Theology, that is the study of God, is essential for all Christians. It is silly to say, as I have sometimes heard, that Christians don’t need theology. The truth, of course, is you have one weather you claim it as such or not. The knowledge of God and the things of God are found all throughout our world. The real question, then, is weather or not you have a Biblical theology of God. The local church is, sadly, rife with bad theology. Many people in the pews, and even some pastors, do not know the true God of Scripture and His ways, despite all their years in an local body. Part of the problem, as we saw last week, is that most people think of theology in terms of academic instruction. The teaching of theology has been seen as a discipline in understanding the nuances of various theologians from history. This, we have said, must change and we must focus on theology as discipleship. That is to say, theology should be practical or it is not theology. This week we want to discuss the means by which theological education in the church can and should happen, for, as with the content of theology, so the pedagogy of theological instruction is viewed from an academic mindset and therefore fails to serve the local church. An alternative solution is, I believe, to remythologize theology in order that we might communicate it more powerfully.
This concept of remythologizing first came to me back in 2009. Jason Lief wrote an article for Teaching Theology and Religion that both critiqued current paradigms in theological education and proposed this as an alternative model. His article “Challenging the Objectivist Paradigm: Teaching Biblical Theology with J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and Guillermo del Toro” was both fascinating and challenging. Lief asks, “How do we help students truly encounter the biblical narrative?” His answer is to help students to “imaginatively foster a mythological approach to the Bible, Christianity, and the current cultural situation so they might hear the theological proclamation of the text and begin to challenge the modern myths at work forming and shaping their own lives.” Now, Lief is a professor at Dordt College, which is a member of the Christian Reformed Church. Overall the denomination of the CRC has continually shifted left, and so while I don’t know what the author has in mind by these statements expressly, I can say that even as a conservative evangelical there is value in this recommendation.
It was Rudolf Bultmann who decried the presence of what he called “myth” in the Scriptures. In his book Jesus Christ and Mythology he wrote:
For the modern man the mythological conception of the world, the conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and of redemption, are over and done with.
Lief believes that much theological education, as a result of such sentiments and such influence, has led to theological instruction merely in the form of propositional statements to be memorized and regurgitated. What’s interesting, of course, is that theological education among conservative evangelicals doesn’t look much different. We too are prone to think of teaching the Bible in terms of communicating merely propositions for memorization. Doctrines are facts to be rattled off like entries pulled from the glossary of your theology textbook. What this means for the average person in the pew is that if they can Biblically define the atonement and adequately refute characters like Rob Bell then they have “done theology.” But that leads us back to our first problem, that theology is viewed merely as academic head knowledge. And if that is all theology is then it is pretty useless. There must be, then, an approach to teaching theology which invites people to see doctrines in light of God’s story for their lives and their world.
For Lief that involves using great fiction, art, and film. He invites teachers to utilize the stories of Lewis and Tolkien to teach their students, and he even has a fascinating discussion of Pan’s Labyrinth as a venue for exploring a theology of revelation. He believes that pop culture can be a medium for understanding the theological. I certainly agree. But this different approach to theology also means doing instruction as a community and allowing all our lives to shape the way we communicate the truths of Scripture.
Let me be clear here: it’s not that I believe that Scriptures are mythical. Nor do I think that our theological education should not use propositional statements, as some teach. But by detaching theology from the storyline of Scripture and the storyline of my life we rob it of its significance. As Lief writes, “So we come to think of reality as ‘out there,” apart from us, and knowing becomes a kind of spectator sport.” I think we must make use of our own stories in the midst of theological education, that’s next week’s topic.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 