Orthodoxy Without Orthopraxy

Why Right Doctrine Isn’t Saving Us — and What Might

As a freshman in Bible college, I was eager to discuss what I was learning. Theology made my mind spin, and I was fortunate to have brothers in my dorm hall who shared the same hunger to wrestle with complex ideas.

We had one guy who didn’t always agree with us.

During those years, the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement was in full swing. Calvinism versus Arminianism dominated every late-night conversation. But here’s what I noticed about this friend: he never actually let the text shape his theology. Instead, he let his feelings about exclusion and punishment drive the interpretation. He couldn’t accept that God might choose some and pass over others. So rather than wrestling with what Scripture actually said, he worked backward — reshaping the text to fit his emotional comfort.

At the time, I thought he was the outlier.

Years later, I realized he was just doing openly what all of us do quietly.

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The Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the American church has more theological resources than any generation in history — more commentaries, more podcasts, more seminary access, more study Bibles — and yet we are not being noticeably transformed by any of it.

We have orthodoxy. We can articulate the doctrines. Many of us could pass a systematic theology exam. But our lives look functionally identical to the culture around us — the same anxieties about money, the same reflexive tribalism, the same addiction to comfort, the same quiet compromises we’d rather not name. We have right belief without right practice. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy.

James saw this coming: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like” (James 1:22–24).

We look into the mirror of Scripture constantly. We write about what we see there. We argue about the mirror’s frame and its proper angle. Then we walk away unchanged.

Why?

Because somewhere along the way, we learned to use theology as a shield against transformation rather than a means of it. We spend more time debating and defending theological positions than we do actually being shaped by them. And often — more often than we’d like to admit — we’re not even defending what Scripture says. We’re defending what we’ve already decided we want it to say.

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Same Method, Different Directions

The examples cross every tribal line. Take churches, for example.

On one side, progressive churches have spent the last two decades reinterpreting Scripture’s sexual ethics. They begin with a cultural conviction — that affirming LGBTQ+ identity is morally necessary — and then work backward through the text. They reframe what Paul meant in Romans 1. They contextualize Leviticus as an irrelevant cultural artifact. They find theological language to justify what the surrounding culture has already decided is true. The text gets bent to fit the conclusion.

On the other side, conservative churches have baptized nationalism. They begin with a cultural conviction — that national strength, sovereignty, and greatness are ultimate goods — and then work backward through the text. They quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 as if it were addressed to America. They ignore the prophetic warnings about trusting in chariots and horses (Ps. 20:7), about the nations being “a drop from a bucket” before the Lord (Isa. 40:15). They use theology to sanctify what culture has already decided is true. The text gets bent to fit the conclusion.

Same method. Different directions.

And here’s what should haunt us: both sides are convinced they’re letting Scripture speak. Both sides think they’re being faithful. Both sides have PhDs, commentaries, and hermeneutical arguments to support their readings.

The problem isn’t intelligence. The problem is direction.

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Why We All Do This

The deeper pattern emerges when you stop asking which side is doing this and start asking why we all do it.

The answer is simpler and more uncomfortable than we’d like: we want God and His commands to conform to our cultural moment. We want theology to validate what we’ve already decided. We want Scripture to bless the life we’re already living.

Think about your own life for a moment — not the hot-button culture war issues, but the ordinary ones. What convictions do you hold most fiercely about money? About success? About comfort? About security?

Now ask honestly: Did you arrive at those convictions by letting Scripture shape you? Or did you absorb them from your culture, your family, your class — and then find the theological language to justify them afterward?

Most of us, if we’re being honest, did the latter.

We debate predestination when what we’re really defending is our need for control. We argue about church authority when what we’re really protecting is our autonomy. We construct elaborate biblical defenses of wealth accumulation while Jesus’ words sit in the Gospel of Luke like a live grenade: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:24).

We think we’re defending Scripture. We’re actually defending ourselves.

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Let me pause here. To put it plainly, what follows is a little more theologically dense. It’s also a lot more than I usually write in general. I want you to keep reading, because it was this research that sparked the whole concept of redemptive correlation.

