Why you shouldn’t get your theology from social media; particularly Twitter and Facebook. I have been continuously theoblogging since 2005 (at a variety of urls, this is my most steady); as such I have had all sorts of exposure, as I’m sure many of us have, to various Christian traditions outside of my own. This can result in persuading us away from what we once confessed as our own belief structure as Christians. For example: we might have grown up a straight low church evangelical who affirms a dispensational reading of the Bible with a non-liturgical frame for how we do church and thus think God. This in fact is my background, as I’m sure it is many of our backgrounds. Once we enter the fray of social media this background gets immediately thrown into relief. We come up against Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox, and other traditions that have a much deeper connection to the arc of the historical church than what we have grown up with as Free Church evangelicals. When exposed to such traditions we might sense a notion of novelty relative to our own understanding and experience of the Church. In fact we might become open to things we otherwise would have never entertained outwith this exposure.

What I want to suggest is that unless we are willing to do a deep dive into these various traditions, beyond the simple exposure we receive from social media, that it is best if we do not allow this exposure to cause us to question all that we have held dear before; that is in regard to the way we understand Church and doctrine. What I am suggesting is that if we are going to allow social media to cause us to question our own traditional backgrounds as Christians that we should do our due diligence, as far as pressing into these traditions, and see what in fact stands behind them. I have had this “temptation” myself many times. I have been tempted, for example, to become Orthodox and Presbyterian (of a certain ilk) because of my exposure to these traditions online. But when I pressed deeper into these traditions it become evidently clear that they are not in line with my own basic commitments as a Christian. Certainly, there are doctrinal contours in these traditions that I find amenable to my own Free Church traditional commitments, but that’s it; there is an amenability, but not space for a wholesale “conversion” to these traditions for me.

As I write this I’m not even sure this is a real issue for others, but it has been one for me; and I can’t imagine that I’m alone in this sort of “temptation” to move into other Christian traditions from my own. Yet this begs an important question: what in fact defines my Christian tradition? For me, I am largely baptistic in orientation. This means that I believe in the autonomy of the local church under the authority of the Word of God; that I affirm believer’s baptism; that I am low church in regard to following liturgy and the Christian calendar; that my heritage is rooted in the Reformation side of the Protestant Reformation, with inklings toward the Radical Reformation (but not in lock-step with that movement). This is why, for me, Karl Barth has been such a cornerstone for theological development. He offers a narratival theology that seeks, in principle, to find its theological zest in the Bible’s reality in Jesus Christ. He is okay with challenging the so called Great Tradition of the catholic Church when Scripture seems at odds with what this Great Trad seems to communicate (sometimes by implication only).

Full disclosure: I was turned onto Barth in seminary under the teaching of Paul Metzger. We spent a whole semester with Barth’s theology, and this had a lasting impact on me. It wasn’t till after I graduated seminary in 2003 that I began to take up and read Barth in earnest. It was at this point that I realized I had found someone who was deeply resonate with almost all of my prior Free Church theological commitments and predilections. I didn’t become “Barthianish” from my online exposure, instead that came from substantial time spent with Barth’s theology outside and prior to engagement on social media.

Maybe you can sense some contradiction in what I’m getting at. I seem to be saying that we shouldn’t get our theology from social media, and at the same time I also might seem to be saying that if we are exposed to a theological tradition that piques our interest online we should pursue that beyond any sort of superficiality that often attends the online game. Indeed, I am saying all of the above. We shouldn’t simply read our theology off of social media and at the same time I think it is possible to pursue, in depth, various traditions that we might have been alerted to by social media. I am simply saying that we need to be zealous and rigorous in the way we approach the theological when interacting online. We need to be steadfast in our commitment to our prior theological tradition and background, and not simply throw it away for the sake of novelty.