Theology Puts Words In Our Mouths

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, November 17, 2005
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People are drawn to particular theological and philosophical camps because they offer language previously unavailable to talk about certain things. My remarks here are tentative. I'm not offering up a conclusion, or even an argument. But it strikes me that, when people tell me why they abandoned fundamentalism for evangelicalism, or Baptist theology for Methodist theology, or Arminianism for Calvinism, or evangelicalism for postevangelicalism or Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, the rationale has as much to do with what the old position left out as what the new one offers. Simply put, we develop an awareness of certain issues, ideas or feelings, but our current position doesn't afford us a language in which to talk about them. We gravitate toward systems that elucidate the lacunae.

Also, the reverse must be true. Sometimes we are drawn to a theology or a philosophy because it doesn't have the language to talk about certain things. If you've grown up in Western Christendom, with its systematic distinctions between justification and sanctification and a thousand other things, you might be pleased to discover Eastern variations of the faith that don't delve into such matters. If you grew up on soteriological debates, you might be drawn to a tradition where the heat is ecclesiological, or what have you.

This tendency also helps explain why so many of us have such a patchwork of theological and philosophical ideas bouncing around in our heads. We can borrow natural law and theology of the body from the Roman Catholics, worldview, antithesis and common grace from the Neo-Calvinists, missiology from the postmoderns, ecclesiology from the evangelicals and so on, and the question isn't whether all the pieces fit. It's whether we now have the categories to speak about what we'd like to address.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? To be honest, I'm not sure. I think it might be both. Whatever it is, this seems to be what is happening. And it also helps explain the indifference of the majority to just about every theological or philosophical system. They're busy talking about sports.