Christian, your theology is overrated.
That’s not to say that it’s not important, it’s just not as important as you probably think it is or have grown up believing. It’s really not what this Christian life is about—at least if we’re to use the Gospels as a reference point.
Most of us have been conditioned to believe that our spirituality is all about our belief system; all the boxes we check, the way we interpret individual passages of the Bible, the clever and complicated ways we talk about religion: our Christian apologetic.
When we meet or engage people we normally lead with theology even if we’re unaware of it. Invariably our litmus test for the depth and authenticity of a person’s faith is likely what they believe, before it is who they are. Knowing their character is less important than hearing their hermeneutic. This is especially true in the forced distance of social media, where we quickly screen people for their take on the polarizing issues of the day: sexuality, abortion, guns, the election—and their responses determine how we evaluate their religious convictions and whether or not we are willing to be in community with them.
As a result local churches too so often become segregated, conditional communities of like-minded culture war Christians, who believe they alone comprise God’s side.
Despite all our talk of a Gospel for everyone, despite our effusive language about diversity and inclusion and grace for all—we ultimately just want to know what people think about gays or guns or maybe Hell, and we either align ourselves with, or distance ourselves from them depending on their answer. In this way our theology becomes an easy, efficient barrier between us and those we believe to be less-enlightened than we are.
Yet Jesus didn’t have a theology, at least not in the way most Christians imagine he did or the kind they perceive for themselves.
In the fifth chapter of Matthew’s biography, Jesus sits down on a rugged hillside packed with a mix of the devoted, the curious, and the skeptical and begins to teach. Many of those gathered likely had never heard him before, and they certainly hadn’t read anything he’d written or been able to dissect his teachings. This is perhaps one of the greatest overlooked aspects of the life and ministry of Christ in the Gospels: the distinct lack of religion. The New Testament after all, was only now being written (or rather spoken) in real-time, out of the very mouth of Jesus to those listening. This was the available Christian theology: Christ.
It would be decades before a moment like this would be permanently documented and later still, fit into some manmade framework. That moment on that hillside was enough for those present.
Jesus’ closest disciples, most of whom were raised in the Hebrew faith, would have shared with him knowledge of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. This was the only framework of their religious worldview or reference point for his teaching, but in the Rabbinic tradition even this was built on a conversational wrestling with the words and their application to daily life, not some rigid, mathematical formula modern Evangelicalism has given us. And as Jesus delivers his new Kingdom manifesto (which we now know as the Sermon on the Mount) he spends a great portion of it reframing the very tradition itself, challenging and deepening all they know about it, stretching whatever the God Box looked like for them. “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I say…” Over and over Jesus gives his hearers a fresh lens through which to view faith tradition and a higher calling rooted in the response of their lives to the love of God.
When Jesus gathers at the table with people he doesn’t burden them with doctrine or allow their beliefs or behavior to keep them at a distance. He sees them. He offers them the gift of proximity and the invitation to communion.
With the benefit of hindsight, with 2,000 years of church history, and with a billion or so books on the subject it’s tempting now to fly over the ministry of Jesus at 30,000 feet and create some tidy, well-organized theological system; to say “Jesus clearly was referring to this here”, or “This is how we exegete this phrase in light of this commentary”. But those living alongside Jesus didn’t have such things. His disciples, those entrusted to record and replicate his message for Humanity had only their shared experience to draw from and the Hebrew Scriptures as a touchstone. They had only what they saw, heard, and walked through together as a filter to understand him and to decide what God was trying to say to the world.
This all underscores the reality that for those in his midst, Jesus was far more relational than he was theological.
His guests at the table, the people he encountered on the hillsides and in the streets, and his disciples had that brief moment in the history of the planet to share space and time with him. They had the words he spoke to them, the parables he shared, the compassion he provided, the wounds he healed. That was their daily bread.
Maybe we don’t need (and never needed) to create an elaborate, extensively footnoted religious system as a way of knowing and teaching others about the character of God. This obviously wasn’t a primary or even peripheral objective of Jesus, otherwise he would have done it. He would have written everything down first and spent the three years of his public ministry doing nothing but lecturing people on the right things to believe. He would have handed out tracts and given altar calls and moved one—but he didn’t.
Yes, he preached, he taught, he healed—and he lived. This is one of the clearest and yet most neglected lessons of the Gospels: life as working theology. The truth is: hurting, grieving, hungry people don’t really care about your hermeneutic or your system. These things might impress your seminary classmates or your church friends, but they don’t transform the world.
Jesus gives us the perfect blueprint of a captivating apologetic of love; that were we to choose it and live it, might bring the greatest revival the planet has ever seen.
Maybe that much later Evangelist Paul, was right, maybe love really is all you need.
Maybe that is the only theology that matters.
