Towards a Description of Pyro-theology

Increasingly my work is being referenced via the term, “pyro-theology” or “pyrotheology” (which one do you think is better?)

The term was first coined by ikon (by Chris Fry) for a transformance art gathering we put on at Greenbelt Festival in 2009. Since then it has become a useful signifier for the work I am engaged in. Below you will find a provisional (and inadequate) overview of this new theological term. It is taken from the Pyrotheology Facebook page. There isn’t much happening on it at the moment, but in the coming months that will be changing…

Contrasting the typical understanding of Christianity as offering satisfaction and certainty pyrothology unearths a more radical and disturbing alternative. Pyrotheology is an approach that explores how the event testified to in the founding documents of Christianity invites us into a different mode of life. One in which we learn how to embrace the idea that we can’t be whole, that life is traumatic and that we don’t know the secret.

Decrying the popular view of God as a type of product that will render us complete, remove our suffering and reveal the answers, pyrotheology offers the blueprint for an incendiary faith that courageously embraces brokenness, resolutely faces up to unknowing and joyfully accepts the difficulties of existence.

Pyrotheology does not seek to draw people into some kind of fractured existence, but rather to draw out the ways in which we already are fractured; a reality that our various cultural, political and religious narratives eclipse. By short-circuiting the various techniques we use to avoid such a confrontation with ourselves, and encouraging us to embrace what we unveil, the pyrotheological thesis is that we will find that death is robbed of its sting.