When I teach systematic theology, a key early moment comes when we read Elizabeth Johnson’s classic text in feminist theology, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. This 1992 text (since reprinted in multiple editions) remains a classic exploration of nascent feminist themes in the Bible and subsequent Christian tradition; however, what is particularly helpful about the text is the clarity with which Johnson argues for the importance of theological discourse itself in shaping our worldviews and ways of being human:

As the focus of absolute trust, one to whom you can give yourself without fear of betrayal, the holy mystery of God undergirds and implicitly gives direction to all of a believing person’s enterprises, principles, choices, system of values, and relationships. The symbol of God functions. Neither abstract in content nor neutral in its effect, speaking about God sums up, unifies, and expresses a faith community’s sense of ultimate mystery, the world view and expectation of order devolving from them, and the concomitant orientation of human life and devotion. (Johnson, 4)

Johnson’s point is crucial to her project, because the brunt of her argument is that the language that we use for God will have deep implications across our worldviews and actions, including how we treat others. If we can only envision God as male, then there cannot help but be repercussions that strengthen patriarchy across cultural and political realms. If we regard God as having ordained the United States of America to a status of exceptionalism, then that will have implications for how we engage geopolitical realities, particularly in times of conflict.

In the past several decades, this notion—that our ideas about God have a direct and discernible correlation with our political and ethical attitudes—has become entrenched as a standard justification for why theology matters as an academic and ecclesial discipline. Indeed, it has been virtually axiomatic within theological discourse that the manner in which we construe and depict certain theological symbols—salvation, the Eucharist, the person of Christ, the nature of divine providence, etc.—will have predictable outcomes upon the behavior of those who take such symbols seriously.

To take just a few examples:

The elevation by “social Trinitarians” of God-images that emphasize God’s existence as Triune community rather than solitary monad is thought by these theologians to provide us with divine grounding for more open, vulnerable, and egalitarian communities on earth. On this model, Trinitarian perichoresis (that is, the indwelling of the persons of the Trinity within each other) becomes a model for more authentic/less dominating human interaction.

The recovery—over against the popular apocalyptic perspective represented in, say, the Left Behind novels—of the book of Revelation’s vision of Christ’s redemption as encompassing all of creation, and not just humanity, is championed by ecological theologians as a framework for encouraging Christians to value the natural environment. If we understand nature as the arena of Christ’s redemptive activity and not simply as the dispensable backdrop against which salvation occurs, so the theory goes, then Christians will be more motivated to care for creation.

Explorations into the problem of evil that emphasize that God is capable of genuine suffering, in contrast to those strains of the patristic and medieval tradition that emphasize God’s immunity from privation, are thought to promote a vision of power and love that is more humane and less patriarchal than their alternatives.

There is no question that this mode of theologizing—predicated on the belief that analyzing how embedded theological assumptions produce deleterious social effects in order to propose (or recover) other symbols that might motivate more salutary ways of being in the world—has catalyzed a great deal of excellent theological reflection across global and denominational lines. Feminist, black, liberation, womanist, process, and a whole host of other vital theological movements have constructed marvelously creative and faithful reworkings of core Christian symbols on the belief that these could be made to function in ways that might make the world a more just and beautiful place. These achievements should be celebrated.

But if “the symbol functions” has become an established piece of theological orthodoxy, then like all bits of orthodoxy it should be critically appraised every once in a while to see if it still can withstand the stress tests of Christian life in the twenty-first century. And in that spirit, we might have reason for concern.

First, we should notice that one of the effects, perhaps unintended, of this line of thinking is that it provides constructive theologians who might be anxious about the very legitimacy of their discipline (perhaps especially, but not exclusively, within university contexts) a seemingly unassailable rationale for their work. If our theological symbols and what we do with them have the power to make the world a better or worse place, then the utility of theology then becomes defensible on the same grounds by which one might argue for the use of political science or philosophy: critical reflection has political results. I know that I myself have been known to stand in front of classrooms and make impassioned pleas to rows of skeptical students that, because symbols function, theology has “real world” importance.

