This is the first in what will be many papers on my seminary journey. I will post them here for the enjoyment of all those who happen upon this page.
Theology is something that we all do. Regardless of religious affiliation we are all about the business of “god-talk”. We are all trying to provide meaning for our existence, from the atheist to the Christian fundamentalist. In the context of this paper, however, I will be exploring theological formation as looking back on the Christ event and seeking to explain its meaning and purpose, and the processes by which it occurs at the individual level.
The first act of theology occurred after the death of the last apostle. It is at this point that there was no person tied to the Christ event with authority to teach, or at least to do it with apostolic authority, which would have been accepted as final.[1] In theory if there was no change in culture or no introduction of a new threat, then no more theology need be done. Additionally, if the gospel were not spread throughout the world there would also be no need for theology. If it could continue to be explained in terms of its Greco-Roman context and birthed from the continuing story of Israel, I think the Scriptures would be enough. However, this is not reality and so very quickly the context and culture changed, and theology was born. The first major encounter of the need for theology arrived in the way of Gnosticism.
At its most basic form Gnosticism embraced the idea that the physical world is bad, and that it is in need of escape.[2] The irony of discussing this heresy as what began the process of Christian theology and the development of orthodoxy, is that this basic idea permeates much of Christian teaching today.[3] Flowing from this basic worldview were many teachings that the early Christians found to be problematic: denial of the incarnation, resurrection of the dead, and creation just to name a few. The first major attempt at defeating the Gnostic Christians was done by Irenaeus.
While there were apostolic fathers and apologists who began doing theology before Irenaeus, it was either directed at specific issues in communities (apostolic fathers) or as a means of explaining Christian belief to pagans (apologists). Irenaeus is the first to accomplish building upon Christian theology.[4] This says something profound about the Christian experience at the time. The core of what it meant to be a Christian in the days of Jesus, and then in that in-between-time until John’s death, was centered on community, on praxis.[5] They knew the significance and the power of the Christ event, and were now seeking to live out that good news in their communities. The challenge of theology did not come until they began to try to spread that good news. The line to doing theology for the purposes of establishing orthodoxy ran something like this: praxis – heterodoxy – theology – heresy – orthodoxy. It is a fluid thing and not completely linear at times, but it began with praxis.
For Irenaeus to combat Gnostic Christian teachings he had to provide an explanation for an embodied redemption by an embodied Jesus. His answer was found in Romans 5. From there he expanded on the Adam comparison to the work of Christ and sought to explain that Christ was the literal reversal of the Adam story. It was necessary for God to enter the human experience and live it in reverse of Adam. This idea came to be known as recapitulation. “For Irenaeus if man is to be saved, it is necessary that the first man, Adam, be brought back to life, and not simply that a new and perfect man who bears no relation to Adam should appear on the earth. God, who has life, must permit His life to enter into ‘Adam’ the man who truly hungers and thirsts, eats and drinks, is wearied and needs rest, who knows anxiety, sorrow and joy, and who suffers pain when confronted with the fact of death.”[6]
The story of Irenaeus’ dealings with the Gnostics provides a microcosm of the story of Christian theology in the early church. He is an example of the hard work that must be done when confronted with a context that is not obviously answered by Scripture alone. Consider too that he likely would not have had access to all of what we consider the New Testament, since it was not yet compiled as we see it today. He had a core idea from the circulated letters from Paul and Peter and expanded on that idea to meet the need. How are we in today’s context to be at the hard work of theology for our time? What does that process look like on an individual level?
Close your eyes and picture this with me. Imagine you are a white middle-class male in a small midwestern town. You met a friend who invited you to a local non-denominational Christian church just off Main street. You visit a few times, and the “gospel” is presented, at which point you go forward in the sanctuary, pray a prayer, and are now welcomed into that community as a follower of Jesus. The “gospel” presented was that you are a sinner, God is a judge, and Jesus is a lawyer. Jesus has bridged the gap between you and God and it is faith confessed in prayer that will invite the Spirit into your heart to wipe away that debt, so that you can go to heaven and not to hell. You have done some things in your short time on earth that you know are not right, and so this “gospel” makes sense. Now you will spend time in that community learning about their representation of the Christian faith. What is embedded in this representation? An American flag stands in the front of the church, opposite a Christian flag. There are only men in leadership positions. The Bible is described as inerrant and authoritative for your life. You can read it. You are situated in a town, in a state, in a country that is powerful and dominant on the world stage, and you are part of that story.
