Why is All This ‘Theology’ Needed?

“Why is all this complicated theology necessary? Doesn’t it just create things for people to argue about and separate churches from each other? Why isn’t it enough to just love Jesus and read your Bible and go to church and try to be a good person?”

If you haven’t been asked this question, you may have asked it yourself. Either way, there’s a reasonable chance you found the answer unsatisfactory. Nobody can contemplate the divisions in the Body of Christ without some feeling of sadness, even if that sadness is tinged with resentment or outrage at the “wrong-headedness of those (insert your preferred wrong-headed group here).”

Now if THEY would only come around.

Sigh.

The problem, of course, goes all the way back to the New Testament. Paul’s letters illustrate what happens when people go off on their own without guidance; he is constantly setting congregations straight on some error they’ve made.

What it’s Not

There’s an old joke about how to carve an elephant. You get a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

Sometimes this reminds me of Christian theology. Given that Christianity is full of mystery, theologians sometimes seem to spend a lot of time saying “Well, whatever this mystery is, we can say that it is not THAT.”

And so the Arians were read out as wrong, as were the Manicheans, the Docetics, the Gnostics, and so on, and so on.

Theologians are somewhat like a playground fence. A fence is there to keep the kids inside a safe zone. They can pretty much do whatever they want inside that safe zone, but the fence keeps them from darting out into the street, or falling off the bluff and into the river that borders the safe zone.

It’s not an enviable job. There are always plenty of amateurs trying to climb the fences to prove it’s safe outside the wire, and plenty of opposition pros telling them why their boundaries are too far away from the safe zone, or unnecessarily close.

But it’s really a good thing to have them around when there’s need.

From Simple to Complex

Consider this: Adam and Even originally had one commandment to obey: don’t eat the fruit of a particular tree.

They ate it. And we all know what happened then.

Whether you take this story literally or as a deep metaphor, since that moment life has grown ever more complicated. The one commandment grew to ten, and then to the lengthy codes of the Torah – the Pentateuch – and the elaborations and explications, along with the consequences and interactions of all the elements of the law that make up the Talmud. That is a lot for an amateur to master.

It has been said that Christianity began with one fact – the Resurrection – and two Sacraments – Baptism and the Eucharist. Accurate or not, Christianity is considerably more complex than that now. Just as Adam and Eve had no need for just war theory, St. Peter had no need to give a considered judgment on in vitro fertilization. As life presents with more choices, the moral and ethical considerations governing those choices become more complex and difficult to parse.

When an Expert is Needed

When things get too complicated, it is time to call in the professionals. Knowing when to call in the plumber can save you hundreds of dollars and endless time in cleaning and disinfecting from an amateur blunder. If that is important with your house, how important is it when the object of work is the soul?

Before retirement I worked with computers, and I’m modestly good at understanding what’s going on with them. In consequence I’m in some small demand among my friends and acquaintances whose computer expertise is often limited to turning on the power and clicking away with the mouse. My skill – which leaves me prone to blathering about RAID arrays and FSB clock speeds and other stuff that is nonsense to the ordinary human with a real life – is useful when someone has a problem, and amusingly confusing or boring when they don’t.

It’s the way we work. We call in the experts when there’s need, and just go about our business when things are running well.

I am not, in fact, a professional computer hardware technician (I was a software guy), but I am an interested and experienced amateur. One of my neighbors is not a professional carpenter or plumber, but he is experienced and capable with all kinds of home repairs, and has an incredible assortment of power tools and special gadgets to make maintenance easier and more professional. Even he knows when to contact a plumber or electrician or carpenter.

I have a friend at work who is not a professional mechanic, but he knows his car inside and out, and does a lot of work on it himself, for the love of it. But he knows when to take his car to a service center.

They Handle the Tricky Stuff

As it happens, I actually have some academic training in matters theological and ecclesiastical, but I am no professional. I try to remember this when asked a question and avoid going out of my depth or beyond my knowledge. But sometimes I get going, and may be more confident in my thinking than I should be.

This is one reason I appreciate and value serious theologians. Like any amateur, it’s a joy for me to watch the professional at work, and there’s always something to learn.

Sometimes it may seem as though the scholars and thinkers are just engaged in making simple things too complicated for ordinary folks. But somebody has to handle all the tricky stuff so that the rest of us can operate in peace without always second-guessing our thoughts and feelings.

Adults can resent rules and regulations in the same way as children can resent fences.   Being human we want our freedom as unfettered as possible.  We are sometimes even too blithely willing to sacrifice safety to have it.  And we seem to do this more so when we simply do not – or cannot – recognize the dangers we are exposing ourselves to.

All the more reason to thank a theologian the next time you have a chance.