When Our Dialogue Dies
Three deathstrokes for meaningful theological engagement
Most theological content and engagement online—and especially social media—is very passionate but not very good. That may sound elitist, but you know it’s true. You’ve seen it with your own eyes and probably have rolled them.
In the comments of my last article, for example (which I don’t generally engage), I was urged to perform a Google search for “Did Paul write all his letters in the Bible?” (verbatim). Perhaps if I had done so instead of going to seminary or preaching through the Pastoral Epistles I would be as informed as those asking Google about authorship within the Pauline corpus. Another woman (who clearly didn’t mind publicly embodying the title of the article itself—“When Women Aren’t Taken Seriously”) voiced her frustration over male commentators writing about the birth of Jesus. Giving birth is, after all, something women do, and women are apparently far better positioned to give insight into the Christmas narrative as a result.
The furor of public, theological wrangling has largely been occasioned by the “Mohler Amendment” vote at the SBC annual convention last week. While I’ve already written about that amendment and some concerns related to it, I think it’s worth explicitly pointing out three patterns I’ve noticed over the past week that completely kill serious theological engagement before it ever gets started. Importantly, none of these patterns are unique to online theological engagement and are just as deadly “IRL” (as the cool kids say? I’m not sure—I’m not cool).
I address each briefly below.
A Hermeneutic of Hurt and Anger
Nothing shuts down fruitful theological engagement faster than someone who believes that their victimization or the victimization of others has resulted from a particular understanding of the Bible. The reasoning goes: “If people who do ‘bad thing X’ justify doing X with ‘theology Y,’ then ‘theology Y’ is clearly problematic or false.” In the wake of last week’s vote, complementarianism has been analyzed with this schema.
Many who have been abused by husbands or pastors who have justified their evil with complementarian interpretations of the Bible take it as obvious that complementarianism (whatever that now means, exactly) is false. In most cases, no amount of trying to explain that most complementarians do not, in fact, abuse anyone in any shape or form proves to be persuasive. Further, attempting to explain that people have been inappropriately appealing to Scripture to justify their sinful behavior for millennia is not enough to overcome the hermeneutic of hurt and anger.
Rather, the intuition that God’s word couldn’t possibly contain arrangements for church and the family that could yield disaster becomes the hermeneutical starting point. The problem is, “I approach this text uncertain about what it means, but certain about what it does not mean because I’ve seen it work out very badly or have been personally hurt by it” is not a hermeneutic for serious Bible interpreters.
I have genuine, deep sorrow for men and women who have been mistreated by those who have wrapped their sin in Bible verses. I really do—I am so sorry. On the Christian hope, one day, public vindication is coming for you!
But the fact remains that unwise and sinful implementation of biblical truths is not an argument against such truths but an indictment of those practicing them sinfully or misunderstanding them altogether. Someone mistaking bad behavior correlated with X for an argument that X is bad or that X causes the bad behavior itself has skipped informal logic class.
Remember, the birds fly south every time the leaves change color, but no one believes that orange and yellow leaves cause avian migration. Similarly, happy, “complementarian” women and loving, caring male leaders demonstrate that something poisonous has to be added to the recipe to get results that are hurtful or abusive.
Examples of hurt and anger hermeneutics can be multiplied far beyond the gender role controversies (e.g., biblical allowances for divorce, the moral status of homosexuality et al.). And yet, in every case, what you can be nearly certain of is this: someone with a hermeneutic of hurt is not going to be persuaded by Bible verses, Greek grammar, or the Church Fathers. In fact, they are going to search out every scholar they can find to buttress their hurt and anger-driven conclusions with some intellectual firepower. In most cases, the only practical hope of persuading them will lie with flesh and blood human beings who hold these apparently problematic views flourishing before them over time.
And that’s not possible to achieve online. The best practice when encountering a hermeneutic of hurt and anger online is to acknowledge and move on—they may have a broken framework for interpreting and applying the Bible, but you aren’t going to be the one to help them fix it.
A Hermeneutic of Pragmatism
A hermeneutic of hurt likely falls under a larger hermeneutical umbrella: a hermeneutic of pragmatism—when interpreting and applying the Bible we should play to our strengths, prize efficiency and do what works.
