How to Be a Post-Theology-Nerd

Here is a test of theological significance: A theological distinction is significant if it affects how people actually live out the Christian life.

Last week, my wife and I met a United Pentecostal couple who live down the street from us. (The United Pentecostal Church is a “Oneness Pentecostal” denomination, denying that God is Trinitarian.) The couple are involved in publishing Christian books, Christian counseling, and looking for a good Christian school to send their children.

Having been theologically educated, I ought to pull down a few books from my shelves on Trinitarian heresies, label this couple “modalist” and therefore “heretic,” and discount our similarities as superficial. And when I was a theology nerd, that is what I would have done. But something has changed.

My name is Joel Carini, and I’m a recovering theology nerd.

1. The Queen of the Sciences

At one time, I would have defended my interest in theology as a spiritual pursuit of the highest things. It was “the queen of the sciences.” To pursue theology at the highest levels was to be the most mature kind of Christian, sufficiently prepared for Christian leadership. Pursuing and disseminating theological knowledge was superior to secular and political vocations. The world would not be changed merely through doing good or through politics, but through preaching the theologically-correct gospel.

At the time, I couldn’t see how narrow and arrogant this way of thinking was. Exalting the significance of intellectuals, I ignored the significance of the rest of the body of Christ. I was like one of the frontal lobes saying to the rest of the body, “I don’t need you.”

After seminary, the indication of my problem was how my own spirituality was shaped. It felt like my head had grown several sizes, while the rest of my body atrophied. My weighty skull was bending my body over sideways, so that I was almost looking at people upside-down. Part of me still thought, “I have so much to teach people.” But seeing the disparity between their relatively upright posture and mine, I felt that something was amiss.

2. To Be or Not to Be (A Theology Nerd)

In college, whether to become a theology nerd was a question on the table, on which others challenged me. Friends at Wheaton College urged me that it was more important to do something in the world to help people than to get correct the finer points of theology. The evangelistic-types insisted that theology would distract me from evangelism and seeking people’s conversion. The Neo-Anabaptist types said to focus on the Gospels and Christ’s practical teaching, rather than the details of Pauline theology. Back then, I had an array of counter-arguments, but now I see that there was truth in each of their critiques.

Now, each of these critics would be wrong to discount theology entirely. For example, if we focus on doing good works only, the distinctive message of salvation goes missing. We might help people be warm and well-fed now, but we leave their souls unprotected and empty hereafter. On the other hand, if we focus on evangelism to the exclusion of theology, we might get the gospel itself wrong or have nothing meatier to offer Christians who desire to grow in knowledge.

But if we shouldn’t neglect theology, we also shouldn’t forget why theology matters. If serving others and doing good works should be accompanied by communicating the gospel, this doesn’t justify obsessive concern with every theological distinctive and esoteric detail. In articulating the content of the gospel and other knowledge in which Christians must grow, we do not need to concern ourselves with questions that go well beyond these goals.

Here is a test of theological significance: A theological distinction is significant if it affects how people actually live out the Christian life.

Take baptism as an example: One group baptizes infants, another only those who profess faith. Both raise their children in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord.” I’m going to go out on a limb and say it doesn’t matter when you baptize children. Show me all the Bible verses and Greek words you want; but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.

For another example, predestination properly understood shouldn’t affect whether we evangelize. The fact that things are predestined doesn’t change our obligations in the slightest. So this should mean that it is immaterial whether people are Arminian or Calvinist.

Now, for each of these doctrines, we can find the practical element of it, places where it might really matter. For instance, I grew up with a kind of preaching that urged conversion almost weekly. We constantly had to determine whether we were in or out of the kingdom of heaven, to begin anew, to question whether we were really saved.

For me, the practical significance of infant baptism is to relieve my children of this pressure. I want them to grow as Christians without a focus on a moment of conversion and baptism. After all, the majority of the Christian life is slow growth without monumental turning-points. But of course, a Baptist could recognize this as well. The difference here isn’t really “infant baptism,”but the theology of sanctification, or even just the psychology of human development.

Calvinism too takes on a practical nature when it engenders a kind of humility about our own capacities and trust in divine providence. If being a Calvinist means wanting to debate whether salvation is predestined or not, knowing that it makes no difference to practice, then it will be meaningless. If being a Calvinist means being humble about our moral nature and confident in God’s good purposes, then it is very meaningful, and I highly recommend it.

3. What Seminary Doesn’t Teach

When people who officially have the same theology differ markedly on other matters, I begin to wonder if their official theological agreement is as significant as their practical conclusions.