However, I realize this may not be for every reader. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s okay. Scroll down to the heading, “The Reversal,” and you can pick up on the train of thought without missing a beat.

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Tillich’s Shadow

There’s a theological name for this pattern, and understanding it will help you see the mechanism at work — and where it leads.

Paul Tillich, the twentieth-century German-American theologian, gave us the most rigorous and consequential version of this error. Near the end of his life, he described his life’s work this way:

My whole theological work has been directed to the interpretation of religious symbols in such a way that the secular man — and we are all secular — can understand and be moved by them.¹

Read that carefully. It is not a statement about defending the faith or proclaiming the gospel. It is a statement of apologetic translation: the guiding criterion for Tillich’s entire theological output was the comprehension of the secular man. The question was always in the driver’s seat. This confession makes explicit what his formal methodology only implies.

The Method of Correlation

Tillich called his approach the “method of correlation.” Its stated purpose was to “unite message and situation” — to correlate “the questions implied in the situation with the answers implied in the message … human existence and divine manifestation.”² On the surface, this sounds eminently reasonable. The theologian meets people where they are. He speaks to real human concerns. He doesn’t preach into the void.

He described the method in practice this way: “it makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used in the Christian message are the answers to these questions.” His central illustration: humans experience what he called the “anxiety of nonbeing” — the existential dread of finitude, of death, of the threat that life might be meaningless. And “God,” in Tillich’s framework, is the answer: “the infinite power of being which resists the threat of nonbeing,” what he calls “the ground of being” or “being-itself.” The cultural question (anxiety about nonbeing) shapes the theological answer (God as ground of being).³

Tillich was explicit about the formal structure of this dependency: “In respect to content the Christian answers are dependent on the revelatory events in which they appear; in respect to form they are dependent on the structure of the questions which they answer.”⁴ Content from revelation, form from the question. He believed this distinction would protect the gospel’s integrity while making it intelligible.

That distinction does not hold. And Tillich’s own body of work — across two decades and three volumes of Systematic Theology — is the proof. There are three problems with the method, each more serious than the last.

1. The Form/Content Distinction Collapses in Practice

Tillich’s categories — “ground of being,” “ultimate concern,” “New Being” — are not biblical concepts translated for a modern audience. They are drawn directly from Heidegger and existentialist philosophy, imported wholesale into Christian theology. Tillich acknowledged the framework openly: the analysis of human existence is done “in terms which today are called ‘existential’ … the immediate experience of one’s own existing reveals something of the nature of existence generally.”⁵ The questions — finitude, anxiety, nonbeing — didn’t arise from Scripture. They arrived pre-formed from a philosophical tradition.

The critic Robert Olson puts the principle plainly: for Tillich, “the question must precede the answer and determine its form.”⁶ Not merely influence. Not merely shape the presentation. Determine the form. And when the questions come pre-formed from a philosophical tradition, the answers get bent to fit them, even when the theologian insists the content stays pure.

The consequences are concrete. When Tillich applies the method to the doctrine of God, this is what the questions produce:

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.⁷

This is not a translation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into modern idiom. The question — “what is the ontological ground that overcomes the threat of nonbeing?” — has produced a God who cannot be said to “exist” in any meaningful sense because existence, for Tillich, is a category of finitude. The question has not merely shaped the form. It has reshaped the content.

When pressed on whether this God is personal, Tillich produced what Olson correctly identifies as a paradox that satisfies neither reason nor religious experience: “Personal God does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality. He is not a person, but he is not less than personal.”⁸

Tillich himself seems to have understood where this leads. He reportedly said that he did not pray to being itself, the ground of being — he only meditated on it.⁹ That is the pastoral endpoint of a method that redesigns God to fit the question of ontological anxiety: a God you can contemplate but cannot address. A presence you can feel but cannot name.

