August 30, 2026

DOLLYOLOGY (profanity alert):

Dolly’s theology was love (Brandon Ambrosino, August 28, 2026, Christian Century)

There’s a certain kind of Christian for whom faith begins with an exam (and doesn’t grow much beyond that). Their salvation depends on getting theological answers correct: Is the Son co-eternal with the Father? Does God’s knowledge of the future jeopardize human’s free will? Are the original copies of Scripture free from error?

But there are Christians who are not that concerned about these questions and nevertheless have decided to follow Jesus. Christians like, you know, the first generations of Jesus’s followers. To them, following Jesus meant trusting the God he trusted, meant continuing his ministry to the sick and the poor, meant never giving their complete allegiance to an earthly ruler, meant hoping for God’s future. I think this is the kind of Christian Dolly was. It’s the kind of person Jesus was—the kind of person he calls his followers to become.

I’m a theologian. I’m paid to overthink nebulous, inside-baseball theological ideas, ones that most of Jesus’s followers haven’t heard about and probably wouldn’t ever care to discuss. I think theology is important. Theology is a gift to the church and the world the church is called to serve. But when I start to get bigheaded about my job, as if I’m part of an exclusive group that has been nominated by God to protect Christianity, I’m forced to remind myself that Jesus decided to build God’s kingdom with fishermen and sex workers, that he preferred to tell simple stories without opening a textbook, and that his God will not be bound by my ideas even when power-wielding, self-authorizing groups of educated people call them “orthodox” and “canonical.”

He eventually made His own theology rather easy to comprehend, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”