Theology is important. Constructive, imaginative, Christian thinking is important—and remains important for the church today.
Occasionally you encounter someone in evangelical circles who sniffs at the idea of ‘constructive’ theology today. Their contention is usually something like, ‘it’s all already been worked out,’ suggesting that it’s the height of arrogance to think that you might have anything to add to the body of belief that the Church holds. Just keep preaching the Bible, they would contend.
In lots of ways I’m sympathetic with this, we should indeed ‘just’ keep preaching the Bible on Sundays. There can also be an arrogance attached to those who want to correct or otherwise alter the Church’s historic doctrine. We would do well to search ourselves for that kind of pride.
The thing is, evangelicalism is itself a corrective movement in the history of the church that sought to do all of these things. There also can be an equivalent arrogance in suggesting that we’ve got it all ‘worked out,’ by now. We really haven’t.
In my evangelical charismatic corners of the church world (what I would like to dub ‘British Reformed Charismaticism’ though scholars would speak of the wider British New Church Movement) we have done lots of biblical studies but little theology. That’s fine, particularly because we’re pretty young (around fifty years old), and I think the movement towards theology to complement biblical studies is often a movement of maturity.
That could, in turn, sound arrogant. It isn’t intended to, everything that’s young and vibrant has to mature. The danger is that movements, or churches, ‘mature’ in the wrong direction: away from truth, away from vibrancy, into ossification, into moribund navel-gazing. That’s a maturity of the grave, an attempt to steal from the second tree rather than allow ourselves to be gifted wisdom in time: but we still need wisdom and we still must mature.
My contention is that maturity within the sense of the wider church requires new constructive, theological work. Here are four ways that new theological work is required:
Contextualisation
Every cultural moment is different, every place is different. We can massively overstate this, but it’s true to an extent. We always need to do the work of bringing the gospel, and our wider body of truth, into conversation with the prevailing winds of the day.
This can end up in basically changing what we believe to fit the times, or hiding the awkward bits that no one likes anymore, but that’s not the central idea. The idea is to see how the social imaginary—the stories that we live by—does and does not cohere with Biblical truth, and then to communicate that truth in the language of the culture such that it’s understood.
This can be a strategy of being ‘winsome’ to win people to the gospel, but it is also contextualisation if we recommunicate truths that everyone thinks they believe in such a way as to provoke and offend them with the truth. That can be important work too, though it isn’t the same thing that every edgelord with the keyboard thinks they’re doing.
Retrieval
New theological work is required to retrieve the treasures of the past. There are two thousand years of Christian riches for us to delight in, most evangelicals know very little of it. Most charismatics, even less, I would imagine.
It is constructive work to take an old voice and ask what they have to say to us today. It is constructive work to develop our thinking alongside theirs. Sometimes we think what we’re doing is just recovering the past, but most of the time we’re doing a very modern thing where we bring them into our questions and use that to inform us.
There are two important cautions here: firstly, retrieval that doesn’t realign us with the Bible’s teaching isn’t worth very much. Secondly, retrieval while doing modern work must allow the breeze of the centuries to pass through our minds—we need to sit underneath the teaching of our forefathers rather than on top of or against it.
New Questions
Each age has new questions that need answering, that mean that we move the Church’s teaching as a whole forwards. Not only new realities—the fact that it’s now possible to make a child with the DNA of three people is an actually new reality requiring new work to consider carefully—but also that the changing tide of culture brings pressures that force us to dig deeper into the Biblical texts.
It’s becoming an often said truism that the questions facing the early church were questions of Christology and Theology Proper: who is God? They had to work this out from the texts. Spin forwards a thousand years to the Reformation and we find questions of salvation brought into the fore, such that we have new formulations and answers to questions of how we’re justified—forced to dig both into the history of the church and the text of the Bible. Today, the saying goes, we face questions of anthropology: what does it mean to be human?
We will need to answer these questions with the resources of the past and the word of God, but we will do so by moving forwards the Church’s theology, collectively.
This is one of the ways that the church matures over time (Ephesians 4). We haven’t got it all figured out yet, and we probably won’t have until Christ returns.
New Insights
We haven’t plumbed the depths of the texts that the Lord has given us yet. The best readers of the Bible today are in dialogue with ancient voices—though not always obviously in their work—but they bring new and often speculative insights to the fore.
If no one has said it before we should pause and consider. It’s reasonably likely we’re wrong, I definitely wouldn’t include it in your preaching this Sunday. However, it is possible that we aren’t wrong, so we advance the idea in the company of others who are sympathetic dialogue partners but who challenge us freely, and then gradually into the realm of those who are unsympathetic dialogue partners. The whole while we listen, we consider, we weigh, and above all we pray. I do think that the role of prayer in theological thinking is often underappreciated. Perhaps then we share it with the people who hate us and want us to die (i.e. Twitter), but there’s no pressure to do so.
I was reading Joshua Mobley’s A Brief Systematic Theology of the Symbol a few weeks back. It’s imaginative, inventive work. You could say that’s really all in Aquinas and De Lubac, and you would be sort of right, but Mobley is pushing De Lubac’s thought forwards. It was intriguing in lots of ways for all it isn’t directly applicable (to anything!) and it is from a tradition of the church (Radical Orthodoxy) which isn’t my own.
Assuming we buy his viewpoint, is it immediately obvious how it helps us that he’s noticed this? No. But that’s completely the wrong way of thinking, ideas are good on their own. You don’t know how the next person will pick them up or what Mobley himself will do next with it.
Creative Thinking
All this is to say that creative theological work—the Christian imagination—is important. This isn’t that different from my contention that we need to learn to play in the text.
I think our churches should value this work and the people who do it. Little of what is done is either evangelical or charismatic, so we should encourage more of it to happen. We will need ways to stop people being formed into the institutions where this thinking is done: which almost certainly means we need counter-institutions to do so.
Encourage it, fund it, read it, argue with it, gain from it: in the long run theological work will do us all good.
Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash
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