Of all the things that might be said here, I want to try to say two. It is these two things that will serve as the best introduction to whatever posts have "Christian theology" as their label.
The first is that theology is like geometry. Once you have established the axioms, the best you can say for the postulates is that they are consistent with the axioms. We now know that there can be many geometries, not just Euclid's. They are all "true" in the sense that the proofs follow from the premises. None of them is true without starting somewhere and no starting place is "valid." So saying, "I am a Euclidian"(theoretically) and "I am a Christian" (theologically) mean the same kinds of things. They mean, "You should judge this construction on whether the postulates really are required by the axioms."
Theology is also like geometry in being comprehensive. Nothing is left out of a theology. It defines things by inclusion and exclusion; only lack of imagination will fail to extend the implications to the furthest corner of existential puzzlement. Biblical studies, by contrast, are notoriously local. If scripture doesn't say, then it doesn't say: figure it out another way.
The second premise is that my theology is Christian. That means that Jesus Christ, in life and death, is the answer from which there is no appeal. It isn't like looking in a cheap dictionary for the meaning you want and, failing to find it, you go to a more expensive dictionary. Jesus Christ IS the expensive dictionary for me. I understand that other people use other dictionaries.
That means that for me, it isn't that hard to see whether a theology is Christian. Seeing whether other persons, actual people, are "Christian" is dauntingly difficult and is, in addition, not my job. I ask of a theological premise, "Was God's initiative toward us, the one that required of Jesus the last full measure of devotion, really necessary for dealing with the consequences of our rebellion against God?" In my view, all the answers that conclude it was necessary to have stepped over the threshhold into "Christian" theology. It is the theology that takes its clue from Christ.
I know that seems simple, but orthodoxy is cheap. No one is more orthodox that the devils, says the writer of the epistle of James. "They know to be true what you struggle merely to conceive," he says, "and they are terrified." So an orthodox Christian theology is really important to me, but being orthodox isn't the same thing as living the life a follower of Jesus ought to live. Living that life can cost everything. The orthodoxy itself doesn't cost all that much.
But the commitment to genuinely Christian theology explains why I get so riled by MTD and what I call "buffet table theology." I like using the initials MTD because it makes it sound more like a disease. The initials stand for "moralistic, therapeutic, deism," a designation invented by Christian Smith of Notre Dame to describe the contemporary theology of "Christian" young people. "Moralistic" means that the goal of a Christian life is being a nice person. "Therapeutic" means that being a Christian can add some nice things to your life, like not being so anxious, for instance. "Deism" means that God made the world and headed out on a coffee break from which he has not returned since the Enlightenment took firm hold. Each of those is seriously simplistic; together, they make me gag.
The second counter-example is properly called syncretism, but "buffet table theology" is so much more concrete. All the world's religions and philosophies, including atheism, are spread out on the table. You, the sovereign chooser--you are the one who needs to be pleased, after all, with your selections--mosey down the table and take a little substitutionary atonement here, a little reincarnation there, a little moral enlightenment, and finally some ancestor worship as a garnish. The buffet table is an outrage from the standpoint of the geometry metaphor, but here the great flaw is that can't work. Will the plate you assemble for yourself ever be more than a collection of the things you like? Will any collection of the things you like overwhelm the little world we live in and reach in to save us from ourselves. It's hard to see how that might be, isn't it?
