Theology is Boss

We must consciously and intentionally submit everything we believe about everything else to theological truth. If you get your theology wrong, it doesn’t matter what else you get right.

Theology matters. Sometimes we think of theology as a dusty, stuffy “put God in a box” kind of thing. Theology, though, is truth about God and all things in relation to God (as theologian John Webster said). Theology is everything. If you make a cake and mistake sugar for salt, it won’t matter that you got the rest of the recipe right. If you get your theology wrong, it doesn’t matter what else you get right. We are prone to ignore theology, to be intimated by theology or to submit theology to other concerns. For example, as I’ve said before, putting theology on the right-left conservative-liberal spectrum creates a lot of problems. I consistently see situations that illustrate this point, including a recent one. Since the details and players might be a bit niche to some, let me lay out the threads before I tie them together.

Thread #1 — The Trinity Debate

In 2016 debates about the Trinity bubbled up on the evangelical, theological internet. On the one hand, a group of theologians, such as Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Owen Strachan, had been arguing for several years that the Trinity gives a picture of marriage and male-female relationships. Specifically, the relations of the Father and the Son exemplify the relationships of the husband and the wife. They argued that the Son eternally submits to the Father’s authority, picturing the wife’s submission to her husband. On the other hand, a large group of theologians pushed back, arguing that the Father and the Son are eternally equal as one God with the Spirit. The Father eternally begets the Son such that the Son has the fullness of the divine nature. This is the historic, biblical doctrine of eternal generation. These theologians argued that Grudem, Ware, and Strachan didn’t correctly understand or apply the doctrine of eternal generation. In large part, the second group won the debate, standing (I believe) on the side of biblical, orthodox theology. The first group modified their theology some, but not sufficiently, some argued.

Thread #2 — The Wokeness Scare

In 2019, a debate about racism and Critical Race Theory (CRT) started swirling significantly in the evangelical landscape. In June, 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution about CRT that called it a useful “analytic tool.” A persistently vocal group of Southern Baptists, conservative evangelicals, and others argued against this resolution. They warned that CRT is false teaching, another religion, and that liberal theology was bubbling up. Then with Covid and George Floyd’s death in 2020, things boiled over. The riots and chaos that summer pushed many to say, “See! This cultural Marxism destroys lives and property!” In 2021, Voddie Baucham published Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe and Owen Strachan published Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel — and the Way to Stop It. Baucham’s and Strachan’s responses troubled me. They seemed to describe the issues in play in overly simplistic and divisive ways. I reviewed Baucham’s book and a bunch of the original writings of CRT. But many resonated with these critiques, and there was a pull “to the right” in such streams of evangelical Christianity.

Thread #3 — The Christian Nationalism Fracture

I “asked Jesus into my heart” when I was three, and I remember disliking Michael Dukakis, so I’ve been both evangelical and conservative for a long time. That made the specifics of the “anti-woke” pull to the right even more troubling. As I’ve said, the pull was not just theological, but also cultural and political. Even primarily cultural and political. As the Republican Party, Trump, and the Right generally moved toward a more nationalistic political view, so did evangelicals inclined to the Right. Christian Nationalism has become a thing, as conservative evangelicals discuss it, debate it, and even endorse a form of it. Some have affirmed a very specific form of Christian Nationalism that calls for a sort of ethnic purity. Many have said that Christian Nationalist voices traffic in actual racism and ethnic partiality. This political theology of Christian Nationalism and its problematic racial views have divided the former coalition of “anti-woke,” “conservative” evangelicals. For example, Owen Strachan has written and recently spoke at the G3 conference against ethnic partiality, saying that the gospel reconciles a diverse church globally.

Tying the Threads — Subordinating Theology to Politics and Culture (or Anything Else)

So at this point, some of the folks on the Christian Nationalist Right have started to turn on the Owen Strachan/G3 tribe for betraying the values of the right. Specifically, I’ve seen attacks on Strachan’s Trinitarian theology, questioning whether Strachan is a heretic. Seven years after the Trinity debate boiled over. Now that Strachan is not marching in lockstep with the perceived values of “conservatives,” he’s being called a liberal and a heretic. Now, I’ve had my disagreements with Strachan, both on the Trinity and the way he has attacked “wokeness.” But the point here isn’t about that.

The point is the way we see theology being subordinated to politics and culture. The Christian Nationalist crowd didn’t seem to talk about Strachan's Trinitarianism until he started disagreeing with them on another point. This point, while theological, has a more political-cultural tint. This makes the Trinity serve a political and cultural agenda, turning the whole thing upside down. God is the Trinity, and if we get God the Trinity wrong, God help us even if we get anything else right.

I’ve heard it said that in some churches, you could lay out a heretical view of the Trinity and no one would care. In fact, many wouldn’t even recognize heresy about the Trinity. But disagreement on a treasured political or cultural point would raise concern. Insofar as this is true, even partially, we find politics and culture have taken control while holding theology hostage.

We must consciously and intentionally submit everything we believe about everything else to theological truth. I’ve said before we need to move theological truth from right-left spectrum of conservative-liberal to an up-down axis of orthodox-suborthodox or true-untrue.

In this view, notice where theology sits. It’s above the questions of conservative and liberal, right and left. We serve a King who isn’t to our right or left, but above us, first on a cross, now on a throne. You won’t find him by looking sideways. Our faith and faithfulness is upward.

We swim in the sea of culture and politics, so I’m not surprised to see some subordinate theology to these things. It’s the spirit of the age. But the problem is that the spirit of the age often play-acts as the Spirit of the Page. We have to be careful, because so many things pull at our hearts and minds, pretending to be Truth. We need to learn sound theological truth, rooted in Scripture, and let that truth rule our views of things.