2. The Method Forfeits Scripture’s Power to Interrogate the Questions Themselves

This is the part most readers miss. The Bible doesn’t only answer the questions we bring to it. Sometimes it tells us we’re asking the wrong thing entirely — and that the question itself reveals a disordered heart. Jesus does this constantly. “Which is the greatest commandment?” He answers, then adds a question none of them asked. “Who is my neighbor?” He tells a story that dissolves the questioner’s self-justification before offering any answer. “Are only a few people going to be saved?” He redirects to the urgency of personal repentance.

Scripture doesn’t always meet us where we are. Sometimes it relocates us. But when the cultural question controls the agenda, theology is only permitted to answer — never to interrogate. The method is structurally incapable of producing the kind of reversal that genuine encounter with the living God actually produces.

3. The Method Cannot Sustain the Scandal of the Gospel

If theology’s task is to demonstrate that Christian symbols are “the answers to these questions,” you will inevitably sand off whatever is strange or offensive about those answers. Watch how this plays out systematically in Tillich’s treatment of the historical particulars of the faith.

Begin with the fall. For Tillich, the Genesis account is not a historical event but “not an event in time and space but the transhistorical quality of all events in time and space” — a symbol for the universal human predicament.¹⁰ This is not an incidental hermeneutical decision. It is what the existentialist question requires. If the question is “what is the structure of estrangement in human existence?” then the fall must be a description of that structure, not an event that introduced it.

Continue with the resurrection. Rather than defending bodily resurrection as a historical event, Tillich treats resurrection as one of several “christological symbols” that must be “understood as symbols,” insisting they “lose their meaning if taken literally.” What the disciples called the resurrection of Christ was, for Tillich, an encounter with “the New Being” — a category drawn not from biblical eschatology but from his existentialist ontology.¹¹ The resurrection becomes a transformative experience of new existential possibility. The question has determined what kind of answer is permissible.

Then arrive at the most unsettling destination: the person of Jesus. For Tillich, the name and historical details of Jesus’ life are theologically dispensable. He stated this directly: “Participation, not historical argument, guarantees the reality of the event upon which Christianity is based. It guarantees a personal life in which the New Being has conquered the old being. But it does not guarantee his name to be Jesus of Nazareth.”¹²

He went further. Any Christianity that clings to the historical Jesus as the center is, in Tillich’s words, not merely incomplete but a “perversion”: “A Christianity which does not assert that Jesus of Nazareth is sacrificed to Jesus as the Christ is just one more religion among many others. It has no justifiable claim to finality.”¹³

This is the logic of the method carried to its conclusion. The existentialist question requires a universal, abstract principle of essentialization — a “New Being” that can overcome estrangement in general. A particular man from Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, resurrected on the third day, whose name you call on for salvation — that man is an obstacle to the universality the question demands. So the name dissolves. The history dissolves. What remains is the principle.

The Terminal Destination

By 1952, in The Courage to Be, Tillich was confronting what he called the defining anxiety of the twentieth century: not the fear of death, but the anxiety of meaninglessness — the sense, post-Nietzsche, that God is gone and with him every framework for significance. What does the method of correlation produce when confronted with that question?

This: “The faith which creates the courage to take [meaninglessness] into itself has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute. It is undefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness … The content of absolute faith is the ‘God above God.’”¹⁴

The endpoint is faith with “no special content.” Tillich describes absolute faith — the final form of authentic religious existence in his system — as existing “without the safety of words and concepts … without a name, a church, a cult, a theology.”¹⁵

Without a name. Without a church. Without a theology.

This is not a movement toward greater transcendence. This is what happens when a method that begins by asking “how can the secular man understand?” follows its own logic faithfully to the end. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who raised Jesus from the dead, whose name you can call on, to whom you can pray — has been dissolved by the question that was supposed to make him intelligible.

Tillich himself closes The Courage to Be with the sentence that most honestly captures what the method produces: “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”¹⁶

The God who appears when God has disappeared. The question generates the God. The anxiety of doubt is doing the theological work. This is not a Christian answer to an existential question. It is an existential answer wearing Christian vocabulary. And it is the terminal destination of any method that lets the cultural question set the terms.

