Theology: A Guntonian Reflection

What is theology? This question cannot be answered once-and-for-all time, a template and corpus requiring merely competent internalization and reproduction. This way of thinking about theology can take two main forms.

-theology as a flotation device: here theology is used to distance and separate believers from the world and its hurts and struggle. It centers one’s interest on a God whose interest is to “save souls” from a world gone wrong and now destined for destruction. Theology in this mode spawns an inner-focused spirituality looking upward to return to God in heaven at death or at Christ’s return. Focused on a God somewhere else interested in getting us somewhere else for some other kind of existence (non-bodily), the believe “floats” above the life and the earth he or she had been freed from with little concern for that world and those left in it, save for their “souls” which needed saving.

-theology as a belt: here theology is used to secure the believer in faith as a belt secures one’s pants around the waist to prevent them from falling down. Focused on the content of theology, usually considered a one-size-fits-all matter - no matter how differently each person might parse that “size” – embracing this theology serves to secure one in faith and enable it to effectively confute other ways of securing one’s life and identity. Intellectually-focused and apologetically-minded the world is still view as a damaged, dangerous, and ultimately to be destroyed reality that must be wrestled into submission by an agile and well-formed “Christian mind.” The Bible alone or the Bible and other works expository of biblical content (catechisms, confessions or statements of faith, authoritative lists of dogmas) are the belt that secures us in the world as we make our way to God’s kingdom.

Colin Gunton offers a different model for theology in his book The One, the Three and the Many. Instead of a flotation device or a belt, he seems to envision theology as

-a toolbelt: a loosely fastened belt that neither lifts one above the world and beyond its concerns and troubles nor secures us a place in this world from which to stand and do battle with it. A toolbelt carries multiple instruments for construction and repair, tools for doing something. And that something the toolbelt of theology does is deconstruct and reconstruct salient aspects of the world we live in to enable the church to declare and demonstrate a more human and humane way to live in this world.

This deconstructive/reconstructive exercise of theology, what I am interpreting Gunton as its toolbelt function, is part and parcel of the church’s prophetic ministry (Jer.1:9-10). Every generation in its time and place will use different tools from its belt, or use the same tools differently, to address its context with a prophetic word from God. Some matters are perennial and account for a large measure of commonality and continuity to this prophetic message through the ages. Others are more temporally and geographically specific giving each era its distinctiveness.     

This toolbelt of theology is as badly needed today as ever. We do not need floatation device theology at all. Belt theology can be useful as long as it is a toolbelt. Theology used only to secure our place or to aim at a specious “certainty” is to default on its genuine function and service to the world.