This is the best place and the best way to get engaged in theology. This isn't your home church, your family's dining room table or the workplace break room where conversations can become a high-stakes game of "you're in or you're out" or "you're a reasonable person or a crazy religious zealot." Use this as a laboratory for ideas: maybe they are your ideas, maybe they are ideas you've heard that you need to hear someone respond to. Either way, I think all Christians need to spend some time thinking about the things we take for granted. But, we don't like to do that. It can be scary and besides, they take up less space and energy if we just take them for granted.
Problem 1: When we take our theological assumptions for granted, challenges to faith make our House of Cards crumble.
Problem 1: When we take our theological assumptions for granted, challenges to faith make our House of Cards crumble.
Problem 2: Christians have a credibility problem that is compounded by our ignorance about our own faith traditions.
As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her 2008 article for Christian Century, "Failing Christianity" our churches often support us in believing things that we really don't know very much about. Many Christians don't even know what the words that they use to describe their beliefs MEAN. It is important for Christians to learn a bit about the history and vocabulary of Christian belief.
Last but not least, I think theology should have "street value." This might mean that Christians need to find ways to "re-jargoned" or translate their theology into the thought categories of their own culture. This is a huge debate: Is accepting the Christian message a cultural conversion (where one learns the language of the Christian faith) or is the onus of conversion on the Christian (to translate the faith into the terms of the receptor culture)?
As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her 2008 article for Christian Century, "Failing Christianity" our churches often support us in believing things that we really don't know very much about. Many Christians don't even know what the words that they use to describe their beliefs MEAN. It is important for Christians to learn a bit about the history and vocabulary of Christian belief.
Last but not least, I think theology should have "street value." This might mean that Christians need to find ways to "re-jargoned" or translate their theology into the thought categories of their own culture. This is a huge debate: Is accepting the Christian message a cultural conversion (where one learns the language of the Christian faith) or is the onus of conversion on the Christian (to translate the faith into the terms of the receptor culture)?
In my view, we must do both. Christians need to get themselves educated and if they do so, they may find that they don't need to "re-invent the wheel." On the other hand: Karl Barth wrote the the work of dogmatics was to always be beginning at the beginning, by which he meant, the "gospel" that is the basic Christian message.
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