Good or Bad Sources for Theology

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f you find out you have a debilitating disease, you’ll probably turn to an expert doctor instead of your great-aunt Helen’s home remedy. If your car breaks down, you’d probably rather go to the best mechanic in town instead of your brothers do-it-all-for-$10-and-hope-it-works repair shop – regardless of how sentimental that might be. If you happen to have any left-over assets and you want to invest, you’ll probably turn to a reputable money manager with a proven track record in place of something like Ken’s Qwick Cash. I think we all intuitively understand this principle, but have you ever stopped to think about why?

At first glance, it’s probably because it assures us that we will get the best results. If I want to return to fullest health, I talk to a doctor with expertise regarding my ailment. If I want my car to work, I go to an expert mechanic, etc. I get best results from the best people.

But why do I get the best results from these people? It seems to me that I get these optimal results because these people have the best information – they are my best available sources. Now, a similar question needs to be asked when we consider theology. What sources do I look to when I am thinking about God? Who/what am I listening to as I build my ideas about God, the church, Christian living, etc.?

For the longest time, Christians believed that the proper source was some amalgamation of Scripture and philosophy. Eventually that ran its course and Christians the primary source of theology became reason. On this model, only those things, which were justifiable by rationality, could be considered legitimate content for theological construction. Ultimately, that too seemed insufficient to account for certain religious necessities and many Christians turned to feeling or experience to legitimate their claims about God. (Just as an aside, for all you historians of Christianity, I do realize this overview is hopelessly reductionistic. However, I do think it serves the point I am trying to make.)

In our present day, we now have a funny admixture of folks doing theology in the church on both the professional and popular levels. Some folks hold fast to foundational sources (i.e. the Bible) while others are continuing to explore other sources for Christian claims (i.e. experience, etc.).

As I have mulled over some thoughts about legitimate sources for Christian theology, I seem to have arrived at three that I cannot get away from.  I think an argument can be made that all three of these sources are necessary to the task of theology because all of them have God somehow closely related to them. Here they are in no particular order:

1) Scripture

Classically speaking, this has been a source for theology that, in one way or another, has never quite gone away. People have ridiculed it, pulled it apart, canonically reshaped it, etc. but it has held its ground and seems to me to be a pillar of Christianity. Exactly in what way, I may not be exactly sure. However, I do know that the Holy Spirit is present in/with/through the Scriptures and therefore it must be acknowledged as a proper source for Christian thinking.

2) Tradition

I know I might lose some of my protestant, evangelical friends at this point, but bear with me. Where does tradition come from? The church. What is the church? The body of Christ in the world. Who is promised to be with the body of Christ? The Holy Spirit. It seems to me that, even though tradition might be a little bit messy, it is still a vibrant expression of the God in the world. Therefore, whatever church tradition might say, it behooves us to pay attention. Not because we have some servile attitude toward a Roman hierarchy, but because we recognize that God’s spirit is within and among the people of God.

3) Experience

This is something that I think Evangelicals have been all over the place with. Some of us despise “personal experiences of God” because you can’t quantify them. Others are all about experience, but don’t really take time to interpret those experiences according to Scripture or tradition. So here is my take on it. Experience is absolutely legitimate. This is one of the beautiful things about Christianity – God is personally present to His children. Therefore, we need to explore what it might look like to utilize our own experiences or those of a particular sub-group in the construction of theology.

Hopefully you gather that I don’t pretend to have all this worked out. Let’s get a conversation going! What do you think are legitimate sources for thinking about God? 

Why I'm grateful for Feminist Theology...

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 have to admit, when I first started into the world of contemporary Feminist Theology I was a bit uncertain. Coming from a conservative, evangelical background I wondered how I might graciously navigate this literature with open eyes and ears. Isn’t anything “liberal” an immanent threat to the “pure” Christianity of evangelicalism? (Hopefully you hear the sarcasm dripping from that last question) How could I – a theologian in training – risk exposing myself to these ideas? Well, I am happy to say that there are no ghosts hidden within the pages of contemporary Feminist Theology and, as far as I can tell, I emerged still in one piece.   

But, it has definitely been a journey for me as I’ve read this literature. I began with a general interest in the movement, but soon grew to really appreciate the questions that were being asked. What follows are a few reflections that I’ve gleaned from my time reading this literature. These are by no means exhaustive, but I think they are reflective of where I am currently at in relation to the movement that is Feminist Theology.

I do want to mention that it is not necessarily my intention here to alter the tenets of an evangelical take on gender roles, nor do I seek to chastise Feminist Theology for it’s perspective on women and the world. If anything, I seek to press the bounds of evangelicalism to see how much it can receive from Feminist Theology. I see this as a brief practice in conversation between seemingly disparate groups. Essentially, I am looking to see what both movements can equally affirm and, in doing so, I hope to stimulate an ongoing, charitable conversation.  

So, with that being said, here are some of my reflections on what conservative evangelicalism can remember/learn from Feminist Theology.

1) Women are Valuable.

