doctrinal whoring

By the time you get to the end of this you may think my use of the term "whoring" is misplaced. But, I do not think those who latch onto specific doctrinal formulations as the only media for God's revelation do so out of principle. I think that they do so out of an often tacit compromise for the social controls established by the group with which they identify their self. It becomes not a matter of principle governed by personal conscience, but a socially reinforced fusion of belief and a specific group defined by that belief.

Assertions often fly suggesting ideas that liberalism (which is a term used loosely to say, not my understanding of orthodoxy governed in my religious group) will lead to a "slow suicide" for Christianity. If by suicide, one means change then the answer is yes, it will. After all, if God forbid one changes and assumes a different theological position, the old self is gone but behold, a new person has arrived. However, it comes off as an assertion suggestive of "the death of God" or "secularization" (again very loosely used).

There is really no evidence that liberalism equals a "slow suicide" for Christianity. Liberalism in the late 19th century and in the 1930's were quite potent and yet attendance and belief in God are quite consistent in longitudinal trends. The liberalism equals secularization thesis proves false. So to anyone, I strongly suggest abandoning the assertion.

To also suggest that the development of doctrine is not a socially conditioned animal is a fantastically selective view of history that latches onto one historical saga at the expense of everything else. Humans construct doctrine as a social object otherwise it would be just a tad more consistent would it not? Doctrine is a cultural artifact because humans construct it as a structure to legitimate true and false statements about God, homosexuality, the death penalty, abortion, the atonement, the sacraments, etc. Moreover, doctrine is a source for religious groups to levy social control over their own membership and to exclude others. Again, this is largely axiomatic in the sociology of religion. Unless you would rather reject all of that knowledge as something "worldly" which kind of just proves the point.

Once more, Irenaus did not see penal substitutionary atonement (aka PSA – again, the idea that God has to send his son to die in order to satisfy God's own immutable law of death as a consequence of sin) and it is not something widely accepted in Eastern Orthodox circles and has never really been. Calvin, by the way, relied on a lot of patristic material in order to re-establish the lineage of true teaching as the authority. So were they all magically wrong when Anselm codified the PSA theory in the form we have it today?

The problem is that this is ideology first, evidence second. When one's doctrinal commitments become so rooted in ideology rather than evidence, I call that doctrinal whoring. It's putting reified social ideas created by people, in front of a God who continually judges our ideas incorrect and tentative no matter how right we think they are. Before you say "that's postmodernist" it's really not. It's a fully modernist notion of critical realism for which we can thank American pragmatists and group of fellows in Frankfurt. But if you are reading this and think that you have had the fullness of the Truth of God revealed to you in a specific doctrine, maybe I should start listening to you rather than attend to the God who might be telling the church something different than the Truth you believe your system to mediate, and apparently with infallible authority?

Related posts:

1. sociology and religion, what a pair