Anti-theology: How’s it working for you?

If you’re the sort of person who groans inwardly whenever I write yet another one of these theology articles, you’re likely anti-theology: You consider theology to be useless speculation about who God is, and about how salvation works, and you wish Christians would just stop it with all the guesswork. Get to the practical stuff!

Which practical stuff? Depends on the Christian.

• We got the sort who thinks Christianity is meant to soothe people. Agitated because you’re not sure God loves you?—relax; he does. Agitated because of some deficiency you think you have?—relax; God’ll fix that or cure you. Agitated because you’re not sure you’re going to heaven?—relax; you are. Agitated because the world is crap?—relax; Jesus is returning.
• We got the sort who thinks Christianity’s primary job is to denounce sin. Loudly. Angrily. Because we gotta warn sinners away from hellfire! We gotta tell them hell is real, and they’re going there unless they repent! If we don’t do something about the sin, God’s gonna smite America with tornadoes and atmospheric rivers and plague and critical race theory! I forget which of the horseman that was, but it’s one of them.
• We got the sort who thinks Christianity is meant to make us blessed and highly favored, and wealthy. Who thinks we learn the secrets of prayer, God will answer every request with yes and amen, and we’ll get everything we ever wished for, like Aladdin’s genie but with infinite wishes. Pity nobody seems to know the secrets of prayer but Pastor, whom God gave the mansion and the Gulfstream jets. Maybe if we give him money he’ll clue us in.
• We got the sort who covet power, and heard the Holy Spirit grants supernatural gifts to Christians, so they want some. How do we activate these gifts? How can we become prophets, or faith-healers, or do mighty miracles? How can we get a revival started in our churches, and use it to boost our attendance, boost donations, and finally afford some of the things our churches have always wanted to buy? Let’s get a swimming pool!—we can use it for baptisms and youth group pool parties!
• We got the sort who thinks Christianity is meant to take over our country like its Founders always intended, and the reason they go to church is to network with fellow party members. Shh, don’t tell the IRS that’s what we’re really up to. And don’t tell the FBI, lest they find the stash of guns in the basement. If the guns make you anxious, don’t be!—they’re for the End Times.
• We got the sort who wants to know which current events are actually part of the End Times. They want our preachers to start interpreting the news this way. They wanna know whether the rapture’s coming, and how soon. They wanna know who the Beast is. (But don’t you dare tell ’em it’s Donald Trump. It’s not. Though yeah, he frequently acts beastlike.)
• And we got the sort who just wants to be left alone. They just wanna go to church, sing nice songs, hear nice sermons, take holy communion, and be under no obligations whatsoever to do anything further. Don’t have to donate money; rich people can fund the church without ’em. Don’t have to share Jesus with their neighbors; they can mass-mail flyers. Don’t have to change their lives at all. Salvation’s a free gift, after all.

And so forth. I used to attend a church which regularly held self-improvement classes of all sorts: How to improve your marriage. How to handle your finances better. How to rein in your out-of-control kids. (More spanking, apparently.) How to deal with the Jehovah’s Witnesses when they came to your door. All these classes were supposedly based on “biblical principles”… and yeah, some of these principles were acquired in some very iffy ways. But people really appreciated these classes. Self-help books are really popular with just about everyone, y’know… and whenever you Christianize them, Christians just love them.

So yeah, many a Christian would much rather have that than theology. Certainly much rather I blog about that than theology.

But how do you know I’m even giving you good advice? How do you know I’m not just taking the same old philosophy you find among pagans, slapping Christian labels all over it, and pretending it’s biblical? You know, like Christian counselors who paste Christian stickers over Freudian psychology of the self, and tell people the id body, ego soul, and superego spirit are how God actually created us to think. Or like when John Eldredge took the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, added a bunch of bible stories and verses, and tells men it’s right and biblical to indulge their fleshly human impulses to be sexist and bossy… and kinda toxic.

How do you know I’m not just leading you utterly astray with my “proper Christian worldview”?

