“CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY”, Richard Dawkins says, “is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content.” The fellow Oxford academic Alister McGrath issues a popular-level statement for the defence.
McGrath unpicks five objections to theology. On the one side sits Dawkins, denouncing it as vacuous nonsense. On the other sit a range of Christians, variously complaining that theology complicates faith, detracts from mission in the real world, is insufficiently biblical, or is a Western invention. The author engages each objection with characteristic lucidity.
His case for theology is that it provides a big picture or map for life and faith. In particular, theology offers wisdom (sense of purpose, antidote to superficiality), well-being (meaning and value, engaging deepest longings), and wonder (attentiveness to creation, sense of awe). McGrath cites theologians and novelists who shed light on the matter, with industrial quantities of C. S. Lewis.
Despite the book’s many positives, however, I finished it with a nagging sense that McGrath leaves unaddressed the most potent objection to theology in today’s culture.
Our age is acutely sensitive to spin and hypocrisy. Integrity and transparency are the qualities most prized in leaders. The professions least trusted by the public are politicians and advertisers. Fine words are widely seen as a mask for power-play, and many think that the real motive of the Church is to take people’s money or abuse children. By that reckoning, theology seems an exercise in smoke and mirrors. This is the Wizard of Oz objection: sonorous, godlike words are revealed as hollow or deceptive when the curtain is pulled back.
McGrath commends the theologian Karl Barth. But we now know that Barth had a decades-long affair with his personal assistant, who collaborated in his writing. She shared the family home for nearly 40 years, causing deep pain to Barth’s wife. What if we see a truer narrative written on the face of Nelly Barth than in six million words of the Church Dogmatics?
In other words, what is the point of theology — if our culture thinks that God-words are tools of manipulation, and if theologians turn out to be as inconsistent as the rest of us? If the 20th century’s most epic work of theology was written by means of a damaging affair, how can that not colour our reading? It would be good to hear McGrath’s response to these objections. Without it, this book feels incomplete, even a little sanitised.
The Revd Mike Starkey is a freelance writer and former Head of Church Growth for Manchester diocese.
What’s the Point of Theology? Wisdom, wellbeing and wonder
Alister McGrath
SPCK £10.99
(978-0-281-08689-4)
Church Times Bookshop £9.89