The thought occurred to me last night that much of the theological developments over the last many centuries, particularly during and post-mediaeval times stem from personal insecurities. Ludwig Feuerbach famously made the observation that ‘theology is anthropology,’ that it is the self’s projection of its self-perceived notion of virtuousness and greatness. Here’s an anonymous description taken from an anonymous source: “Feuerbach claimed that our conceptions of “god” are always just projections of our own values. God fulfills our need to objectify our virtues, and embodies our values. Thus the essence of religion is human nature, and our Gods tell us about ourselves…”theology as anthropology”. Barth, took Feuerbach’s critique to heart, and I think he was right to do so. And this is probably what prompted my seemingly random thinking about the basis of theological motivation and development stemming from personal insecurities (of the theologians et al). Take this as my psycho-theological analysis.
Human interactions, inter-personal dynamics in societas writ large, outwith the Holy Spirit’s intervening and re-creating work moment by moment, can only be based upon a person’s insecurity coram Deo. People, by theo-biblical definition are born into a functionally abstract relationship towards God; God, the living ground and inner-reality of all humanity, and all other existences. If humanity, apart from subjective entrance into the new creation of God in Christ, are fragmented, abstract shadows vis-a-vis God, they will necessarily operate in daily life from a place of insecurity; this will implicate all endeavors, including theological developments. Someone might say, yeah, but Bobby, most people who do Christian theology do so from an intentional mode of being pro-fessionally Christian, and so would not suffer from this sort of abstract standing before God. I would respond: the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians exhorts the church there, particularly in chapters 1—4, to stop operating with and from the wisdom of the world; to cease operating as if the wisdom of the cross is foolish and weak. He was chiding self-professing Christians, genuine Christians even, to stop thinking from the wisdom-systems they had been inculcated into by fleshy birth. He challenged them to be theologians of the cross, rather than being theologians of glory as that was signified by their adoption of the sophia present in the world writ large; a wisdom built upon the self-projection of an insecure and un-enlivened humanity. In other words, it is highly possible, even probable, for Christians even, to fall prey to wisdom-systems, intellectual-centers that are ultimately at odds with the revealed and apocalyptic reality of the Gospel of God in Jesus Christ. These systems, when adopted and synthesized by Christians, end up distorting, at best, the way the Christian views and thus presents and proclaims God to themselves, and thus to others.
For my money, the aforementioned type of theology—the type based in insecurity and wisdom-systems of this world—is what we get when we adopt what historically has been identified as the via negativa or negative way of doing theology. We see this way most prominently demonstrated in the theology of someone like Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas famously synthesized Aristotle’s metaphysics into his Christian theology, thus producing a theology focused on a God known by a discursive speculative reasoning process from effect to cause within a tightly bound cause-effect chain-of-being hierarchy from below to above. I take this theological methodology, as it is principially formed by adoption of pagan philosophy, to be based in a human insecurity before the triune and living God. As such it suffers from a necessarily faulty starting point in regard to providing capacity to rightly think God. Even so, it has become so accreted in the Church’s Great Tradition, it has become so elevated as the pinnacle of the ‘orthodox’ way, that to point out what should be a simple biblical truth, tends to make the one pointing this out to be considered potentially heretical, at best, heterodox. This is usually how the insecure operate though, so such labeling would be consonant with their mode of function as the so-called orthodox.