Importance of theology?
I'm nearing the end of my time as an M.Div. student at Perkins, and I've been thinking about my the experience of taking seminary classes. Part of my own reflection process has involved reading the essays I wrote for admissions and scholarship applications from four years ago. In these documents, I almost always brought in my passion to develop my theology—I remember writing something along the lines of “our worldview shapes how we live.” I would then tie this into how admission into Perkins would equip me to accomplish this through a well-rounded, liberal education. I’m sure the admissions committee ate this up.
This assumption—that our worldview shapes how we live—is really quite common. Consider the following examples from a few Christian writers and preachers:
- Jeff Hood writes about his experience of shame in a Southern Baptist context. He argues that this kind of theology is incredibly damaging and leads many to suicide, all because SB theology is “devoid of the love of Jesus.”
- In one of the best sermons I’ve heard in a while, Greg Boyd talks about the “Twilight Zone God” and how our mental image of God shapes our life.
- Rachel Held Evans has often critiqued the Calvinism of folks like John Piper, arguing that the theology itself is abusive.
- Tony Jones has argued that the primary problem with Mark Driscoll is his misguided theology. I think it’s a fair reading of Jones to say that he thinks Driscoll would be perfectly fine if he were to become less “right wing.”
As strange as it may sound, I’m a little hesitant now about what I wrote for Perkins—that theology and worldview are somehow the golden egg for Christian living. Don’t get me wrong, having a nasty picture of God can help you turn into a very nasty person. A low-hanging-fruit case-in-point of this phenomenon would be Westboro Baptist Church.
