Why Theology Thursdays Matter

As I am still traveling while typing this entry, I am going to depart from the typical Theology Thursday format and take a post to explain a bit more why I even care about Theology.

Up until this point, every Theology Thursday post has been in review and contemplation of Harvard Religion professor Harvey Cox’s Future of Faith. Here, though, I want to touch on the simple nature of Theology.

In short, Theology is one’s thoughts concerning God & the divine; the Metaphysical, if you will. Most commonly, the term is associated with religion and monotheism, but I suggest it goes beyond those bounds.

Even atheism is a theism, counter-intuitive as it may be. If monotheism is the theism of One, atheism is the theism of Naught. Likewise, thoughts absent of acknowledgement of the divine can effect one’s actions as much as thoughts permeated by such.

What you believe matters.

Though I subscribe to the Way of Christ, I tend to be a sympathizer of other religions. For sometime, I’ve been distantly intrigued by Buddhism and fellow Eastern religions, though my interaction with each has been minimal.

Only a few short weeks prior to my departure to India, I was speaking to a friend’s wife about her work in Thailand. Like myself, she traveled to the Asian country to interact with young girls trapped in the cycle of the Sex Trade.

She made one comment that struck me immediately:

“Here in the West, we often glamorize Eastern religions without realizing the oppressive impact they have on their culture.”

Within the doctrine of Reincarnation, she pointed out, being born a woman means that you’ve messed up in the past, and therefore unworthy to be a man. This mentality obviously oppresses women below the status of men, prevalent in many cultures worldwide, but especially evident throughout Asia. As inferiors, women are open to abuse and mistreatment deemed acceptable and simply their lot in this life.

It was not until then that I fully appreciated the equality presented in my belief structure. As one author of the Scriptures wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Obviously, I’m not proposing that everyone aligned within the Christian tradition has forever been free of prejudice. History clearly says otherwise. But that does not negate the presence of this mindset as core to its teachings.

As Karen Armstrong suggests in her work The History of God,

“In all three [Abrahamic] faiths, [God] has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo.”

When a society loses sight of a core teaching, when it changes even the smallest of beliefs, the resulting effects can have drastic impact on its culture.

In India, reincarnation surfaces in another way. American pop culture, in my experience, has long made light of the “Sacred Cows” of India. I first remember hearing the phrase while watching Saturday morning cartoons. In the Hindu religion, the cow is a holy animal and cannot be killed.

During my visit to India, I encountered these Sacred Cows first hand. Roaming near every street, cows commonly bring the chaos of India’s traffic to a halt. Not killing the Sacred Cow leads to not eating them either. It is not uncommon for a town of meager rations to keep a cow better fed than their children.

But there is an animal more detrimental to India’s food source than the cow; “a lesser-known and more sinister culprit [...] protected by religious belief — the rat” (Revolution in World Missions, 128). Because of, the doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma, as I understand it, the rat is viewed as a potential soul-recipient and therefore worthy of being preserved at all costs. This belief allows for the destruction of 20% of the food crop produced in India due to rats run rampant (ibid). One estimate puts the rat population at an average of 10 per household throughout the country.

Some within India, however, have changed their beliefs for the better. For example, Mypadu, the hut village we visited in Andrha Pradesh, set traps for the rats of their village and add it to their list of delicacies, which also includes cats and dogs. Though a portion of the town is Hindu, they reject the exaltation of the lowly rodents and use all of their available resources to keep their children fed. Their theology effects their actions.

In due course, I expect my Theology to effect mine. A contemporary trend is to say “Do away with the whole thing! We don’t need religion at all.” But as Cox points out in The Future of Faith, man’s pondering about, interaction with, and devotion to the Divine has been around as long as History, and it’s not going away.

Sure, the oppression of women and the exaltation of rodents is cultural, but it is Theological at its core. In the West, we are privileged enough to have a culture that offers a smorgasbord of Theological practicums at our disposal. The cultural-religious gluttony has led us to dabble — sometimes for the better, often for the worse. And our dabbling has caused us to downplay the Divine.

Yet, this does not make its significance less impacting on our, or any, culture. One politician said of his country, “India’s problems will never cease until her religion [and I add Theology] changes” (Revolution in World Missions, 128).

Why continue Theology Thursdays?

Because in their culture and in ours, What we believe matters.

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[Photo Credit: "Holy Cow" graciously stolen from Marissa Lorusso's Facebook Album "India 2009/2010". Follow Marissa on Twitter here.]