On the Importance of Good Theology

 

On the Importance of Good Theology

Father Richard Rohr is one of the great practitioners and teachers of spirituality today. He his himself Roman Catholic, and to an extent he writes from a Roman Catholic perspective; but his work is not aimed only at Roman Catholic Christians. Rohr speaks to all Christians and indeed to all people who value the spiritual life. I have great respect for him and have learned from him, but here I have a bone to pick with him. I just read him say something that is not only wrong but dangerous. In his book What the Mystics Know, Rohr dismisses the value of being right theologically as merely an ego matter. He’s wrong about that. A great, late mentor of mine in Christian ministry once said to me, “Bad theology kills people.” He was absolutely right about that. Bad theology kills people. I want here to contemplate the value of good theology and the harm of bad theology and to explain why being right theologically matters.

Why is good theology important? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to look at the harm of bad theology. One very extreme example of the harm of extremely bad theology today is the terrorism inflicted by Muslim extremists (not regular people of the great Muslim faith) on innocent civilians around the world. Bad theology led to people hijacking airliners an crashing them into buildings of symbolic significance on September 11, 2001. Bad theology led Hamas terrorists to attack Israel and kill some 1, 200 innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023. Bad theology led four Islamist terrorists to attack a popular music venue in Moscow on March 25, 2024, killing around 130 innocent civilians. Other incidents of Islamist terrorism are far too numerous to mention. Islam is, in its essence, a religion of peace through which countless generations of people have found a meaningful connection with God. Today, a very small percentage of Muslim people have corrupted Islamic theology into a justification for mass murder and suicide, both of which the Koran, Islam’s holy book, condemns. In Islam, bad theology is killing people. Even if it is only functioning as a cover for acts that really motivated by political or cultural issues, it is still killing people.

Bad Christian theology has killed people for millennia too. I’ll give just a couple of quick examples here. Bad Christian theology that says that only Christians are saved from eternity in hell led to Christian religious imperialism and the killing of countless numbers of indigenous people in many places around the world. Christian theology that called Jews devils, concocted wild stories about how evil they are, and blamed them for the death of Jesus Christ, led to the unspeakable, incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust. Bad Jewish theology that uses the notion of Israel as land God has given only to the Jews has led to Israeli displacement and oppression of Palestinian Arabs that has resulted in numerous deaths among the Palestinians. Examples of the harm of bad theology are not hard to find.

In the United States today, bad Christian theology does, on occasion, lead to killing. A Christian extremist who bought the lie of Christian anti-Judaism attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, killing seven people and wounding six others. Yet the harm that bad Christian theology does in our country today is less often actually murder than it is a kind of spiritual death that it imposes on millions of Americans who consider themselves to be good Christians.

The dominant theology of American Christianity, especially American evangelical Christianity, is something called the classical theory of atonement. That’s the theory of salvation that says the a cosmic price had to be paid for human sin before God could or would forgive that sin. The suffering and death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was that price. Those who are saved are those, and only those, who take Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and believe that his sacrifice bought their salvation from sin. The classical theory of atonement is simply appallingly bad Christian theology. It makes God a monster, a cosmic child abuser. It leads to a religion grounded in the fear of eternal damnation. A great many Christians spend their whole lives living in that fear because of what their church has told them Christianity is. The classical theory of atonement stunts Christian spirituality and thereby stunts the lives of countless Christians around the world.

Any theology that leads to physical killing and/or spiritual death is bad theology, and it matters a lot. Any such theology is bad theology because all of the world’s great faith traditions know that God is a God of grace. God saves everyone, and no one need live in fear for the eternal fate of their souls. God is a God of peace. God wants peace for all people not just for those who think that they are the only ones who really understand God. God is nonviolent and calls all people to lives of nonviolence. These and other blessings are not just the teachings of good Christian theology. They are the teachings of great religions the world over.

Good theology leads to life not death. Good theology leads to a lively spirituality that seeks good for all God’s people and the knows that all people are God’s people. Good theology leads to lives committed to caring for those in need and to reforming all human systems that put people in need. Good theology leads to lives of inner peace and the ability for a person to face whatever happens to them in life in peace and with hope in this life and beyond this life. Good theology enhances life, bad theology taints life. Bad theology detracts from the abundant life that God wants for all of God’s people.

So Father Rohr, as much as I respect you, I must strongly disagree with you here. Yes, it feels good the think you have the right theology, but that doesn’t make right theology a matter only or even at mostly of the human ego. Right theology, good theology, is an existential matter for all of humanity. The world has suffered immensely over the millennia because of bad theology, bad Christian theology most of all. God calls some of us to do what we can to correct that bad Christian theology. That’s what I try to do with my theological writing. Yes, I suppose that on one level I do it because getting it right strokes my ego, but that doesn’t detract from the importance of good theology. Bad theology kills people both physically and spiritually. Good theology saves people by opening for them the way to fullness of life. That’s why good theology matters.