Does a woman have better “leadership skills” than her husband? Then she should take the lead in their marriage. Is this woman a good teacher—perhaps better than the pastor? Let’s get her some reps in the pulpit; we don’t want to squash her God-given gifts and people may even benefit more from hearing her than Pastor John. Is church discipline failing to cause this person to repent? Perhaps we should lift it. Maybe we shouldn’t even practice church discipline—it does make people feel shame, after all. People should not stay in marriages in which they are miserable or feel emotionally neglected; that is definitely not how Christ relates to the church.
And on and on.
A hermeneutic of pragmatism is driven by understanding Scripture in a way that most effectively and efficiently accomplishes certain ends. Taking cues from industrialization and corporate America, in its current form such a hermeneutic starts with certain circumstances and human resources and says, “Surely the Bible, properly understood, is a guide to optimizing what we’ve got here. If we are listening to it correctly and implementing it accurately, we are going to have people who feel utilized, fulfilled and joyful—the Bible works.”
But the problem is that obeying Scripture may be difficult, frustrating and inefficient for a whole host of reasons including our own ignorance and sin combined with that of others. Circumstances play a role, too.
Take a woman who has giftedness in teaching, for example. The responsible pastor doesn’t show her the way to the pulpit, tell her she has her gifts by mistake or ignore her—and those who do so should be ashamed.
Instead, he should help her find opportunities for her to exercise her gifts inside and outside the home—in addition to teaching her own children, perhaps she can lead a women’s Bible study, teach in a women’s ministry (or be a part of starting one), write a Substack, teach a women’s Sunday School class or do a variety of other things that Scripture clearly permits.
Of course, a woman who finds herself in a church context that lacks opportunities like these may very well feel frustrated or sad. But such frustration and sadness cannot morph into a cousin of the hurt and anger hermeneutic. Instead, we should trust God with the manner in which he has chosen to build his church.
And when we take a look at how he has chosen to do that, we find very little to suggest that Scripture’s revelation and instruction are aimed at efficiency or geared toward optimization as we conceive of it. Sanctification takes a long time. Relationships are messy. Church hierarchies aren’t pure meritocracy. The marriage covenant isn’t dependent on chemistry or personal satisfaction. Jesus has been gone for 2000 years.
Approaching the Bible with a “which interpretation works best” hermeneutic will tend to bulldoze right over inconvenient truths and unintuitive restrictions that flow out of God’s sovereign prerogative, especially when they offend our sensibilities. Further, God may be withholding certain things from us for our good, even when it seems as though we are being divinely stifled. We may find ourselves to be hoping Hannahs.
When we silently (or loudly) start considering God’s word to be an inconvenience to maximizing our marriages, ministries or moxie, we have taken a wrong turn. Remember, Jeremiah loathed his doomed-to-failure ministry, Hosea was told to marry a whore and Job never got answers.
Trusting God was enough.
And it must also be so for us even when we feel that we aren’t realizing our “full potential” in God’s sovereignly administered Kingdom. It’s not our hermeneutic that needs to change, it’s our perspective.
Psycho-Babble Polemics
Everyone has received strong “instruction” in psychology-driven polemics over the last five years, so we needn’t belabor this point.
“Of course you believe that—you’re a man.”
“Of course you believe that—you’re white.”
“Ok, well, you’re black but you believe that because you have internalized whiteness.”
“You hold that view because it helps you keep power.”
And so on.
Sadly, popular level theological dialogue has not escaped the same pseudo-psychological speculation that is now standard fare in cultural analysis. Even the most rigorously argued theological conclusion can now be dismissed out of hand with gusto and passion because of who is advancing the conclusion. It’s embarrassing and represents pseudo-intellectualism at its finest, creating the illusion that theological novices (if you can even call them that) can credibly stand toe to toe with people who have forgotten more about the Bible than they will ever know.
Furthermore, this tactic commits the well-known genetic fallacy in attempting to invalidate the truth of a claim by criticizing how one came to believe it. But claims are true or false independent of how one comes to believe them or what psychological forces were involved in the belief formation process; your belief that the earth is spherical is still true even if you came to believe it during an acid trip where a talking refrigerator told you that spheres are masculine and the earth is a man.
Of course, the fallacy is convenient because, once more, such invalidation serves as an “ace in the hole” and as a substitute for hours and hours—years even—of actual theological study (like with real books and possibly professors). Once we arrive here either online, in the church or at the coffee shop, no real theology is happening. Frankly, no real critical thinking is happening either. Truth claims stand or fall with their supporting reasons, arguments and evidence, not ad hominem attacks or armchair psychology.
Here’s a crazy idea: if we can’t judge people by the content of their character, perhaps we can at least strive to judge people by the character of their content.