Fill-In-The-Blank Theology

There’s nothing wrong with evangelicals.

The truth is, I’m not just picking on the conservative evangelicals. I’m also talking about theological liberals too. One can be just as dogmatic to one’s cause and be on the left or the right.

But evangelicals are the ones I know best, because I was one for a lot of years until I became fairly disillusioned and struck out more or less on my own.

What did it for me was when I realized that a lot of the nicely packaged theology and Bible I had been taught in Bible College and seminary didn’t really work for people out in the real world. Oh, I had plenty of answers—but after several years in ministry I noticed that by and large, people’s lives weren’t changing, that things in the church seemed to be actually getting worse and not better. Something was not working here. But what was it?

I went back and re-examined not so much the content of what I was taught, but rather the methods that were employed, and I came to realize that a lot of it was “fill-in-the-blanks.” What am I talking about? I’m talking about the systematic theology classes where the professor stood up in the front lecturing (from prepared notes) and the students filled in the corresponding blanks on their notes. You know, stuff like “God is __________” and the professor told us the answer and we filled it in and moved on to the next blank. At the end of the term, both students and professor alike had the same set of notes!

And in Bible classes we had notes with blanks in them too, with points like “The main theme of the book of Judges is ______________” and the professor would tell us the answer and we would write it in the blank. And the best part of all, when it came time for exams, we would encounter essay questions like this: “State the professor’s view as to the main theme of the book of Judges” or “Give the professor’s interpretation as to what constitutes the ‘unpardonable sin.’” This makes me wonder: didn’t he already know his own viewpoints? Why did he need a class full of students to parrot back to him what he already believes?

Now the irony is, maybe the professors were correct in the answers they gave us for the blank spaces. Even if they were, that isn’t the point I’m making here. What I’m saying is this: Where’s the ownership on the part of the students? A person can’t own what they are told to write by somebody else into a blank space. The student did not discover it on his or her own; he or she did not come to that “Aha!” moment of self-discovery and make the concept theirs. In fact it was the rare professor who taught in such a way that we engaged in this process ourselves—but they were few and far between.

What this “fill-in-the-blank” process can do is turn out a bunch of students who have heads full of great-sounding theological words and concepts that they memorized in order to pass their exams. They can tell you with absolute confidence their various professors’ views as to the interpretations of biblical books. And when many of them get out into the real world of ministry, they can survive for years by using their class notes for sermon preparation and leading Bible studies. And it all sounds so good, so scholarly. And the people in the pews are buying it because it’s what they expected to hear all along, After all, that’s why they hired this young kid straight out of seminary—to maintain the status quo, to live up to their expectations.

But we can’t stop there. We have to ask the next question too. In a church like the one described above, what kind of Christians does this process turn out? It turns out a bunch of Christians who have an attitude of theological and biblical certitude. Because their leaders are so certain, so black-and-white in their teaching and theology, the congregation has the same attitude. Their mentality is summed up in the words of an 80’s Stryper song: “And we’re fighting all the sin/and the Good Book, it says we’ll win.” We know we’re gonna win in the end, so in the meantime, let’s all sit around and reassure each other how right we are about everything theological and biblical as we point out all the flaws in the world and everybody around us.

If I sound a little cynical, it’s because I am. The irony is, it took me about twelve years of hardship in ministry to come to the place where I finally realized that the old system was crumbling, as the worldview of modernism is being replaced by postmodernism. The more the old system of doing things passes away, the more the desire for theological certitude on the part of conservatives. But when people do this, two things happen: One, it tends to concretize interpretations and make them fixed, with no room for change or adaptation. And two, it means that in the meantime, culture has passed them by. There is little or no engagement of the culture because they are too busy shoring up their defenses to deal with what the world is actually doing. So at the end of the process, there will be a great looking castle standing there, but even before it was finished it was obsolete.