To be clear, I never doubted this as a general principle. I promise – you can ask my lovely wife. :) However, I don’t think I ever realized just how valuable women are to the theological task. They have an amazing capacity to highlight alternative realities about God that can easily go unnoticed to the male eye.  The perspective they bring to theology serves to expand our working concept of God and imbues the discipline with a life and vibrancy that is easily lost. I cannot help but express my gratefulness to those women who have sought to labor for God and their community in the task of theology.

2) Women are Necessary.

If you believe, as I do, that humanity necessarily exists in the dualism of man and woman, then it behooves theology to lend an ear to women as they express their understanding of God. If we fail at this task, then we are in jeopardy of restricting theology to the limited world of male understanding. Theology in general cannot afford to pretend that a male-dominated perspective in some way covers the totality of human experience. I find the call of Feminist Theology to recognize women’s understanding to be a refreshing chastisement of the theological norm. For, it seems, that theology needs female reflection if it is to be a complete discipline.

3) Don’t be satisfied with the norm.

As a whole, Feminist Theology has been an attempt at recalibrating the norms of theological reflection. Whether or not you buy into their reasoning behind this or even their methodology, I do think we can/should appreciate the desire these women had to do theology for their day. They were not content with blindly appropriating what they saw as antiquated ideas for their theological project. They were not satisfied with the ‘norm’ because it did not seem to satisfy new data they had to interpret. Now, I am not advocating that we toss out all the classic, orthodox doctrines of the church. However, reading Feminist Theology has challenged me to patiently, cautiously discern what it might look like to do theology for our day. We have new questions and new horizons against which those questions need to be answered. It will not do to slap and old answer on a new question. We need carefully nuanced answers to contemporary questions. 

4) Theology needs to value experience.

In many ways, one of the faults of Evangelical theology has been its penchant to produce tomes of systematic theology that are quite lean on existential import or pragmatic implications. It’s hard to read one of these systematics without asking, “Was there a real person who wrote this or just some brain?” People of today need theology for today. They need theology that relates, in some degree, to their experience. This is the task of theology – it needs to filter down from the beautiful art of rational superstructures into the nitty-gritty of daily life. I think Feminist Theology (as well as other liberation theologies) do this in a meaningful way. Because they pull from experience, they seem to have a more direct route back to theology’s practical implications.

At the end of the day, I think there are many ways that Feminist Theology challenges conservative, evangelicalism. These are just a few of the talking points I have discovered between the two movements and I hope that I continue to glean more. Furthermore, I do hope – with all my heart – that the church learns to be more favorable to women and their insight into the church, theology, and life in general. 

Thanks for reading and keep thinking!

What's your story?

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 was recently reading a pleasant essay by Brian Brock on the history of Christian Ethics in America.[1] In this essay, Brock makes the interesting observation that many 20^th century ‘christian’ ethicists attempted to do their work within the bounds of secular reason – thereby losing locution and conclusions that retained much of any ‘christian’ value.  He notes:

The overwhelming impression one receives when reading the founding figures of American Christian ethics, with some marginal exceptions, is that their desire was not to think in doctrinal terms at all. Their interest was in making Christianity respectable before a world that expected it to live by [the] Enlightenment Creed. Only when it played by these rules could “Christian ethics” demonstrate its worth as a civilizing force.[2]

Obviously, there are so many things to be said even about this simple paragraph. Since when did Christianity become a civilizing force? How can self-professing Christians refuse to think doctrinally? Who determined that Christians needed to accept the Enlightenment story and its concomitant creed? Unfortunately, I don’t think I can answer all of these questions in the space of a blog post. I do however want to highlight one thing I took away from Brock’s essay.

            As Brock observed, there is an interesting relationship between the story you tell about the world and the way that story allows you to live. The Enlightenment story (though perhaps not inevitably) set purely rational parameters for Christian ethicists to work in. If ethics was going to be meaningful, then it needed to arise from appeal to universal human reason. I should have access to the same moral conclusions that you do when we reason towards ethical obligations concerning a certain matter. Perhaps the early moral philosophers of the Enlightenment had a place for God, but eventually he became unnecessary ‘left-overs’ from yesterday’s religious sensibilities. If reason can tell us how to live, then why do we need God again?

            This is one reason why I love the church fathers. Their passion for consistency aided their correlation between metaphysics and morality. If they believed something was true about reality, then that imported something to their personal lives. There was no place for doctrinal verbosity without devotional praxis. If you don’t believe me, then read any of the great spiritual writers: Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, etc.  Each of these authors drew heavily from their metaphysical structure as they produced constructive ethical norms.

We are lacking something substantive like this in our 21^st century American milieu of praxis divorced from metaphysic. We kick around terms that used to mean something, but now are relics from an age long gone.  We have Christian terms adjudicating secular concepts and getting us no further than the repetitive reconfiguration of uninspired ideas.  I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Christianity has more impetus than that. Is this as good as it gets? It can’t be.

Perhaps its time we start telling a better story – a story that has some cultural clout. Maybe its time that Christianity once again sets the terms of the discussion instead of acquiescing to the norms of secular culture.  Maybe we can remember that sometimes the best story to tell about the world is the one that not everyone agrees with. Maybe….

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[1] Brian Brock, “Christian Ethics,” in Mapping Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012): 293-317.

[2] Ibid., 297.