What is [theology] Good for?

absolutely nothing?

Though I have tried before to explain what theology is and what it is for, I find myself still coming up short. I feel sometimes like an apologist for the discipline, insisting on its beauty and significance, but it feels, too, like I’m an apologist for something to people who think they already have the thing. Its like I’ve set up a grill and am selling hamburgers in the McDonalds parking lot, or at the beach offering flotation devices to surfers. It is either nonsense or redundancy. People can either do it themselves- and your suggestion is an insult- or they just don’t want what you have, even if it may be better.

            There are at least two categories of people who think they don’t need theology. The first are those who think it will inevitably be oppressive. The second are the diy-types, the “theology for everyone”-s, who assume that you are simply gatekeeping knowledge that they could just get in a book.

            What I’m here to tell you instead is that everyone doesn’t need theology, and theology is not actually for everyone. Some might be better off without it. But it is still an actual good with real value, and more of you (a lot more of you thank you may think!) may benefit from it. But the thing theology is for, its not doing very well.

Here is our starting definition of what Theology is.

Theology is a Western¹discipline that serves to clarify and expound claims about God and his² relation to the world.

I’m going to treat this like a technical definition and parse the whole thing.

The early and easy definition I give to students is that “theology” is the “study of God”. But that says hardly anything. Our understanding of God is going to foreground what we think it means to “study” him, so the answer is predetermined. So this expanded definition will allow us, I think, to make more headway.

By saying that the discipline is “Western”, I am speaking simply of the limited tradition that I intend to describe and inhabit. I do not intend to say that theology is necessarily Western, just that the tradition has been historically so. And here, a short excursus is in order.

            For where, after all, does theology originate? Who is the father of the discipline? To this question there are several answers. One might say John the evangelist, who authored the book of John and likely Revelation and in both books cast a theological vision of who the person of Christ was. I think many would likely say that Augustine was the “father” of theology, as his writings have grounded Western thinking about God in certain ways. But to name Augustine (d. 430) as father ignores thinkers like St. Antony (d.356) who not only predate him but whose writings situate a significant counterweight to Augustine on certain theological matters. Additionally, to name either Antony or Augustine as “Western” would be an anachronism, as monastics of the Egyptian desert would share neither a location, a linguistic, philosophical, or educational background that Western theologians would recognize. So why on earth would I make such a scandalous claim that the discipline of theology is “Western”?

I think this distinction pertains because I am naming not primarily a set of sources, but a style for doing theological inquiry. “Theology” is “Western” because it originates not in the desert but first in the scholastic university, which eventually landed it in the German university system.³ Are these locations a moral evaluation of their value? Certainly not. They are simply a factual reflection of the internal consistency of the theological training I have received, and of the “tradition” that I work within.

Does this mean that “Western” sources, languages, or values are the norm by which theology must be judged and the accent that it must speak with?

            Absolutely not. Indeed, my own training has been enriched by and sometimes oriented toward thinkers who come from outside of the West, who bring with them insights and observations that I lack. They consistently demonstrate the weaknesses of the “Western” location that Theology speaks from. But they do come to this tradition- meaning there is a location that they arrive to, to which they bring their goods. The intercultural exchange that benefits theology will not occur if those who seek to join do not master the theological discipline as it is practiced in its current form. Again, this is not a normative claim! It simply how disciplines work. Without boundaries, there is no coherent subject (not a political claim! simply a logical one).

            Here’s an example. Practitioners of Chinese medicine who seek to practice Western medicine first train in methods that are practiced in the West. They will learn to treat and diagnose conditions in a manner consistent with Western medicine. They will bring to their practice their own training and knowledge that precedes and in some cases exceeds the Western medical canon. But in order to offer such improvements, they must first be “trained” as Western doctors. Now they do not need to do so! They might practice as Chinese medical practitioners in New York or Houston. But they cannot practice as American physicians without submitting to a course of study in Western medicine. This is not a value judgement; it simply says that in order to do “medicine” in the US they have to share categories and concepts and principles. Western medicine is better for the participation of those who know Chinese medicine, but to improve Western medical practices, these practitioners first have to submit to a system that is not their own. That the system operates this way is not an oppressive, anti-Western sentiment. Minimally it is an acknowledgement that without norms and standards there would be only chaos.

And now, another excursus.

            The discipline of theology has gotten not only unwieldy, but incoherent. It is chaos. This is because theology has set its mind on doing not only several things, but everything. It not only no longer speaks about God, but it often seems as if it no longer intends to do so. Even when it claims that it intends to speak after God and mimes a traditional voice and content, its preening self-consciousness and defensive posture gives it away. If you state that your claim is to “defend” or “advance” or “champion” a claim, what I hear is that this is a war. We are in enemy territory, and we must construct an adequate place to stand, in order to not be destroyed. I am many things but I am a piss poor fighter and a lady to boot. Early on I quit this fight.

