Becoming a Theological Orthodontist
Becoming a Theological Orthodontist
Healthy Christian life and community involves the head (what we believe), the heart (what we feel), and the hands (what we do).
Last week, I argued that we should define Christian faithfulness not on a right-left axis of conservative and liberal but on a vertical axis of orthodox and suborthodox. I appreciate the feedback I received from quite a few folks as I refine my thoughts. To continue the conversation, I want to clarify and expand here more fully what I mean by “orthodox.” I don’t mean just beliefs in our heads theologically, but a full and holistic vision of the Christian life. By “orthodox,” I want to include three elements of a fully formed Christian or Christian movement. I’ve written about this before, and I keep returning to it.
Healthy Christian life and community involves the head (what we believe), the heart (what we feel), and the hands (what we do). In other words, faithful Christianity gets the whole person involved in the action: the head (beliefs), the heart (affections), and the hands (actions). We must believe the right things in our heads, we must love the right things in our hearts, and we must do the right things with our hands. The five-dollar theological word that guys like me use to sound smart for these things are orthodoxy, orthopathy, and orthopraxy. Thus the orthodoxy of the vertical axis also includes orthopathy and orthopraxy.
Theological Braces
These words all start with “ortho.” When I think of “ortho,” I first think of Dr. Hawk. I visited Dr. Hawk’s office once a month for four years from fifth to ninth grade. That’s about 48 visits; and on 28 of those visits (yes, I kept count), I had to confess: “I broke another brace.” The first time I broke a brace, I was biting into a deep-fried chicken thigh. I can’t remember how any of the others broke after that. But each time I would sheepishly admit my dental sin to the doctor or his assistant. After three broken braces, the doctor’s clerk was supposed to charge my parents for any repairs. They didn’t catch on, though. (My parents were glad, I’m sure). By the time dozens of repairs into the plan to straighten my teeth had taken a two-year process and doubled it, it was too late.
As an orthodontist, Dr. Hawk’s job was to straighten the teeth filling up my crooked smile. An orthodontist’s job is coded into the name: in Greek “dontia” means “teeth” and “ortho” means “straight.” A doctor with “ortho” in the name specializes in a form of “orthotics,” straightening something that has become misaligned. It’s important work, because God designed the human body in a certain way, but in the fallen and broken world we inhabit, things don’t always become what God intended. Things like teeth grow in crookedly.
Things grow in crookedly all throughout the world, and no nook or cranny is immune. The church, for example, does not escape the consequence of the curse. Things grow in crookedly in the church, too, and any nook or cranny of the church can be in danger of becoming misaligned. But a good doctor can realign things in our bodies toward God’s original intention, and God in his kindness allows us to realign things in our world and in his church. A good orthodontist knows the proper alignment of the teeth that fill a human smile, and God has gifted his word to his church to teach us the proper alignment of the community of Christ, the church. In other words, we might say that Christians are called to “theological orthotics,” to be a part of realigning the church toward God’s intention, straightening the church’s too-often crooked smile. Like middle-school-Danny, we need consistent check-ups, realignments, and repairs.
The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Evangelicals
Thankfully, we’re not covering ground that the church hasn’t had to cover before. We can learn from our history rather than merely repeating it. Faithful evangelicals today stand on the shoulders of our forefathers. We are the heirs of many times that the need for reform bubbled to the surface. For example, in the middle of the twentieth century, American Protestant Christianity had two very influential groups: the mainline, “modernist” Christians and the “fundamentalist” Christians. The fundamentalists believed the truth of the Christian faith as revealed in the Bible. For example, the fundamentalists believed that Jesus was both God and man and that Jesus was born of a virgin.
While fundamentalists had faithful beliefs, they had another problem. They had broken some braces and were missing out on faithful actions. They wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the social gospel and liberal Christianity. But in avoiding that ditch they fell into another ditch. The Christians who believed the right doctrines had abandoned the right practices. Bible-believing Christians had withdrawn into their “holy huddles” instead of addressing the needs in the world around them. Into that situation, God raised up a giant of a man named Carl F.H. Henry. Carl Henry was like an orthodontist for fundamentalists. Carl Henry saw the problem and went to work. He helped start new schools and publications. In 1947 Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, a book of merely a few dozen power-packed pages. He aimed his work at the way that fundamentalists had withdrawn from engaging the problems in society. With that book, he helped sparked the wildfire that became the contemporary American evangelical movement.
I’ve said before that I think the evangelical conscience today has become uneasy like the fundamentalist conscience had become when Henry wrote his book. Scripture says “a threefold cord is not easily broken” (Eccl. 4:12), and we need to reclaim the threefold cord of faithful evangelical life—evangelical beliefs, evangelical actions, and evangelical affections—head, heart, and hands. Remove any one of these three, and you end up with something like a crooked smile, a misaligned form of faith and life. If you remove passionate affections (heart) from faithful beliefs (head) and obedient action (hands), you end up with legalism. If you remove faithful beliefs (head) from obedient actions (hands) and passionate affections (heart), you end up with progressivism. If you remove obedient action (hands) from faithful beliefs (head) and passionate affection (heart), you get pietism.
We need to reclaim our wholehearted commitment to evangelical beliefs, evangelical actions, and evangelical affections. We need to get our head right (what we should believe), get our hearts right (what we should feel), and get our hands right (what we should do). To put it another way, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. If we think about orthodoxy as the truth, orthopraxy as the way, and orthopathy as the life, we can’t lose any of these without losing Jesus.
I’m much more concerned, therefore, with a person’s location on the vertical theological axis than the horizontal political axis. Let’s imagine three people. Danny is a politically conservative, theologically orthodox Christian. Rhoda is a politically liberal, theologically orthodox Christian. James is a politically conservative atheist. I have definite convictions about political and cultural concerns, but even if Rhoda is to my left politically, she is still my sister in Christ. On the other hand, James is much closer to me politically and maybe culturally, but an eternity away theologically. I have eternally more in common with Rhoda than with James. James needs conversion to Jesus, even if he votes the same way I do.
Unfortunately, we’re not inclined to think of things this way. And in fact the political and cultural differences with Rhoda might seem on the surface more obvious than the theological differences with James. We need to reorient our theological and political imaginations—not for the sake of putting folks into a pigeon-hole, but for the sake of love. If I mix up the horizontal and the vertical, I might think that Rhoda needs evangelization and James doesn’t. That would be the opposite of the demands of love. Instead, Rhoda should be mutually encouraged as a sister while James should be evangelized as a neighbor.
That’s really the goal of this whole thing. Love.
One last thing. I’m working on ways to chart the locations of our theological beliefs vertically and our political ones horizontally. For example, I put James all the way to the bottom of the vertical axis because James is an atheist. That’s far “below the line” of orthodoxy. I’m thinking of even a sort of assessment quiz that we could use to get clarity on our own beliefs. What kinds of questions and themes would you include to get that clarity?