I’ve long believed that our two biggest failings as a church are that we don’t spend nearly enough time in the world being the servants that Christ tells us we are called to be, and that we don’t have anything more than a surface level understanding of the theology of our faith. These two problems are too often treated as separate, or even opposed to each other, when they are actually inextricably linked. Christian theology is fundamentally a theology of service. We see this throughout the biblical narrative, but specifically in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We see it in Matthew 20:28 where Jesus says he came to serve and not to be served. We also see it in Jesus’ summary of the law where he says the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus spent time talking with the religious scholars of his day, debating theology with them for hours. He spent much more of his time working with people to meet their needs. It’s instructive to me that Jesus doesn’t spend all his time in the temple. He spends it walking around the country.

I bring this up because of this debate about whether the Adam & Eve story has to be literally true for Christianity to have any validity. To sum the debate up as simply as possible, Ross Douthat argues that atheists need religious fundamentalists because they both thrive on absolute black and white thinking, and neither side can stand people who try and introduce gray areas. Jerry Coyne then argues that Douthat has no idea what he’s talking about, and that anybody who thinks they can introduce grey into the black and white areas of theology is stupid, pathetic, and worse than fundamentalists. Oh, and he says the Bible is outdated and childish. Mark Shea responds to Coyne by arguing that there has to be gray, and that theology is about a deeper meaning than just literalism. Finally, Andrew Sullivan gives his thoughts here and here, which track closely with mine, and are more eloquent, so I’ll just ask you read his posts.

I don’t feel the need or interest to add more to this debate. I do however want to highlight what I think are two problems with Western Christianity that help cause this debate. I’m going to do this in two posts because I’m too long-winded to do it as one, so below is installment number one.

The first problem is one I stated above—we have a lack of theological depth in our churches and, therefore, in the people who attend those churches. The fault for this lies at the feet of those of us charged with leading the church. Too often we have looked at theology as either a subject we love but have no time for once we leave seminary, or as that pain in the ass class we just want to pass so we can get out of seminary and never have to think about again. I was amazed at the number of future pastors in seminary who viewed theology as antithetical to their future ministries.

The problem is that theology, being the study of God, undergirds everything we do as a church. You literally can’t escape doing theology, even if you don’t believe in God. Everything we do as a church and as individuals shows what we believe about God. I know pastors who claim that they don’t want to do theology, they just want to show people how to live like Christ wants us to live. They are completely oblivious to the fact that they just explained their theology in that sentence—Christ-like service as the purpose of our lives.

This lack of theological depth is the reason that so many of our churches fall in to one of three mistaken tracks. Either a) the “God wants you to be a millionaire” prosperity/quasi Retribution Theology gospel that is partially informed by the Pentateuch and not at all informed by the prophets or Jesus; b) The “You can go to heaven as long as you do x,y,z” gospel (or it’s twin, the more common “they’re going to hell because they do a,b,c” gospel) that also tends to ignore Jesus and the prophets while focusing on some laws cherry-picked from Leviticus; or c) the “Just come to church on Sunday morning and then keep your beliefs private” gospel that is very respectful and proper, but also ignores a good part of Jesus’ message and leads to a dying church that is out of touch with creation.

As the church we too often forget that so much of what Jesus did was teach theology to his disciples and anyone who would listen. What was the sermon on the mount if not a theology lesson? What were all the parables? It wasn’t the religious leaders who understood the teachings either, they were the ones least willing to listen. That should be reason enough for us as leaders to encourage everyone to claim their theology and work with us in figuring out who God is calling us to be in the world.