But here we might wonder whether it behooves theologians—who, after all, really ought to know a bit about how easily good intentions lead to delusion—to be especially self-suspicious when their methods of justifying their disciplinary existences end up highlighting the utilitarian value of God-talk in ways that make themselves indispensable on some supposedly neutral, rational calculus of what really “matters.” On a theological level, it seems that a discourse which has at its heart a broken criminal on a cross ought to be highly cognizant that nowhere does the fallen character of the world manifest itself more clearly than in agreed-upon standards for what constitutes “relevance” and “success.” Meanwhile, at ground level, it is not at all apparent that, despite the massive number of books and articles produced in the field of constructive theology every year, theology as a discipline has been particularly effective in its purported aims of changing human behavior. Put bluntly, if the axiom “the symbol functions” is predicated upon the potential of theology to change the world, then theologians should assess in all humility the extent to which that potential has been realized.

Such an honest assessment might lead us to realize that one of the most philosophically and theologically significant facts about human beings, religious or otherwise, is our deeply rooted ability to live in cognitive dissonance with (if not in outright contradiction to) that which we affirm to be true and good. Indeed, not only are we capable of massive cognitive dissonance, but a whole host of structures have the capacity to absorb our “correct” theologies into systems that remain fully undisturbed by our changed worldviews. As a Christian, I affirm the primacy of charity and God’s love for the poor even as my pursuit of a stable middle-class existence is, quite honestly, no less enthusiastic than that of my “secular” friends. If asked, I would affirm that I value family more than my career, but I suspect that my Outlook calendar would tell a different story. When I preach, I find myself telling congregations that the infectious joy of the Gospel is too large for us not to share the good news of Jesus Christ, even as I am well aware of how easy it is for me to keep absolutely silent about my Christian faith in settings where I don’t think that it would be welcomed.

A cheap solution to this dilemma would be to say that we must not “really” believe what we say we believe if there is no apparent correlation between what we affirm about God and how we live. But far better than such superficial stratagems would be to acknowledge that there is a certain naïveté in thinking that the connections between what we want to believe and how we actually live will ever be direct and predictable.

If we concede this, then all is not lost for theologians; indeed, far from it. When one looks to the depths of the Augustinian tradition, for example, one sees a whole host of powerful trajectories that explain how we are caught up in webs of ­self-deception and dissonance from what we know to be good in ways that escape our understanding, much less our control. Indeed, in recent years a whole host of secular philosophers (in deep contrast to the “new atheists”) have drawn appreciatively on specifically Christian theological themes in order to have conceptual material for articulating facets of the human project that standards of Enlightenment rationality simply cannot comprehend. And this has only been amplified in our global context by the West’s encounter with modes of human flourishing that are quite foreign to our own traditions (and perhaps helpful for precisely that reason).

But to mine those insights requires that theology give up any pretense to being a ­self-sufficient discipline or a kind of Rosetta stone that can decode human actions and instead embrace deep interdisciplinarity in order to see how insights about the human condition are articulated within the realms that study it: literature, art, political science, philosophy, the sciences, and so on. Just as one cannot responsibly engage in theology without some basic levels of competence in these disciplines, then it does seem legitimate to point out that the development of these lines of inquiry have, throughout history, been so deeply imbued with theological notions (Christian and otherwise) that competent deployment of the symbols of theology have the potential to shed light on precisely the areas of wisdom that these disciplines seek to articulate. When the rewards of disciplinary dialogue are so potentially great, then monologue becomes not only impractical but also unethical.

Another way to say this is that, in theology, the distance between what we believe and the sort of systems of behavior that we perpetuate is in fact among the most interesting objects for investigation; however, that investigation is best carried on in collaboration and not the pretense of ­self-sufficiency. If we have had reason in these last decades to lose faith in our symbols’ ability to “function” in any straightforward or utilitarian fashion, then we should not yet give up hope that they can work in tandem with other realms of knowledge to shed some light, however imperfectly, on the ways in which our fragile attempts at realizing the good, the true, and the beautiful in our own experience are sometimes met with disaster beyond our control and sometimes graced with success beyond our deserving. Indeed, there is a good argument to be made that this is what theology has in fact always been: a discourse that seeks to make sense of the fact that both death and life (in the fullest senses of each term) are distinct possibilities at any time, and that how we orient ourselves toward God has implications for how authentically and humanely we navigate that uncertainty on earth until that day that “we know as we are known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Whether or not such discourse produces practical results, it might produce richer lives.

Robert Saler is Research Fellow and Director of the Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Programs at Christian Theological Seminary. His most recent book is Between Magisterium and Marketplace: A Constructive Account of Theology and the Church (Fortress, 2014).

Works Cited

Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Herder and Herder, 2002.