Now imagine you are a Hispanic woman in Miami. You are a Christian. This faith was passed on to you from as early as you can remember. You learned it from your mother because your father passed away when you were young. She told you the story of St. Lazarus and you pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mary) when you are distressed or in a time of need. You know that Jesus died “for your sins”, but far more important to your faith is your survival. There is no flag in your church. It is women that have showed you the ways of Jesus. You know of the Bible, but you do not have one. You cannot read it. You are on the underside of power. Your liberation is your salvation.[7] You are situated in a town, in a state, in a country that is dominant on the world stage, and you are not part of that story.
These two scenarios describe two separate faith experiences that are taken for granted. The story of each of these nameless persons describes aspects of their embedded theologies. The theologies they inherit in their context for their time. “It is the implicit theology that Christians live out in their daily lives.”[8] The two individuals in my stories will likely continue in their embedded theologies until something happens that causes them to question what they have been taught or learned.
Imagine that our first individual visits Miami for a Christian conference of some sort. Part of the experience is street evangelizing. In an encounter on the street he meets our young Hispanic woman. In the ensuing conversation the two embedded theologies collide. This is the first time that the man hears the experience of a Christian in terms of their liberation from oppression. This is the first time that the woman encounters an individual so committed to studying the Bible. The woman asks the man where he situates himself in the Exodus narrative. He situates himself with the Israelites in his ‘spiritual’ freedom. She encourages him to consider that he may be among the Egyptians, and therefore the one in power, the oppressor. If he takes this insight and contemplates it and evaluates it over and against his current story, he is now doing deliberative theology.[9] He is confronted with a theology that does not fit what he currently understands or knows. The woman may conversely see that reading Scripture and studying it for spiritual formation is not part of her theology. To reevaluate her relationship to Scripture would be to do deliberative theology.
This hypothetical scenario outlines what would be the ideal outcome of this interaction. Unfortunately, what all too often occurs is that the person in the position of power tells the person on the underside of power that to be a Christian is to be like him. It might not be said explicitly but is implicit in his praxis. The man may declare upon hearing that the woman works a full-time job, that she should be at home with her kids. He is basing this on his embedded theology of the nuclear family being in line with his experience of Scripture and Christian living, at the ignorance of the experience of the other. As Isasi-Diaz explains, “To do theology is to validate and uphold the lived experience of the oppressed—experience which the dominant cultures deny.”[10]
My experience on the journey of theological formation started in a small Baptist church in New Hampshire. I prayed the salvation prayer at the age of six and was baptized sometime soon after. That experience and the few years following in a Southern Baptist megachurch in Florida, framed much of what I internalized about the faith. I had a faith based on fear. I would pray that same salvation prayer over and over thinking maybe it did not work the time before. I eventually grew out of this in my teenage years as our family left the Baptist denomination for a non-denominational church. I would say Scripture was taught as central, but I lacked all motivation to make it so. I existed in a space uninhabited by an anchor. This continued until I entered military service and began to travel the world. Though I still claimed faith in Christ, I laid aside any clinging vestiges of practicing that faith. I had encountered men and women of vast faith differences and could not reconcile the fact that they were just like me and yet so different. In 2016-18 I tried to find a system that could anchor, and I ended up in Reformed theology of the Calvinist tradition. Unfortunately, it lacked the answers that satisfied so I formally renounced my faith. It was the reality that had been there for years, but I finally acknowledged it. It took about six months before I would reconsider Jesus, encouraged to do so more by the study of philosophy than Christian apologetics or Scripture. I had embedded theologies that had no life, and it was so multi-layered and so fraught with trauma, that doing deliberative theology required burning down the house and rebuilding. It is only then that I discovered names like N.T. Wright, Greg Boyd, Brian Zahnd, Walter Bruegemann, Scot McKnight, Tim Mackie, Rudolph Bultmann, Karl Barth and so on. It is only then that I found out about the kingdom of God, the new heavens and new earth, bodily resurrection, now and not yet, gospel as God’s kingdom come to earth and so on. It was only then that I discovered faith need not be defined by how certain I could be, but by how I followed in the way of the Lamb and trusted in the power of God at work in the cosmos, not to destroy it, but to reunite his space with our space. It was only then that I could repent of a faith in American “Christianity” and begin to live the way of the exile.
As seen in the story of the early Christian church theological formation is a communal experience. But within community is the individual doing the work of theology, in her context for her time. It is not easy, it is not the same, and it should never be stagnant. A life of faith well lived travels the changing road of theological formation.
[1] Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition Reform, First Edition (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 1999), 25–26.
[2] Ibid., 36.
[3] Howard W. Stone and James O. Duke, How to Think Theologically, 3rd Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 21.
[4] Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, 68.
[5] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 1st North American Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 360.
[6] Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, 76.
[7] Mary Potter Engel, Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, Rev Exp Su Edition (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1998), 267–74.
[8] Stone and Duke, How to Think Theologically, 15.
[9] Ibid., 18.
[10] Engel, Lift Every Voice, 273.
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