EVERYONE'S A THEOLOGIAN

Cosmos # 7 by Dov Lederberg, 2002

In this week's chapter title from The Life of Meaning, we look at "More Than is Dreamt of in Your Theologies." In comparison to our earlier interview responses, this exchange is more expository than narrative, but I believe many can implicitly recognize the landscape in which these responses are set.
Novelist, Marilynne Robinson, and Physicist / Anglican Priest, John Polkinghorne, give their individual intentions toward sermons, poetry, science, existence and its underlying meaning.
Robinson speaks eloquently of how the best sermons are attempts at understanding the "difficult" as well as the symbiotic relationship between the listeners and the one speaking. A writer, Robinson also speaks of how poetry as language pushes the bounds of meaning for us. Polkinghorne, as a physicist, acknowledges the limit of science for himself to give reason beyond the mechanical. The area of the spiritual is for him the proper place to search for meaning.
I believe Albert Einstein once remarked that the most important tool that we have in the quest of science is our imagination. To think that language and science can be approached as methods of imagining our world, our existence, gives new place to us as participant creators.
In Lederberg's illustration above, an imaginative and artistic interpretation of the cosmos is given. It is his interpretation of how the world is represented. Robinson and Polkinghorne, each imagine the world from their experience and perspective. In this way one might say each one of them is a theologian. In our present pattern of western thought, can it be argued that "everyone's a theologian?"
If so, how did we get here?  
How does that impact our communal faith heritage of history and institutions? 
How does that impact our personal identity?  
And our way in constructing new relationships with others within a faith context and purpose?

Walter Morton for Terra Incognita