Churches Without Chests is the personal blog of David de Bruyn, as the author indicates on his “About” page. De Bruyn is a South African Bible teacher who has hosted a weekly radio program called Bible Perspective for more than twenty years while pastoring New Covenant Baptist Church in Johannesburg, though he is not its only Bible teacher, as the “Sermons” section of the church’s website attests. I read de Bruyn regularly, and have even combed through his blog archives, which are extensive. It’s solid ministry, and I appreciate his thoughtfulness and passion for the Word.
Lately, he’s been writing about spiritual stagnation.
A Quilt-Work of Competing Voices
The series so far is a four-parter made up of fictional letters written to what are probably imaginary believers described realistically enough for their problems to sound achingly familiar. Each letter isolates a potential cause of spiritual stagnation as perceived by a caring shepherd observing patterns in the lives of members of his flock. So far, he has dealt with “Over the Next Hill Christianity”, “Passive Rebellion” and “Conscientious Defensiveness”. In part four, he deals with what he calls “Hodgepodge Theology”. Here, of course, is where I get off the bus, or else the title of this post would be “Recommend-a-blog (33)”, which was all about David’s excellent series of letters to an agnostic.
David describes hodgepodge theology as follows:
“I don’t mean that your theology is erroneous, or even immature. I mean that your theology is an eclectic mix, a cobbled-together mishmash of your own making, a quilt-work of competing voices, stitched and held together only by your own mind.”
At the surface level at least, David seems to have put his finger on a genuine problem.
The Monster Mash
I recall reading about a fellow who had mashed together Judaism, Islam and Christianity into a personal belief system. The differences between these three views of God, Christ, the mechanics of salvation and so on are so massive that he could only do so by picking his favorite bits from each religion almost at random while ignoring inherent contradictions in his new system so glaring they would be evident to a devout six-year-old. It struck me that it was impossible for anything so personal and eclectic to point in the direction of truth. It reminds me of Israel’s years under the rule of judges, when everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Some terrible stories come out of that period.
David’s solution to such a mishmash is “a stable, logical, and internally consistent system of Christian doctrines, with a unifying principle”, which the stagnant believer might be fortunate enough to find emanating from his own local church’s statement of faith and practice. Genuine theological positions, de Bruyn writes, come through “months and years of absorbing the theological stance of a church”, and yes, he says, that requires trust. By limiting the number of different teachers he listens to, David thinks his stagnant charge may find his faith has greater coherence.
To David’s credit, he’s not urging blind obedience or cultic loyalty to his own teaching, but rather finding a theological web with a center and a perimeter, something that doesn’t come from clicking on random YouTube sermons. If that web turns out to be the theological product of a different set of Christian minds in another church or denomination, that’s just fine.
Living in Hodgepodge Lodge
Still, given de Bruyn’s definition, I’m not so sure hodgepodge theology is such a bad thing. Adopting an existing theological system seems to me to have the potential to cause more problems than it solves, and developing one’s own theological system from scratch takes a long, long time, often decades, leaving the young believer’s big picture view of the faith less than perfectly complete. Moreover, I’m not sure an ad hoc system of beliefs causes spiritual stagnation. I rather think it’s the opposite problem: too much novelty. Hodgepodge theologians tend to be overly excitable rather than stagnant, because they are always finding some new thing they enjoy.
Pre-packaged theological systems are a necessary evil for Christians who do not have the intellectual chops or developed character qualities to make investigation of the word of God a regular feature of their daily Christian lives, but they are far from the ideal way to learn about the word of God.
The Reformed theological package, for example, generally (but not always) includes determinism, a non-dispensational view of scripture, and an Amillennial or Post-Millennial view of Bible prophecy. While these certainly form a theological web with a center and a perimeter, to the extent that any of these are erroneous views of scripture, the Christian who holds to only one or two of these beliefs is in a better position to understand his Bible accurately than the one who holds to all three. The latter position is more internally consistent, to be sure. It’s also, in my view at least, consistently wrong. A quilt-work of competing voices is preferable to being sincerely and coherently mistaken at every turn.
Trusting and Verifying
Another problem with theological packages is that even their adherents do not practice them consistently. Most Calvinists evangelize, which doesn’t follow logically from a deterministic perspective, but is certainly preferable to not doing so. Likewise, when Christians who believe the Lord wants voluntary rather than mechanistic compliance with his will talk about why the Lord allowed this or that human choice to have actual consequences in the world rather than overruling it, they are lapsing inadvertently into Calvinistic determinism. I think we would all agree that when some subset of our views of scripture is incorrect, we are better off not letting it dictate our practice or influence our thought life.
A third problem with letting trust guide you into a single, coherent truth package is that virtually every group of Christians everywhere is wrong about something, or at very least has an incomplete picture of the truth. Limiting your sources to a single teacher or group of teachers all but guarantees you will adopt their errors rather than making your own (though you may well do both by misunderstanding them). Picking and choosing elements from diverse theological packages has its dangers, but a view of scripture that is 100% faithful and orthodox is going to have to diverge from all internally consistent systems with a unifying principle wherever their proponents have made an incorrect fundamental assumption. There is just no way around that. A better principle is trust but verify, as the Jews in Berea did. Verifying sometimes takes a while.
Saved in an Echo Chamber
Seemingly-coherent theological packages have an unfortunate but very natural way of self-reinforcing. The churches and denominations that teach them become echo chambers. In 2020’s Election and Predestination, Peter Kerr describes how his own views were formed. Misplaced trust in the wisdom of his more mature fellow Christians was a major contributor:
“When I first encountered the concept of election and predestination as a young convert, I naturally consulted with the Christian leaders in my circle and accepted the explanations and definitions they supplied. As a result, their view simply became my view, and it was reinforced by the books I was reading and the sermons I was hearing at that time. Whenever I came across these words in the Bible, I automatically applied the definitions I had learned.”
Whatever you may think of Peter’s journey, it involved a great deal of personal Bible study and led him not only to eventually reject the views of his youth, but also to write and teach about what he had discovered. But it was only by stepping outside the theological system into the pure milk of the Word that he ever had opportunity to reevaluate his theology at all.
Conscience and Discernment
Finally, there is the matter of conscience. In order to walk rightly before God, every choice one makes — even the incorrect ones — needs to leave the conscience at ease. Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. I estimate it is preferable to have a theological package assembled from multiple sources about which one is at peace than a single-source system that appears superficially coherent but contains aspects that trouble one’s conscience. I once asked a supersessionist how he felt about having to throw out Ezekiel 36-48 and Romans 11 because of his systematic theology. He conceded it makes him very, very uncomfortable. That’s the sort of consistency and coherence that are not worth having.
Discernment doesn’t come from trusting the theological package of your local church, however wonderful it may be. Discernment comes from listening to all sorts of competing voices and learning to distinguish truth from error by comparing scripture with scripture.
If that leads to hodgepodge theology in the short term, it will not in the long term.
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