How Theology Killed My Faith

First off, I'd like to apologize for yesterday's somewhat craptastic post. I think it's about as exciting as, well, sitting through a Lutheran service on Setting II. But it does give some background for the information in this post, which I think will be a bit more interesting.

Texas Lutheran requires all its students to take two theology classes. There's an introductory course that everyone has to take, and after that you have your pick of advanced classes. I had put off the intro course because I had this terrible fear of it being a kind of Sunday school for college credit, even though friends assured me that was not the case.

I finally got around to the intro class my junior year. It certainly wasn't Sunday school! We read books like Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson and Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich. Robinson said that instead of thinking of God as "up there" or "out there," we should think of God simply as love. Tillich said that faith was whatever our "Ultimate Concern" was and that God is "the ground of our being." Reading books like these illuminated the theological and intellectual canyon between clergy and laity in most denominations. Apparently Robinson's and Tillich's ideas were much less controversial among theologians and pastors than they were among ordinary members.

At first I was furious. I felt like these ideas had been kept from me as if I'd be too dense to understand them. And then I started pondering the implications of these ideas and got really furious. I thought, "Well, if it's all just metaphor and poetry, why bother?" Now I just think the Hindus beat these guys to that approach by a few thousand years.

I actually have more to say on this topic, but the point I want to make deserves its own post, which I'll probably put up sometime tomorrow.

Then Came the Lutherans

After my falling out with the Southern Baptists when I was in high school, I was invited by a friend to try out her church. Going in, my knowledge of Lutheranism was limited to what I'd heard about the Reformation in history classes, which wasn't a whole lot.

The liturgy threw me off completely. It took me months to get the hang of flipping back and forth between the liturgy and the hymns. Sometimes it felt like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books: "For Sundays during Pentecost, skip to page X. For Sundays during Advent, skip to page Y." I didn't even know what Advent (or Lent, for that matter) actually was until I started going to the Lutheran church. I knew they made Advent calendars for Christmas and that some people gave stuff up for Lent, but I'd always figured that was just something people did in other parts of the country, like sledding. I didn't fully get the ideas behind the structure of the Lutheran service until I had to study the structure of the Catholic Mass in a music history class a few years later. But eventually I was able to at least follow along capably.

I never really cared for the service (although Setting I of the Lutheran Book of Worship was at least less dreary than Setting II), but they were nice enough people, and there were punch and cookies after most services, not to mention real wine in Communion! For those who don't know, Southern Baptists use grape juice, and they don't call it Communion--they call it "The Lord's Supper." So I was happy enough there, and I enjoyed the community service stuff I got to do with the Luther League.

While I only attended that church for a little over a year, that happened to overlap with my taking the SAT's, and in the demographic info, I checked "Lutheran" as my religious preference, which turned out to be pivotal. Shortly after the SAT's, I had a falling out with my Lutheran friend and figured it would be best if I stopped going to that church. However, I received a letter just before the start of my senior year from Texas Lutheran College (now Texas Lutheran University). It began something like, "We thought you might be interested in the benefits of a Lutheran education."

"Um, not really," I remember thinking.

However, the letter went on to say that because of my GPA and test scores, they'd give me $2000 off the top, which quickly turned "Not really" into "Keep talking." The short version: they were the highest bidder, so that's where I ended up after high school. That's when things really got interesting.

For next time: details about my time at TLU, and the effects of studying theology.