Home » Academics » Lecture Hall

A Backpack, Not a Fort: Theology for the Journey of Life

"Could you really persuade us if we did not listen?"
he asked.

"There is no way," said Glaucon.

— Plato, The Republic

Pilgrim Theology

Christian theology is an activity for those en route, and it should be conducted so as to aid those who study it and practice it to travel more efficiently and effectively toward truth. Theology ought to be, in other words, both a statement of present belief and an explorer's compass for further intellectual navigation. "Ought to be," however, is not "is."

Our beliefs too often function as a barrier to learning, not a bridge. For many of us, our theology works more like the burden on the back of Bunyan's pilgrim than it does a guide or a stimulus. What ought to serve as an impetus to further theological discovery serves often as an impediment. That happens because bad ideas have bad consequences. The bad consequences in view here result from our functional disability (or unwillingness) to distinguish our own theology from Scripture. Though we often advance them and cling to them as if they were, our beliefs are not the Bible. They are our (often) debatable extrapolations and tendentious quotations from it.

Like it or not, our beliefs sometimes say as much about us as they do about Scripture. Our "ologies" and our "isms" represent and embody both the Bible and our present understanding of it. Insofar as they do the former, I offer no objection and no advice. Insofar as they do the latter — and they sometimes do it to a startling degree — I believe we must maintain them in something of a provisional status. They can be, and sometimes should be, questioned, even overturned.

No one reading this essay has a perfect theology. Nor do I. As Christian thinkers, we are seekers after truth, not merely its custodians. Those who think of themselves primarily in the "guardian of truth" mode are not at all likely to recognize error in their beliefs because their beliefs are no longer subjected to penetrating scrutiny, if ever they were. The beliefs of such thinkers serve merely as the presuppositions from which they dogmatize rather than the provisional answers to questions that might need to be carefully reevaluated. Sheltered from critical analysis, those ideas can, and do, block the path to wisdom and to the discovery of further theological truth. Sadly, this procedural neglect results in massive theological blind spots.

Theological Genetics

I say "sadly" because pedagogy imitates biology, and from biology we know that we reproduce after our own kind. Quite predictably, theological genetics virtually guarantees that when bad theologians plant the seed of bad theologizing, the harvest can only be more bad theologians. That situation would be sufficiently regrettable were it not made worse by the widespread practice of theological incest — the practice whereby graduates from Faithful Christian College go to Faithful Theological Seminary for graduate training so that they can come back to Faithful Christian College to teach students whom they then will advise to go on for further study at Faithful Theological Seminary. And, if all this can happen without leaving campus for many years at a time (as is sometimes the case), all the better.

Whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not, students who enroll for their first semester at Faithful Christian College often are in great intellectual and spiritual danger. Unless something quite unforeseen and unpredictable occurs (and, thank God, it sometimes does), they will be indoctrinated, not educated, having mistaken entrenchment in theological bigotry for mental and spiritual readiness to serve God in a fallen world. Just as no one of us has a perfect theology or all of the truth, neither does any individual college or seminary. Remember this: Education is your way out of group think, not into it.

Lifelines

Put differently, I intend this brief essay and its successors to be a summons to theological dynamism, not to theological settlement. Some of the things we cling to so tenaciously are not theological lifelines at all; they are just soggy ropes floating on the flood of theological confusion. Because the rising tide of confusion that swirls around us makes the temptation to seize every apparent lifeline a strong one, and because that temptation arises not only very often but very early in the theological enterprise, I want to forestall young theologians grasping at things not securely tied to the shore of reality (or truth, which is the same thing).

I well remember how the world appeared to me, as perhaps it does to all the theologically uninitiated: Black or white, yes or no, up or down, good or bad, true or false. I am not saying that these important polarities do not exist. They most certainly do. I am saying that they sometimes cannot be quickly or easily identified or ascertained. Sometimes they can; but not always, and perhaps not often. Never forget what some theologians call the noetic effects of sin: We are fallen people, with fallen minds, in a fallen world.

It is easy to be wrong.

Young students of doctrine also need to know that some of the best theological lifelines no longer appear clean or inviting. Quite the contrary; the best theological lifelines are sometimes heavily befouled, not because they are faulty and unsafe, but because they are secure and because large numbers of those who lived before us and who found themselves awash in a whirling torrent of uncertainty, who were buffeted against the rocks of error and who were spinning and bobbing in the eddies of theological controversy and confusion, have seized those ropes and clung to them with all the strength their muddy hands could muster.

Occasionally our ancestors left these ropes behind them in as good a condition as when they found them.

Usually, however, they did not. Human fallenness almost always leaves its mark. Even theology itself (to borrow a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins) wears man's smudge and shares man's smell. In that sense, the smudges and smells of tradition and experience can serve as a guide and an endorsement. They sometimes indicate well-tested ways of keeping your head above water. They also expose the erroneous assumption that what looks clean and inviting must be good and that what looks soiled and tattered must not.

But some lifelines, very good ones I am convinced, have rarely been tried. Still others, overused and severely weakened, are ready to break. In the essays that follow, I intend to point to examples of each.

Lessons like these are important and ought to be learned early, especially by those about to embark on the journey of theological discovery. If some of what I have said proves to be of value to the seasoned theological traveler as well, then all the better. The Church rarely prospers more than when its teachers are teachable.

That, at any rate, is the burden and purpose of this essay — the benefit of the Church through the wise nurture of its theologians, young and old.

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

How do you view theology? As a fort or a backpack?

Join the discussion!

Accordingly, while the essays that follow might sometimes be aggressively articulated, they endorse informed tolerance whenever they can. Or, to put the case differently, this brief essay and its successors are an advertisement on behalf of the marketplace of theological ideas. In that marketplace, ideas are subjected to intense scrutiny and sometimes to withering critique. In that process, while some notions prove their worth, others are roundly defeated. For still other ideas the verdict is not yet in. With regard to them — and they are a legion — this essay is a call to patient and informed pluralism, not to relativism.