So You've Decided to Have Awful Theology

Folks, isn’t it time a Christian wrote about theology?

For over one hundred years, the Church has debated theology. Let’s quickly settle the issue, by answering the important questions: what is it, and why does yours suck so bad?

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Let’s look at the word itself. First of all, theology is an American word, so we already know what it means, but let’s dig deeper. There’s an “o” in the middle, so we know that it also translates to something in Greek. Theo means something about God, and -ology means the study of things, so we can know that theology basically means the study of theology, which is where the word is its own definition, which is called autoerotic.

To put it in laid man’s terms, theology is where you read what the Bible says but you want to do something different, so you have to make an argument. Most theology is bad, including yours. Especially yours. Is this your fault? Of course it’s not. One thing I am always telling the restoration committee is “why would I take responsibility for this, when God has put so many other people around me?”

There are many reasons that Christians have awful theology. The most likely scenario is that you’re just not very smart.

The good news is that God can use flawed Christians. Let’s go to the Greek: the disciple Paul went to the widow’s house and asked for some food, except she was running out of oil, and Paul was like “I just want a sandwich, why do I care how much oil you have, but whatever, let’s do a miracle,” so he made oil come out of the lady’s pot until it filled up all the clay jars that the she could find. There was so much oil that it looked like a flood, and then some Christian guys made a song about it, and Paul named their band Jars of Clay, but they were only allowed to play acoustic guitars in the beginning, to show that God could use even the weak instruments to do stuff. Also, they had a bunch of strings on their album. It was a thing.

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Probably the biggest benefit to having bad theology is all the extra sins you get to do. And it doesn’t matter if you are conservative or liberal: when I was a kid, people in my church told me that music with drums was sinful, because the devil lived in the beat. And even though there was an inspirational Christian radio station that played hymns and Wintley Phipps songs, sometimes they would sneak in a Steven Curtis Chapman song that had some light percussion, this was back when he had a mullet and was trying to be James Taylor. So I got to sin, just by listening to 90.1 WOCG in my room while I did Saxon Math. And then a lot of the kids who grew up like that said “this is trauma,” and they decided to not have any rules at all for their kids, and they bought them beer and condoms when they were 16 and the kids got to do a whole bunch of sins, until it made the kids sick and they said “this is trauma,” and they decided to rebel against their parents by becoming Republicans and the whole cycle started over.

So, should a person with bad theology try to change? No, this is very dangerous. Just like the homeschoolers careening back and forth from fundamentalism to deconstruction and back again, you are probably not smart enough to change worldviews. The wise thing to do is to practice “buffet theology,” which is a term that means certain things. I think it means that you are hungry for more theology 20 minutes later, but that might only be for Chinese theology. If that statement is offensive, I will tell the restoration committee that I was just trying to be real, which is also an example of autoerotic.

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