No, the “not” is not a misspelling. The “not” I am referring to is the one that reviewers kept trying to put into my manuscript.

I wrote this manuscript for a course I was teaching, and then decided that I might try to get it published. So I thought I would send it to a few reviewers to get feedback. The manuscript included the phrase, “Theology is an exact science.” Two reviewers thought this was a typo, that I really meant, “Theology is not an exact science,” and inserted “not” for me.

I meant what I had written. Theology is an exact science. God is a God of precision in every aspect of His universe, and especially in His Word. It is easy to misunderstand precision as meaning rigid and one-dimensional. I hope to discuss more on the nature of precision in future posts. Nonetheless, God knows precisely what He is doing and calls us to think His thoughts after Him.

The response of the reviewers tells us a lot about the general attitude among Christians today. Most contemporary evangelicals think that someone could not possibly be saying that theology is an exact science.

This has been a prevalent attitude across the past several decades, during which evangelicals have adopted many concepts that would not pass theological scrutiny of scientific precision. We have discussed some of these forced concepts on this blog on a fairly regular basis, e.g. self-esteem, unconditional acceptance, viewing any restriction short of murder as legalistic, etc. As with a part in a car or watch, a small error can lead to much distortion and suffering.

The bad news is that evangelicals are getting self-consciously worse about approaching theology unscientifically. This embracing of the imprecise seems to be one of the hallmarks of the emerging (or emergent) church movement that seems to be gaining steam among evangelicals daily.

No one seems to know exactly what that movement is about. The postmodern orientation that spawned it resists definition. Ask ten postmodernists what postmodernism is and you get eleven different opinions. They like it that way. If you could define it, it wouldn’t be postmodern. The emergent church movement seems equally as illusive.

However, one component that seems clear is its reaction to what it sees as modernist theology, which sought to reduce theology to a precise system. No one can seem to explain (at least in an understandable way) how this emergent approach to theology that resists precision and systematization differs from the relativism we find in secular postmodernism.

Of course, such a system is very comfortable. The absence of systematic truth leaves the individual freedom to believe and to do his own thing.

The fact is that all of the dominant concepts that have influenced our culture (evangelical and otherwise) across the past several decades reflect the existentialism of the 1960’s. If truth is relative, then the individual has the prerogative to establish truth for himself and do his own thing. He becomes the god in his personal universe, asserting the right to feel good about himself and be accepted by others regardless of how he lives.

This is not to say that the emergent church movement does not have some valid emphases. It does. However, as noted above, even a small amount of error can be very destructive. This movement is opening the door to major theological corruption.

The emergent church movement is moving us away from an evangelical reformation, moving us toward rootlessness at a time when we need to be rooted and grounded. Part of the solution is to “un-not” the view that theology is not an exact science.