:: in.a.mirror.dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

I can’t remember the day this happened exactly, but while in seminary I learned that my Christian faith came from “somewhere.” I didn’t just read the Bible and become an Evangelical Christian in a conservative Baptist church. I had entered a tradition, a tradition that had a history, that held certain beliefs in response to certain theological debates and events. I was adopting a theology that has been forming over a long stretch of time.

This was jarring for me. I’d always thought that my beliefs came straight from the Bible, but over time I began to see that matters were a bit more complex than that. I read the Bible the way I did because of my context and my place in church history, even if I was one of many sincere Christians trying to simply interpret and apply the Bible. This doesn’t mean that my tradition was unbiblical or invalid, only that all traditions come from somewhere and are responding to something from the past.

In an interview at The Ooze, Jeannine Brown comments, “You think a person is just saying, Hey that’s the Bible, but it’s a particular tradition saying, We just believe what the Bible says. They are unconsciously being shaped by a tradition that has full sway over how they think and act. We all have traditions that inform how and what we believe.”

Dealing with this realization that we bring our own baggage to scripture, and to theology in general, is a big part of what I tried to accomplish in my book Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life. It is crucial for readers to understand that talking about the ways context and Christian tradition influence our theology is not the same thing as simply letting our context or traditions tell us what to believe.

We need to be aware of these traditions and interact with them, always looking at the ways they shape us. It is in this awareness that we can study scripture and come to our own conclusions that may or may not fall in line with what’s been passed down to us.