The value of theological competition

The primary objection to the Protestant rule of faith is that it leads to divergence rather than convergence. I’ve dealt with this objection from many different angles. Now I wish to approach it from one more angle.

Human beings are prone to over refinement. You know the old adage that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

By “over refinement” I mean taking things to a logical extreme, or increasing degrees of specialization and precision. By itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Let’s take some examples. Take the game of golf. It started out as a pastime. A pleasant way to kill time.

However, men also have a competitive streak, so what began as an idle recreation became a professional sport. At that point it becomes important to design the perfect golf club, to perfect the optimal grip, to perfect the optimal swing, and so on.

Increasing resources are diverted and devoted to mastering the fine art of hitting a rubber ball into a hole in the ground. Cutting edge technology is deployed to design the most aerodynamic golf ball (e.g. hexagonal dimpled balls) or the most efficient putters and drivers.

Like any sport, golf also has a set of rules. Rules for keeping score as well as regulations governing the design specifications of a legal golf ball. There are golfing magazines and golf instructors.

I’m not venturing a value judgment on these developments. That would take it too seriously. It’s just a game.

There’s no intrinsic value in hitting a rubber ball into a hole in the ground. The whole exercise is inherently and patently artificial. But anything human beings do, however trivial or arbitrary, they tend to improve on over time—learning to do it better and better.

Likewise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking things to a logical extreme. Whether it’s good or bad largely depends on the veracity of the operating premise.

I used the example of golf, but I could illustrate the same point with watches or cars. These are essentially utilitarian inventions, but as with just about any other human invention, the impulse towards over refinement leads the designer to extend and fine-tune his technology to wholly gratuitous levels of precision or performance. Does any one really need a Rolex? A dime store Timex will get the job done.

But that misses the point. The appeal of a Rolex is that it’s so blatantly gratuitous.

Same thing with a Ferrari. There’s a sense in which the faster you can make a car go, the less useful it is as a car—since speed has become an end in itself, at the expense of storage capacity. But, of course, folks don’t buy a Ferrari to buy groceries.

Once again, I’ve not venturing a value-judgment on any of this, but merely illustrating a larger point. For the same psychology takes root in theology.

A theological tradition, if allowed to develop internally in cultural isolation, is apt to become overly refined. It becomes quirky and absurd.

The examples are almost endless. You end up with quaint, legalistic dress codes which were originally well-intentioned, but have hardened into dogma.

You end up with violent schisms over the one true way to pronounced the name of Jesus or make the sign of the cross.

You end up with communion tokens.

You end up with gilded shrines encasing the finger bone of a legendary saint.

The altar call becomes the central sacrament in fundamentalism. The altar call is to fundamentalism what the Mass is to Catholicism.

I could multiply examples, and my examples would reflect my own theological bias. But I say all that to make this point: theological competition is healthy, because theological competition has a pruning effect on theological eccentricities.

When a particular tradition enjoys an unchallenged monopoly, it becomes inbred and overbred—like a hairless dog the size of a kitten. Isolated theological traditions either go from good to bad or bad to worse. It’s only a matter of time before rite makes right.

But competition purifies the competition. When one tradition shines a spotlight on a rival tradition, that makes it more difficult for an idiosyncrasy or historical accident to graduate into an article of faith.

By itself, competition doesn’t prevent theological quirks and curiosities from mutating into pious dogmas, but it exposes them for what they are, and offers an escape route for those who have the ears to hear.

Is there too much theological diversity in Christendom? Undoubtedly. But I’d much rather have a healthy dose of theological competition than allow a doctrinal or ecclesiastical monopoly to go unchecked until it perfects a false premise or optimizes a primitive corruption—leaving us fettered and shackled in a dungeon of dogmatic decadence.