We do the same thing — less elegantly, but just as thoroughly — every time we start with what our cultural moment already values and search Scripture for support. We’re not running Tillich’s full philosophical program. But we are running his logic. The question is in the driver’s seat. The answer conforms. And when the question comes from the culture rather than from God, the God who answers will always look remarkably like what the culture already wanted.

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The Reversal

Last week, I introduced what I’ve been calling Redemptive Correlation — a four-step method (Listen, Distill, Reframe, Respond) for meeting the hard questions of life and culture with the full weight of Scripture’s story. I showed you how it works with the question of online church.

But here’s what I want you to see this week: Redemptive Correlation isn’t just an apologetics tool for answering other people’s questions. It’s a self-diagnostic tool for uncovering where you’ve been doing Tillich’s method on yourself without realizing it.

The core reversal is this: Tillich reads Scripture through culture. Redemptive Correlation reads culture through Scripture.

Tillich asks: “What is the world asking? Let’s find a Christian answer.”

Redemptive Correlation asks: “What does God’s story reveal about reality? Now let’s look at our lives through that lens.”

When you apply that reversal to other people’s questions — as I did last week with the online church example — it produces winsomeness and pastoral depth. But when you apply it to yourself — to the assumptions and desires you’ve never thought to question — it produces something even more important.

It produces repentance.

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Turning the Method Inward

Let me show you what I mean with an example that hits closer to home than the culture war issues: money.

Most Christians I know — myself included — have a functional theology of money that was shaped far more by American culture than by Scripture. We believe in financial security. We admire wealth. We plan for retirement. We measure success partly by income. And if you pressed us, we’d find the verses to justify all of it: “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance” (Prov. 21:5). “If anyone does not provide for his relatives... he has denied the faith” (1 Tim. 5:8). God “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17).

There. Biblical. Settled.

But watch what happens when we stop using Tillich’s method — starting with our cultural question (”How can I be financially secure and honor God?”) — and use Redemptive Correlation instead.

Listen. What’s the question behind the question? The surface question is about stewardship and responsibility. But listen to the ache underneath: What are we actually afraid of? What does our financial anxiety reveal about where our trust is placed? When you listen carefully, the real question isn’t “How should I manage money?” It’s “How do I protect myself from a world that feels scarce and threatening?” That’s not a stewardship question. That’s a worship question.

Distill. What’s theologically at stake? This is not merely a question about financial ethics. It’s a crisis of anthropology and soteriology. It asks: Are we self-sustaining beings who must secure our own futures, or are we creatures dependent on a Provider? It asks: Has Christ’s redemption actually freed us from the anxiety of provision, or have we quietly decided that part of the gospel is decorative? The doctrine being distorted is providence — and behind that, the sufficiency of God Himself.

Reframe. Place it inside the story.

• Creation: God provided abundantly and placed humans in a garden of plenty. Work was good. Provision was a gift. There was no anxiety because there was no scarcity in God’s economy.

• Fall: Scarcity entered through rebellion. And with it came hoarding, anxiety, the desire to store up “many goods” for ourselves (Luke 12:19), and the deep-seated terror that we won’t have enough — that God won’t come through. The fall didn’t just distort our morality. It distorted our relationship to provision itself. We became people who trust barns more than God.

• Redemption: Jesus directly confronted this distortion — not gently. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” He said, “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:19–21). He told a rich young ruler to sell everything (Mark 10:21). He pronounced woe on the rich (Luke 6:24). He said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom (Matt. 19:24). The early church — reading Jesus correctly — responded by holding goods in common (Acts 2:44–45). And Paul told Timothy to “charge the rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God” (1 Tim. 6:17). Notice: the same verse we used to justify enjoyment of wealth, in its full context, is actually a warning against trusting it.

• Restoration: In the new creation, provision is total, scarcity is abolished, and the nations bring their glory into the city of God (Rev. 21:24–26). Kingdom economy is generosity without limit, which means our current economy of anxiety and accumulation is not just imperfect; it is fundamentally flawed. It’s passing away.

