Why orthodox theology?

Some weeks ago I was asked, “Okay, so why’s it so important to be orthodox? Why can’t we just believe whatever we want about God?”

Same reason we can’t just believe whatever we want about electricity.

I mean, if you wanted to, you could believe electricity is just fairy glitter moving through copper wires, and because fairies are always so friendly and benign in children’s cartoons (even though in European mythology, they’re really not) they’d never, ever hurt you. So, you figure, it’s okay to take your tablet with you into the bathtub. And it’s okay to leave it plugged into the charging cable while you do it. And… oh, gee, you’ve died.

Electricity isn’t the best analogy, because God is way more forgiving than electricity mixed with water. Run afoul of electricity and you’re dead. Run afoul of God, and he’ll become human and die for your sins.

Skeptics will immediately agree with me electricity isn’t the best analogy… but for different reasons. See, to their minds electricity falls within the realm of reality. God, not so much. To them, God’s a theory—and not a scientific theory, like relativity or evolution or Pythagoras’s formula. God conceptually exists: There is some sort of supreme being or higher power or creator in the universe, and maybe they believe she’s self-aware and intelligent, instead of just the sum of everything like pantheists believe. She’s out there, somewhere. But, they figure, she’s unknowable.

And to their minds, theology isn’t about the study of God, based on revelation. It’s all guesswork. If God’s unknowable, and doesn’t bother to make herself known, nobody legitimately knows anything about her. So… we make guesses. We guess God is good. (I mean, if she were bad, she’d be terrifying, and only cult leaders would want her to terrify their subjects, so we’re definitely gonna reject that idea.) We guess God is benevolent, ’cause benevolence is good. We guess God loves everybody, ’cause love is good. Well almost everybody; we often guess she doesn’t love evildoers, and will probably send the very worst of them to hell. But she loves most everybody.

Yes, I’ve been referring to this concept of God as “she.” Hey, if all your beliefs about God are guesswork, sometimes you’ll guess a different pronoun. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve heard pagans call God “she.” Women create life, right?—so they guess “she.” (Well, unless they’re men. People love to assign God our own pronouns. Little self-projection on our part.)

Since all their God-thoughts are pure guesswork, they admit there’s a chance they might be wrong. These chances get smaller and smaller as these become long-held, dearly beloved beliefs. Or when their favorite spiritual authors teach the very same things, and confirm for them they’re probably right. But because the God they imagine is a benevolent God, they also imagine if they get her wrong… well a benevolent God has to be a forgiving God, right? Has to be. If they were God, they would be… or at least they would be with themselves. So if they get God wrong, it’s understandable; she hasn’t said anything, so they had to guess as best they could, and she gets that, and forgives that. They’ll get into heaven regardless.

So whenever a Christian like me has an objection to one of their beliefs—“No, that’s not who God is”—they wanna know why my guess is better than theirs. And when I tell them I’m not guessing; this is what Christianity teaches, they wanna know why Christianity’s guess is better than theirs. Because again, they think it’s all guesswork, and Christianity’s depiction of a real, immanent, interactive, living God… is also guesswork. Or fantasy.

You can see why someone who thinks like this, doesn’t think orthodoxy matters. God’ll forgive all our wrong beliefs, right? God’ll let everybody into heaven, right?—so long that we’re good and benevolent like we imagine God is, and not evil, and put more good into the universe than bad. So why must I object to their happy thoughts with orthodox Christianity, when in the end it doesn’t really matter?

Because if it really didn’t matter, their belief God is unknowable, and has never revealed anything for us to believe, would be true. But it’s not. God has told us about himself. He did step down from heaven to explain himself. He became human. He became Jesus. Jesus tells us about God. We’re not guessing. We know, because Jesus told us.

Christians who ask this same question.

We Christians should know this—that God makes himself knowable, and told his prophets about himself, and Jesus told his apostles about his Father, and now we have searchable scriptures to refer to, and the ancient Christians sorted out the most problematic heresies by writing the creeds. And yet I’ve come across Christians who ask me the very same thing: Why’s it so important to be orthodox? Why can’t we believe whatever we please, and if we get God wrong he’ll just forgive us?

Again: Same reason we can’t just believe whatever we please about electricity. If we’re wrong, there will be consequences. Not necessarily lethal ones, but if you’ve ever been zapped by a live wire or shot by a Taser, you know it hurt. And getting God wrong can definitely hurt—both you and others.

If you don’t believe Jesus is alive, you’ve eliminated the basis for believing anything in the New Testament. His resurrection proves both the validity of his teachings, and our resurrection. And yet there are self-described Christians who teach Jesus is dead, or act like he is; that Jesus’s teachings and actions are past tense, that he’s not still interacting with his followers and advocating to his Father on our behalf; that he doesn’t really care what we do so long as we said some form of sinner’s prayer at our conversion, and still believe really hard in him.

If you don’t believe Jesus is God—that he’s a person of the trinity, one with his Father, coequal with the Father and Holy Spirit—you’re gonna see him as lesser than the Father, and gonna promote Old Testament commands over the Sermon on the Mount. You’re gonna make the same mistakes as the legalists Paul rebukes in Galatians, who thought it more important to be Jews than follow Jesus; you’ll think it’s more important to “be Christian” than follow Jesus—in whatever messed-up way you define “being Christian” without following Jesus.

If you don’t believe God saves us by his grace, you’re gonna waste so much time trying to get saved by your own good karma. You’re gonna unnecessarily fret about it. You’re gonna encourage others to unnecessarily fret about it. You might, “for their own good,” try to force them to accumulate good deeds—heck, try to force the whole country into it, by promoting legalistic politicians and Christian nationalism. Laws will get passed, law-breakers will go to prison, and cops will shoot anyone who tries to escape custody. People will die because you refuse to understand God does grace—usually because you don’t do grace either.

In general, if you’re not orthodox, you’re gonna look an awful lot like American Christianism, which doesn’t really follow Jesus, but certainly does claim to. These people by their very actions—by their lack of grace, by their disregard of Jesus’s teachings—prove time and again they do not know him. And Jesus doesn’t know them. They have no relationship. It sounds like the worst-case scenario of what might happen when we don’t bother with orthodoxy, but it’s happening in real time.

So yeah, it’s important! Because it’s true. Orthodoxy tells us truly what God wants us to know about himself. If it weren’t important he wouldn’t have bothered. If you’re legitimately Christian you should want to know it.

And if you’re not… well shouldn’t you be curious? Because if you’re wrong about God being unknowable—if Jesus has made him known Jn 1.18 —wouldn’t that information be way more valuable than your very best guesses?