            I trained as a theologian because I thought God was interesting. I’ve been disappointed to find many who consider God and find him so boring. The discipline of theology requires training, in order that we might be having the same conversation. But there is no requirement that we be talking about the same things, that we be talking in the same way, or that we reach the same conclusions. We have to talk about God in a way that is consistent with the nature of our subject (Aquinas is good on this, to quote the theobros).

I think John Webster is overrated as a theologian (there, I’ve said it), but I do follow him on theology’s need to be theological. This means minimally that theology is self-referential- it intends to think about itself in a way that is consistent with itself. This means that the basic categories of theology reflect our instincts about our subject. Ex nihilo, incarnation, death and resurrection- all of these things must be reflected in our instincts.⁴

Two more statements, before I must go to laundry and clean a bit and go fetch my children from a half-day dismissal, after which I will spend the afternoon in Purgatory ie the county fair. I hate the fair, I hate spending money unnecessarily and junk food and carnival rides that may take my children’s lives far too young. Why must we, etc.

Everyone does not need theology and some people would be better without it. I think the early womanist theologians have an insight here that needs to be more widely heard. In In Search of our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker takes as her sources the women who lived out principles that were pre-reflective. This does not mean they were thoughtless, it simply means that there were truths about God and the world that people knew in their bones. She set out to set these pre-reflective concepts into words, in order that we might reflect on them. Does this make her books more important or sophisticated than the people they reflected on? Of course not! It actually intends to affirm how sophisticated they already were.

One of my rules for teaching theology⁵ is that you should never educate someone out of their mother’s piety. What I mean by this is that you should never saddle your students with a faith that divorces them from the simple piety that made them love Jesus in the first place. If you find yourself too sophisticated after time in my classroom to say “I love Jesus” unironically, I’ve failed you! But we do this a lot.

I often see a kind of smugness in students who have received formal theological training. Actually, sometimes it’s a smugness, and sometimes it’s a crisis. What happens is I’ll give a simple lecture on how God is not a human being, intending to land on a category of “transcendence”. Almost necessarily, one student will hear this affirmation and recognize that they have for their whole lives thought of God as a human. Suddenly they realize that they are at a crisis point, where the faith that they received as a child from their mother is not true. They then begin to question if any of it is true. They find their prayer life interrupted, as they have been envisioning a white man in the sky with a flowing beard this whole time. They no longer know how to pray, nor do they know who they are praying to.

Now, this can actually be a good and beneficial first step in learning theology.⁶ But with the wrong guidance, it can lead to pride. It can cause some to take up a piety that is intellectually driven that misses out on the beating heart of the prayers they heard at their mother’s knee.

You see, your mother may not have needed theology. Your grandmother probably didn’t, either. Many, many, many people live their lives with the kind of piety that theologians could only hope for. This is because the Christian life is not primarily an intellectual affair. It’s not! People trust and pray and gesture and hope just fine without any of this intellectual apparatus. We ought to let them!

Jesus’ words to the woman in Mark 14 come to mind. This nameless woman recognized Jesus for who he was. She then acted upon this recognition, anointing his feet with priceless oil. Her extravagance was a theological gesture, though one without words. She did not need words. We should leave her alone. Never seek to train someone out of their mother’s piety.

Second: Christian writers are not theologians. In most cases, they would benefit from some theology, taught theologically.

I have occasionally attempted to pop into the “popular” Christian market and evaluate or offer some observations about some current trends. For doing so I have been called prickly, accused of “piling on”, or suspected of simple jealousy. As I’ve said before, when I work in this particular mode I think of my job more like a tradesmen. I am an underwater diver or a furnace repairmen. “That piece won’t work there”, or “that tool is the wrong one for the job”, is what I’m trying to say. I am not saying you have no value or are impious! I simply say that you don’t know what you are doing.

These are fighting words, I know. But in many cases, Christian writers who attempt theological accounts of things simply don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know what they don’t know. This means they don’t know what pieces they are working with, what parts are on hand, and how they are usually assembled. This evaluation can be made without any judgment of an individual’s character, intellect, or piety. It is not about any of these things! But it can be an evaluation that still stands.

I need to get on to the laundry now. Perhaps soon I will write about what I wish popular Christian writers and public intellectuals knew.

1. fighting words, I’ll explain.

2. i use male pronouns for God, though I’ve always been taught not to, both for theological reasons and because i’m a contrarian on such matters.

3. i am almost certain that this is the one line that will receive the most pushback in the comments. its alright, i can take it, but [sigh].

4. I think I may return to this at a later date, so that we don’t get to far afield.

5. perhaps I should write these up at some point, as they are largely unarticulated and just instinct.

6. If you are interested in these sorts of courses, I’m starting to offer theology seminars again, on a very occasional basis. You can contact me for details, if you might be interested in hosting one.