One of the pastoral and practical tools I use to evaluate theology— besides whether it is Biblical and Creedal and rooted in the Trinity and Incarnation— is this:
If you cannot preach it to hurting people, or pray it with a forgiving heart, it’s bad theology. If you won’t preach it, and can’t pray it, you shouldn’t believe it.
This is to say that our theology must integrate Christlike Compassion as its first and foremost effect on our life for it to be healthy theology. Theology is practical: It is a tool of spiritual and ethical formation to help us see the world more like Christ, and live a more Christlike life. This, however, seems to make many people uncomfortable. Instead, some people like to say they rely on the Bible ONLY to construct their theology. But the Bible is a very large book and can be re-mixed and spun to say a whole lot of things, from Life-giving Reconciliation and Liberation, to death-dealing slavery and oppression. So, we need some kind of key or guide to discern how to utilize the materials of Scripture to form a healthy theology.
Because of this, many people claim to rely on the Holy Spirit to form their beliefs. But people unfamiliar with the work of the Spirit may not be able to discern exactly what is Her influence, versus what is from their feelings, or what comes from more malevolent spiritual powers. One of the more concrete ways of identifying the Holy Spirit is that She manifests Christlike character within us (i.e. the Fruit of the Spirit. Gal 5.22-23). Key among this fruit is whether we are being led to mercy, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and unconditional love for others. Thus, the criteria above is another way of checking whether the Holy Spirit is leading us.
Some claim to find an objective and unbiased form of theology that is "just the facts". But theology is never "just the facts". Rather it is a holistic interpretation of how the facts hold together in the life of God. Theology is thus always open for bias. This scares people because they worry that our theology will be biased toward justifying certain kinds of sin that are easily pointed out and criticized. But it seems that a far more frequent and hidden bias is that we often interpret theology to validate our own power and privilege in a way that excludes and oppresses others unlike us. This seems to be on frequent display when religious people use all kinds of criteria to prove why "my" group is saved/right/elect, while all other groups are damned/wrong/cursed. So, if we are going to bias our theology-- and we are-- let us bias it toward grace, mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing of wounds.
Some worry that this way of doing theology opens us up to the poison of subjectivism and relativism: That anything goes, and all interpretations are relative to what individuals and groups want to believe. Worse yet, it is warned that this panders to people who want to justify their sins. But a theology of forgiveness and restoration does not justify sin. It recognizes sin and seeks to heal it. Relativism is not our culture's biggest threat to healthy theology. Something else is.
I’ve gone through a lot of schooling, and taught a lot of school, and I’ve only ever come across a handful of actual relativists. And none of them were over 17 years old. And all of them grew out of it. This is because relativism is so obviously absurd that only a handful of teen boys ever really entertain it. And the "Guardians of Western Culture" who pin radical relativism on adult thinkers and writers— especially on radical French deconstructionists— do so based on a sloppy and lazy read of their texts. I think the tirade against relativism is a Quixotic quest to joust straw men. I have, however, come across a bunch of dogmatists who believe that Reality exactly corresponds to the contents of their minds. And when confronted with facts that contradict the contents of their minds, choose to do mental backflips and fly into absurdities to keep hold of their mental idols.
In our culture, the main threat to Truth (with a capital T) does not come from some mysterious vague cabal of subjectivists and relativists writing missives from an ivory tower somewhere. The threat comes from dogmatists who most strongly espouse their own supposed objectivity. Instead of pretending we have some form of infallible certainty, we need to realize that although there is Truth, we are not Him. We can use words to point in the direction of Truth, but we cannot enclose Truth in our words. Depending on what words mean at a given time and culture, some words more effectively point toward Truth than other words. But our words do not contain Truth. They express Truth. Because Truth became a Person, not a set of propositions. That person was the full union of Divine Reality and Human Reality united in the subjectivity of one Person who lived in perfect accord with the Truth within him.
Following the Pattern of this Person of Jesus Christ, we seek to align our inner life with God's greater life, as we embody the Truth within ourselves. Truth comes in the conformity of our inner self with the Divine Self— The Word— that is embodied in Jesus. Our words can be helpful tools to get us into relationship with the Word of God, along with sacraments and sacred practices.
But more often our words can pull us away from the Word, even if our words are “correct” in some technical sense. For instance, someone holding aloft a banner that says “Jesus saves” while perpetrating acts of violence and insurrection. Those words have been emptied of meaning in that context and used in the service of something anti-Christ. This is why Paul warns us: “For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough.” (2 Cor. 11:4) There are “objective” words— like Jesus and Spirit and Gospel— that should point to Truth, but do not because the linkage to Truth is broken inside the person writing or speaking them.
The fetishization of “objectivity” and “rationality” by some denies the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding us, which is essentially subjective and existential: To help us realize the Christ Life within us. In my experience those that fetishize rationality and objectivity, and most loudly protest how they have overcome subjectivity and emotion, are the ones most in bondage to the affective and unconscious parts of their self. They do not realize the real motives and psychic forces that motivate them to reason the way they do. But those who have integrated their emotions and subjectivity, who are fundamentally comfortable with their feelings, and effective with their affections, are the ones who tend to be the most rational and clear headed in making decisions.
One definition of heresy is that it is preferring an easier truth to a hard truth, a simple truth to a complex truth. It is to take one side of a paradox, and ignore the other side, as in heresies that see Jesus as merely human or only God, without accepting the paradox that he is fully human and fully God united in one Person. It is a heresy to think of God as only one or only three. Instead God is best described by the complex and paradoxical idea of the Trinity. It is a heresy to think of salvation as only wrought by God without human cooperation, as well as only wrought by humans without Divine help. Instead it is a synergy of God working through us. It is heresy to think of matter as only particles or only waves, when in fact it is both. And it is heresy to think of Truth as only an objective absolute, or only subjectively relative. The Truth about Truth is that it is the integration of the subjective and objective within our lived experience, the conformity of our inner reality to outer reality.
One does not achieve Truth nor wholeness by “overcoming subjectivity through objectivity”. This would be to overcome ones self, because a self is subjectivity: It is the experience of an objective world through ones own perception and emotion and embodied passions. To feign to be purely objective and rational and dispassionate makes one less human, not more human. And the repression of subjectivity does not make it go away. Instead it makes us blind to our own subjectivity and unaware of the deep currents of need and emotion that motivate our reasoning and ideals. Our hearts have reasons that reason does not understand (so wrote Pascal, I believe). If we do not dive into our affections, our subjectivity, our unconscious, we will not be able to fully grasp the reasons for our reasons. Because we cannot "tame" our emotions and motives, as much as we learn to harmonize with them.
Like how a skilled sailor is able to take wind from any direction, and use it to sail their ship safely to port, so also the would-be theologian must be able to harness the "winds" of feeling and emotion which flows through their self to "sail" their thoughts toward wholeness and health in Christ. We must be able to use the waves of passion and affection, and the deep currents of unconscious motivation and urging, to sail the ship of our soul to safe harbor in God. This takes not only reasoning from evidence to conclusion in a mechanistic rational way, but it also takes diving deep in prayer and meditation and contemplation to harness the inner forces our rational mind is only vaguely aware of. This is why the Eastern Orthodox tradition has always defined a theologian as "One who prays" (cf. Evagrius Ponticus). To be a theologian is to be a mystic who integrates the inner forces within, both subjectively and rationally, to attain full union with Christ.
May we all be theologians. May we become people who truly pray.
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