I used to have a recurring dream. In it, the language of worship and the language of life are reversed. Outside of Sunday service, everyone everywhere speaks exclusively in religious language. The only time “normal” speech occurs is at Sunday “worship,” when we all revert to mundane, secular speech.
The sermon, for example, is largely about the weather.
I think this dream sprung from a sublimated place of my psyche that has long been discomfited by the strangely positivist nature of most religious speech. That is to say, a lot of religious speech appears to me to be based on unfounded or difficult to establish claims, and can be struck down with just a whisper of breath… like a house of cards.
But before we go too far down the road analyzing religious positivism, let’s look at the current situation, the actual use of religious language in our lives.
Overall the data we have on the topic indicates most people, children and adults, are incredibly inarticulate about their religious beliefs, and most are virtually unable to offer any serious theological understanding1 The biggest studies we have indicate that regardless of our faith tradition, we are unlikely to be as articulate about it as we are about many other things, from climate change to the Star Wars universe.
This is true across faiths in America and not uniquely true just of Christians.
Anecdotally, I experience this to be true both in my own life and in our shared lives together. Even professional religious speakers like myself struggle with our facility for religious speech in contexts of a more secular nature. We may, for example, lead the liturgy and preach comfortably, but will be less facile with the language if asked a question by our own children about our faith commitments.
However, in this same world and at the same time, we also have in existence cascading levels of religious speech available to us—if we so desire—that provide language of faith almost esoteric in their complexity and confidence. That is to say, although we may struggle to state the basics of the faith if suddenly interviewed on the street corner, it’s also true that any one of us can pull up a copy of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatic or the Lutheran Confessions and point to a passage and state, “This is what we believe.”
It’s just we rarely do that.2
All of this brings me round to my own increasing discomfiture with religious language. My story is likely typical: I was first exposed to formal theological modes of inquiry while in college and seminary. I fell in love with this language. On some levels I still do love it. I absolutely cherish the time I get to spend with crisp, well-written reflections on the doctrine of the Trinity, for example. I’ll happily cozy up with a volume of Colin Gunton or Robert Jensen or Katherine Sonderegger any day of the week.
I’ve also had a lot of practice in the language of liturgy. You can ask me to pray before meals (I’m a professional pray-er, after all!) and I’ve memorized enough hymns and chants that in almost any context, I can recite or sing for you the content of the faith.
I post and share beautiful prayers from the prayer book in social media, and in my own private devotional life I have a variety of modes, from direct petition to the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, to order my religious language.
But all of this being said, over the last decade or so I’ve noticed my passion for directly or overtly religious language waning. I subscribe to hardly any academic religious journals anymore3, and I read much less theology than in the past. I still read some (and even review those volumes for this blog and other places), but I have become especially averse to any parts of religious language that appear, on my read, to build themselves up on top of each other precariously (like a house of cards).
Another way of saying this: I’m more and more committed to only doing theology that has practical implications, that helps me love my neighbor better, in particular the kinds of neighbors Jesus encouraged us to love. I’m less likely to use theological language to make claims about things difficult to actually know (like the guarantee of life after death or other such claims) unless even those doctrinal claims help us love our neighbors better.
As a result, I’ve become particularly attracted in the past couple of years to theologians and other writers who both use language to confess the faith while concomitantly meditating on the limits of such language. My favorite lately is Dorothee Soelle4, whose work situates itself post-Holocaust and in the context of death of God theology; and of course there was/is the religionless Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Perhaps what I’m discovering is that although I used to have a kind of judgmental response to the results of the study published in Soul Searching, that Americans lack articulacy about their faith, more and more I wonder if they/we have inadvertently practiced (sociologically speaking, that is) a kind of theological reticence with which I agree.
There’s that famous line from Wittgenstein’s philosophy: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
Or more recently in season 3 of the Mandalorian: “One does not speak unless one knows.”
Perhaps our lack of articulacy isn’t ignorance but an indication of wisdom around what we truly just don’t know.
Should we consider Christianity to be primarily a set of (articulable) beliefs?
A lot of theology, which is the language of Christianity, begins from this premise, that indeed we can predicate our confession, our ways of thinking, on sets of beliefs that order themselves into coherent patterns of thought that can be articulated in language.
Although some of these beliefs can be confirmed based on an observable world (you can go and see the Jerusalem mentioned in Scripture), others when asserted must be received wholly through our trusting the testimony of those who confess them (“Jesus rose from the dead”, or “God made everything that exists”). [Perhaps a third category would be statements like “Jesus is Lord” which include both belief and allegiance]
I’m increasingly of the persuasion that one corrective for this in modern religious thought is to move Christianity more toward being simply a set of practices.
Setting aside at least for the moment that the middle way would be assert that beliefs/doctrines inform practice and vice-versa, I’d like to suggest that we have a deep-seated problem in our culture of over-emphasizing belief even while we both a) don’t know as much as we think, and b) believe all kinds of things that are positivist assertions and just so vacuous and untenable when examined.
In this situation, which I think is the actual situation, I’m especially intrigued by the way in which, in the absence of some kinds of legitimate language to attest to our beliefs, we have the problem (if it is a problem) that forms of secular discourse find their way into our religious spaces and replace out-moded doctrinal assertions with new sets of beliefs.
For example, Christian theology on the Left (roughly speaking, what we might call progressive theology) has adopted a moral analysis it shares with the Left, and a lot of what counts as theology today joins such critical theoretical work.
I’m uncertain whether there’s anything particularly wrong with this, although if I compare it to the discourse on the Right, which has replaced any kind of historical theological commitments with crass Christian nationalism, I begin to think I see what Karl Barth saw in his concerns with the rise of what (at the time) was called “liberal” theology.
That is to say, if you don’t know what you believe, you’ll fall for anything.
However, this argument from/against reticence only goes so far. In fact, it’s a paradox. One can not know what one believes for good or bad reasons, even if in both cases one doesn’t know what one believes.
I think what I would argue for at a very pragmatic level would be a more regular dialectic between belief and practice (that is, evaluate current practices over-against beliefs, and vice versa), all with a sub-thesis that Christianity is and should be more aligned with practice than belief.
I tend to operate as a Christian and as pastor with a fairly hardcore sense of “I don’t really care what you believe but I see what you do or don’t do.” All the while living the paradox that I have a rather refined and developed sense of belief in spite of “not caring what you believe.”
Maybe I could say that I strive to have a theologically refined and resonant reason to operate largely a-theologically. Like Wittgenstein’s ladder, I see theology as (sometimes) the way to get to the place where the real work begins.
https://youthandreligion.nd.edu/announcements/soul-searching-the-religious-and-spiritual-lives-of-american-teenagers/
Returning to the Youth and Religion study published in Soul Searching, remarkably when youth or adults are asked what they believe, almost never do they simply recite the Apostles’ Creed, even though they may have memorized it.
A decade ago I subscribe to several, including The Scottish Journal of Theology, just to name one.
Another favorite is the Alan Ecclestone, who as a priest in the UK was famously averse to most theology and preferred to study literature and secular works. I’ve hosted a podcast about him here: