What's sacred about sacred theology
The Summer 2021 issue of Concordia Journal had a fascinating essay by Ken Chitwood, an LC-MS pastor who works as a journalist and anthropologist of religion in Germany and the United States (@kenchitwood). Chitwood’s forthright upending of how we do theology in the Evangelical Lutheran Church is commendable for its boldness. According to this “theologian without borders,” theology must submit to the relativism and tolerance of social science, and the house of God must be rid of the “clutter of theocentrism—the tendency to view our own theology as best and to judge the behavior and beliefs of theologically different people by our own standards.” Whence this clutter, and whose standards should we then use for judgment?
Theology’s own terms Chitwood categorizes as “academic theology,” the study of texts and traditions authoritative within a certain group. “Theology” is [his lowercase “g”] “god talk,” but theology is not therefore derived from an inerrant, infallible, or otherwise objectively important source. Theology is socially situated and also socially defined. All theological definitions are the productions of groups and only the productions of groups. Theology is a social construct, which can thus be used as equivalent to “religion,” as in, “religion, and theology, is what people believe, do, feel, and express in evolving contexts and life situations,” a phrase which might have come from a world religions textbook but which has no particular anchoring in Holy Scripture. Religion and theology are not equivalent to each other; the former may be any human practice of devotion or belief, the latter is the knowledge of God. Theology does not take its marching orders from religion, whatever that might be for any person or group of people, because if it did, we would have the multiplicity of gods to which human hearts entrust themselves the world over.
Sacred theology is definitive and clear because our God is One and He speaks clearly. When we use theology’s terms rather than social science’s terms for theology, we hear objectivity and clarity. St. Paul speaks clearly about false teaching, “If anyone should proclaim another gospel…” (Gal. 1:8), and the Athanasian Creed’s “If a man does not think thus about the Holy Trinity…” is definitive about doctrine essential for every mortal to believe and to confess. In Chitwood’s repackaging, those ways of confessing and of speaking are relativized by social science. How can I judge the theology of a Hispanic Jehovah’s Witness since his theology is differently socially situated than mine? How can I tell the congregation that there are biblical standards for marriage since they watch more TV than I do and so have different ideas about marriage?
No one can dispute that the practice of ethnography or other social science methods are helpful for the discernment of human realities: What do my parishioners really understand when I say that “God is love”? How do elderly congregants react differently to the biblical teaching on the evil of legalized infanticide (euphemistically called “abortion”) from teenage congregants? The question Chitwood does not clearly posit is whether those human understandings or reactions would determine theology. His tone and phrasing presume that those human understandings do determine sacred theology, and that what we speak is also our all-too-human understanding and not a ministry of God’s Word to men. God is off His throne now, and the opinions of men hold the day.
The dethronement of theology in the church is the attempted dethronement of God in the church. The church speaks definitely because it understands God’s revelation in Holy Scripture to be definitive in its source and in its relevance. Jesus’s citation of Holy Scripture to explain the nature of marriage and divorce, “Have ye not read?” (Matt. 19:4) presumes the authority and the relevance—the utter sufficiency—of Holy Scripture for how marriage should be taught and practiced. We dare not presume that the Lord was unaware of how people understood marriage, and we know He was well aware of their reactions to His teaching. Contemporary, common understandings and reactions must give way before the teaching of Scripture, that is, the teaching of God. Jesus’s use of Scripture and His proclamation are consistently theocentric, not anthropocentric, theological, not sociological.
Ironically, Chitwood’s plea for sensitivity to popular understandings extends only to certain popular understandings. Muslims are positively portrayed throughout his piece—asking to pray in a church (it’s unclear to whom)—but LC-MS Christians are thin-skinned or xenophobic and racist along with other American Christians grouped under the “evangelical” sociological heading. Since “racism” and “racist” are supposed to be kill-shots in political discourse similar to ethnic and racial slurs of bygone times, his deployment of those magical terms is not politically innocent. His examples of “everyday theology” continue this line of politically accusatory inquiry. In a denomination that is 90+% white, how many people believe that the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24) are white, as one of Chitwood’s informants reports of a parishioner? Why not choose an example of “everyday theology” that’s more commonly at variance with our church’s teaching on the Olivet Discourse (Mt. 24-25), such as people’s understandings of the end times that are more often conditioned by dispensationalist media than by our pastors’ preaching or our church’s confessions? The misunderstanding of the lost sheep of the house of Israel is easily rectified by explaining Jesus’s meaning, the traditional work of theology as the expounding of the meaning of Holy Scripture. The benevolent Muslims or practitioners of Santeria of Chitwood’s telling are sympathetic, but the Lutheran pastors and parishioners are narrow-minded racists. Under the reign of social science and its mother, politics, can these white American Lutherans be saved?
Mutual recrimination and political accusation will always dominate a church dominated by social science and political positioning. We will find in that labyrinth no way of escape as we are subjected to roiling, incessant theological change. Theology will change with startling rapidity in our church if it becomes subservient to social science, which will mean subservience to political demands; we will find ourselves “carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14) because the teachings of men change all the time. We should have ordained women during the Vietnam-era flush of women’s liberation and the attempt for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Having missed that boat, perhaps we may now somehow make atonement for our predominant demographic whiteness. This program of change exists wherever teachers and preachers prioritize their political and social views over theology. Under theology, everyone in the church is subject to the Word of God. Under social science and politics, everyone in the church is subject to political demands—thus the benevolent Muslim finds himself favored over the apparently racist Lutheran Christian.
There is no alternative to such destructive change because unity in the body of Christ cannot be found except in theology. The Word of the Lord calls too many disparate people into His household for our unity to lie elsewhere. Denominations with greater political homogeneity especially in their clergy such as the Unitarian Universalists or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America do not possess unity in Christ or growth in Christ despite their frequent public use of terms and belief in the reality of “Islamophobia,” “homophobia,” and other fresh shibboleths of our age. These fresh shibboleths mouthed by the clergy and denominational staff are so many fresh hells for churches to experience. Unity and growth in Christ’s church can and shall be found only in devoted study and inculcation of the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures. We are theologically focused because we are theocentric, not anthropocentric. We proclaim not ourselves or our political positions or journalistic impressions, but Jesus Christ as Lord. There is no other path forward for Christ’s church.
There need be no division between “academic theology,” irrelevant, strange, and enslaved to unchurchly and ungodly trends, and “everyday theology,” the odd beliefs of the people filling the churches and perhaps the pulpits, with acceptance of some people’s “everyday theology” and rejection of others’ upon whatever politically or socially arbitrated basis. In the church there is sacred theology preached and believed by all. Imperfections in our preaching or our believing are occasions for repentance, not for celebration or shock. The Word of God shall not be altered or ignored but rather applied so that we may save both ourselves and our hearers. Theology is sacred because it is God’s teaching, not ours.