Didja guess I was gonna answer “Theology”? Goody!

Pragmatic shortcuts instead of depth.

There’s a very popular attitude you’re gonna find among most Americans, called pragmatism: We believe if something works, it’s good. And if it doesn’t work, it’s bad.

The term was first coined by an American, and you’re gonna find pragmatism everywhere in this country. People apply to everything. Business, politics, counseling (Dr. Phil McGraw’s catchphrase, “How’s that working for you?” sums it up nicely), child-rearing, relationships, and even church. The Christian version of it is “If it works, it’s God.” And if it doesn’t work, it’s not God. Maybe it’s Satan.

There’s not a lot of thinking involved in pragmatism. ’Cause why bother?—you try it out, see whether it works, and if not, move on! No thinking, no study, no research, no comparison, no meditation, no need for patience. Just try it. Act. Do. Move.

You’ll notice the Christians who preach pragmatism tend to say the very same things. There’s no waiting for God to act. No searching the scriptures. No prayer and meditation. Pragmatic Christians instruct us to dive right in, and take those leaps of faith—even though this “faith” is based on nothing but what we wish God would do, and our own desires for it to be done.

What about double-checking stuff? Seeking confirmation? Discerning whether something’s a God-thing or not? Pragmatic Christains treat all this cautious behavior as unfaith—as if the only reason we do it is to procrastinate. Or even disobey.

Not that procrastination and disobedience aren’t real problems among Christians. But calling caution that, doesn’t help!

And when impatient Christians try stuff to see whether it works, and it doesn’t work immediately, they ditch it. They don’t bother to find out whether the practices work in the long-term. Or they’ll skip steps. Fr’instance I know some folks who are really big on boron supplements. They heard it’s a good thing, so they tried it. They believed they felt better—and maybe they did, but maybe it they felt better because of the placebo effect, or because the weather got better, or some job stress was eliminated, or anything but the boron… but they want it to be the boron, so that’s what they believe. And they’ll tell all their friends about it! Meanwhile, no actual science took place. “It works” hasn’t been proven. But they’re entirely sure it has.

The very same thing is true with Christian stuff. “Try the St. Jude prayer; it works!” has resulted in lots of people praying to Jesus’s brother… and when life gives them what they want regardless, they give Jude all the credit, and testify of his effectiveness. “Sleep with a prayer cloth under your pillow,” or “Get those word-curses cast off you,” or “This author changed my life; you gotta read his book,” or every other Christian fad, is the result of people looking for anything that’ll work—and putting little to none of it to the test.

Whereas good theology tests all things, and holds on to what’s good. 1Th 5.21

Tried and true. Or not.

The reason so many of our churches fall for every new Christian fad, or get tossed and turned by every political issue, or has very little to say while people are truly suffering, is because too few of the people in our churches ever bother with theology. Other things “work for them” much better and faster, so they do that. And you can’t convince ’em otherwise.

They’re the folks Jesus called blind, even though they insist they see. Jn 9.39-41 They believe they do know how to discern God’s will. They believe their practices do work—for them. They figure they’re spiritually rich and wealthy, and can’t see their own nudity and poverty. Rv 3.17 They’ll even embrace their poverty—mocking the traditions of other churches; claiming these traditions mean these churches are spiritually dead; ignoring how these churches are actually fruitful, whereas their own church has to convince them their despair and depression is actually a form of patience.

“Whatever works” may be how the world works, but it’s a lousy way to build God’s kingdom. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is about how we should be—whether it appears to work or not.

• We should love our neighbors, even though they won’t always return the love.
• We should be generous, even though we won’t immediately get back as much or more.
• We should put our treasures in heaven, even though we won’t see all the results till Jesus returns.

Pragmatism insists, “The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t work, so it must be meant for the next age, not ours.” Theology responds, “I am wrong; Jesus is right,” and follows Jesus anyway—and the kingdom begins to grow in our midst.

So how’s pragmatism really working for you?