every theologian, every state department bureaucrat, every preacher, every politico needs keep that writ large and legible.