American Christianity--Theologically Vacuous

Written by Pastor Nuckols Friday, 18 December 2009 08:21

That the apostolic churches were confessional and that they confessed the apostolic doctrine cannot be disputed.  The apostles delivered the facts about Christ, interpreted those facts, and then developed the consequences for Christian life from this.  To be a believer, meant believing what the apostles taught.  It is in this sense that apostolic succession is a New Testament truth.  Believers succeed the apostles as they believe, teach, and confess what the apostles believed, confessed, and taught.  That is why the apostles not only framed the Christian faith in doctrinal terms but called for its preservation and protection in this form.  No one who is familiar with apostolic teaching and practice could imagine that bare, creedal orthodoxy alone is being advocated in these passages (I Tim 1:10; Titus 1:9; I Tim 6:3; II Tim 1:13-14; I Cor 15:2; I Pet 1:23-25; II John 9; Col 2:6; John 2:7, 24, 26; 3:11; Heb 2:1; Jude 3; I Tim 4:6; etc.).  It is clear, for example, both from the structure of many of Paul’s letters and from many of his specific statements, that he saw belief and practice as inextricably related to each other, the former being the foundation of the latter and the latter being the evidence of the working of the former. 

Christian practice is quite evidently taking on its own peculiar form in contemporary America.  Being practical now in the Church substitutes for being theological, because there is little left to her theology except practice.  Stripped of doctrinal substance and rendered unreflective about and uncritical of the culture, theology now transforms “virtue” into a set of everyday skills for finding success in a world of technology and affluence.  Knowing how to be religious now means knowing how to “make it” in a pragmatic world that is decidedly hostile to absolute principles and transcendent meaning and, in consequence, is driven to seek meaning only in self-fulfillment.  The principal reason that theology is dying in Evangelicalism and non-denominatianalism is that they have depleted their store of good methods for constructing theology; the problem is that, without a vision of God as Other, different from and standing over against the modern world, there is no compelling reason to think thoughts about the world that are not essentially modern.  In fact, there is no reason to thing at all, let alone to think as Christians ought. 

Without an audience of those who know the God who stands outside of the flow of modernity, theology dies as surely as art dies in the absence of art lovers.  And the Church should be this audience.  It is true that theology has deep and necessary roots in academia, but its fundamental connection is with the Church.  The question, therefore, is whether the Church has a mind for theology.  Without this mind, theology cannot take root where by nature and purpose it must take root.  There can be no theology worthy of that name that is not a theology for the Church, a theology in which the Church actively participates, in which she understands herself to be theology’s primary auditor.  The Church is the place where biblical knowledge must be learned, developed, and applied.  The Church is the context in which God and His Word should receive their most serious thought.  This is not to say that theology should not seek to address the academia or the culture.  It should.  But in the contemporary context, it can do no more than address the academy and the culture from within the academia, because it has been dislodged from its primary location within the Church itself.  Without theology there can be no Church, because theology holds the key to Christian identity, to Christianity continuity, to genuine piety, to orthodox worship, and to the sort of Christian thought that seeks to bring the import of God’s Word into this world.

At the same time this disengagement with the culture occurs, the Church turns in on herself, for once she is without theology, once she is without a center in God’s truth, the Church has neither the means nor the desire to look beyond herself.  Without this theology, the Church’s agenda shrinks to the borders of her own interests.  Without this theology, her criterion for success is quite simply her own success.  And where this happens, the same forces of alienation that separate self-absorbed individuals from one another in the culture begin to separate self absorbed churches from one another in the culture begin to separate self-absorbed individuals from each other in the Christian world.  More than that, this self absorption also separates them from God’s larger purposes in the world, that is unity around the comfort of the Gospel rightly proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered.  Without theology, worshipers have no reason to look out into the world beyond their shores, or even within them, for those who have not yet heard the gospel—except, of course, as they are motivated to produce the sort of church growth that is equated with success.  In the absence of theology, the life of the Church becomes hollow, yet this hollowness is so little different from that of modern life that it seems almost normal.  And in this wilderness, voices crying about a loss of spiritual integrity are easily heard.