Take the matter of celibate, gay Christians in the church and in leadership. People with exactly the same stated theology of salvation, Christ, the church, and so on differ on a question which is absolutely core to some people’s Christian lives. (I think it also points to questions that affect all Christians, as I’ve been arguing in my last four posts.) I warrant that this divide represents a real theological difference, next to which most other points of theology pale. Is sanctification akin to miraculous faith-healing? Or does Christian growth take account of the givens of our biology and psychology? Do certain temptations disqualify people from living a faithful Christian life? How you respond to a sincere admission of the thorn in a same-sex attracted Christian’s flesh is more of an indication of your theology than the doctrines you profess.

This question is just one of those that divides the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) on matters of culture and politics. But why such a divide, when the theological curricula of Reformed seminaries are relatively similar? It’s because the actual issues that divide churches - and shape how they live out their faith in our contemporary context - are unaddressed in the theological curriculum. It’s assumed that we can just figure those out on our own.

This means that the question of what Christian faithfulness looks like in contemporary life - the question of the Christian life - is left unaddressed in the education of our pastors. A question like, “How much do we shape our message to be heard by the surrounding culture?” is one which every Christian leader has to answer. But it lies beyond the area of interest of theology-nerds and the curriculum of seminaries.

The standard seminary curriculum includes New Testament, Old Testament, Greek, Hebrew, Theology, Church History, Apologetics, Homiletics, and Practical Theology. While none of these are dispensable, some things are missing. To answer the question of Christian faithfulness in contemporary life, one would need to resort to history, psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, natural science, and other secular disciplines. (See my, “On Being a Natural Theologian.”) While I understand that an educational institution must specialize, there is danger in the illusion that the theological curriculum alone prepares one for Christian life and ministry. (See my, “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Seminary.”)

Now, I am under no illusion that studying these practical questions would lead to widespread agreement. But as currently practiced, theological education treats them as of secondary importance and incapable of being addressed by careful theological reflection. I, on the other hand, am persuaded that they are of primary importance and are the main object on which careful theological reflection is required.

If seminary leads to narrowness, what leads to breadth? I have found that encountering the demands of normal life, work and money, family and child-rearing, and reckoning with my psychology and personal limitations have been instrumental. When you see that these are the structures and constraints of every actual Christian life, the question how to navigate these takes on much more significance than that of how to dot doctrinal i’s and cross theological t’s.

4. Theologian at Large

I have found the men’s workout group “F3” - Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith - to be an interesting microcosm of this idea. While the founder is a Christian, the group uses the word “faith” merely to indicate “believing in something higher than yourself.” We welcome men of all faiths or none.

Without requiring Christian faith, F3, I have found, inculcates Christian virtue far more effectively than any church men’s group. While churches group people by their official profession of Christian faith, F3 sorts people by their willingness to wake up for a 5:30 am workout, to assume responsibility and leadership, and to be vulnerable with other men in the “circle of trust.” While I hope and pray that these men will believe in Christ, it is more important, to begin with, that they begin to live Christian lives. By this practical focus, F3 has done at least as much to ensure that I am practicing my faith as have Christians who agree with me on the finer points of theology.

Then, what is the role of theology? A limited but important one. I have found ways at F3, for example, to host “philosophy night” and get these men thinking deeply in a way many of them have had few opportunities to do. One of these men, himself a Christian, said that he appreciated me getting him away from the topics he, a “jock,” thinks and talks about and making him think deeply about important things.

On the other hand, much of the theology and philosophy I think and write about just goes beyond this group. It has a narrower audience, more geographically distributed. There is a place for this kind of intellectual work also, in helping a smaller and rarer class of thinking people to advance in their understanding. But even here on Substack, I recognize that people have busy lives and their own concerns, and intellectual work must be ordered to and sensitive to those practical concerns. This is in contrast to academia, where people are gathered on the basis of an almost exclusive and obsessive interest in certain topics, which lacks accountability to real life.

And it is the encounter with real life that makes the post-theology-nerd. With it comes the realization that the Bible doesn’t have all the answers, at least not apart from our encountering the world. A kind of humility sets in as you realize that what you thought was the completion of the quest for wisdom was just the beginning of that quest. Even if the theological curriculum claims to have the keys of eternal life, you begin to realize that we cannot be saved by theological knowledge alone. Practical, technical, psychological, and economic knowledge, just to name a few, are also required alongside theological knowledge to live out the Christian faith in the complexity of human life. The way of salvation is a following of Christ in that complexity. This is the way of the post-theology-nerd.