Tribal Theology

The Princeton Proposal (40-1) observes a shift in the basis and nature of division from the Reformation to the present. Initially, disputes “took the form of argumentative exegesis of Holy Scripture, in which the great Christian teachers and witnesses of the past were called to give testimony.”

As divisions unfolded, “actual dispute” waned and in its place came a parody of dispute that was more a “ritual revalidation of division.” Theological scholarship and instruction got caught up in this process, taking “the form of a monological presentation of the distinctive doctrines and practices of a particular community.” 

Disputes were not over Scripture. Scripture and tradition were brought in “as the body of evidence to which theology appeals to validate the strengths of a particular community.” Nineteenth and twentieth-century confessional theology appealed to “the phenomenology of a community’s form of life and teaching, to the ethos discerned in the community’s distinctive history.”

The question became not so much a question of truth – whether something was “faithful to the divine revelation” – but whether it was authentically Catholic, Evangelical, Protestant, Orthodox.

The authors note that “this shift from truth to identity reflects a kind of tribalization of Christian communities, an implicit redefinition of the separated churches as quasi-ethnic groups, each with its unique history and outlook, its distinctive traditions, mores, and folkways.” 

Not only does hit destroy the unity for which Jesus prayed, but it leaves the church vulnerable to cultural forces. In some places, tribal Christianity has fed nationalist fervor, but “in North America it more often has played into the hands of the consumerist dynamics of modern liberal society.” Some accommodate to the Zeitgeist and some resist, but in either case, identity markers are more critical than the question of truth. 

Christianity, proclaimed as the end of tribalism, has been coopted into another form of tribalism.