Respond. Here’s the truth that is both accurate and, I think, beautiful: You don’t need to be afraid. Your anxiety about money is not a problem to be solved with better budgeting — it’s a symptom of the fall that Christ is calling you to repent of. Your instinct to accumulate is not necessarily wisdom — it may be the very thing Jesus warned would keep you from the kingdom. But the God who clothed Adam and Eve after their rebellion, who fed Israel in the wilderness, who said “consider the lilies” — that God has not changed. The invitation isn’t to be reckless. It’s to be free. Free from the tyranny of needing to secure your own future, because your future is already secured by someone better than your 401(k).

That’s the difference. Tillich’s method, starting with our cultural question about financial security, gives us a theology of stewardship that lets us keep living exactly as we were. Redemptive Correlation, starting with God’s story, gives us a diagnosis — and then a gospel invitation to live differently.

One confirms. The other converts.

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Why This Matters for All of Us

Here’s the hard part, and I need to say it directly: this applies to everyone reading this, including me.

Not just progressives. Not just conservatives. Not just the obviously compromised. All of us have places where we’ve bent Scripture to fit our lives instead of bending our lives to fit Scripture.

The pastor who can articulate the doctrines of grace with precision but whose life is driven by ambition and platform-building — he has orthodoxy without orthopraxy. The charismatic worship leader who sings about surrender every Sunday but won’t surrender her financial comfort — she has orthodoxy without orthopraxy. The seminary student who can parse Greek verbs but hasn’t let the Sermon on the Mount disrupt his actual life in a single concrete way — he has orthodoxy without orthopraxy.

All of us are doing what my dorm mate did. Just with different vocabulary and different blind spots.

Paul warned the Corinthians about exactly this: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2). You can have the theology perfect and still be nothing — because the theology was never meant to be an end in itself. It was meant to form you into the image of Christ.

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An Invitation, Not an Indictment

I want to be careful here, because I know how this can land. It can feel like I’m saying your theology doesn’t matter or that everyone is equally wrong. That’s not what I’m saying.

Theology matters immensely. Getting the text right matters. Orthodoxy is not the enemy of orthopraxy — it’s the foundation of it. The demons believe orthodox theology, and they shudder (James 2:19). The Pharisees had the most rigorous doctrinal precision in Israel, and Jesus reserved His harshest words for them. Right doctrine was never the finish line. It was always the starting block.

What I’m inviting you into is not a different set of doctrines but a different direction of engagement with the text. And it’s the same direction I’ve been building this entire project around.

Instead of coming to Scripture asking, “How does this support what I already believe?” — come asking, “Where does this story confront what I’ve been too comfortable to question?”

Instead of reading the Bible as a resource for your cultural battles, read it as a narrative that has its own battles to wage — including battles against the idols you didn’t know you were carrying.

That’s what Redemptive Correlation does when you turn it inward. It doesn’t just help you answer other people’s hard questions. It helps you face your own. And when you face them honestly — when you stop defending yourself long enough to let the story diagnose you — something shifts. You stop performing orthodoxy and start inhabiting it. Right belief starts producing right practice. The mirror of James 1 stops being a glance and starts being a gaze.

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Where We Go from Here

This is what I’m building with Theologetics, and what I’m writing toward in Reading the World Through Eden. Not a system for winning arguments. A method for being transformed by the story of God — and then helping others find their place in it.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll keep doing what I did last week and what I did today: taking the questions your coworkers, kids, neighbors, and your own restless heart are asking, and walking them through Listen, Distill, Reframe, Respond. Sometimes the method will face outward, toward the culture. Sometimes — like today — it will face inward, toward us.

But it starts here. With honesty about where we’ve been doing Tillich’s work without knowing it. With the willingness to let Scripture read us instead of the other way around.

Sit with that. Not as a guilt exercise — guilt alone doesn’t transform anyone — but as the beginning of something better. Because when you let the text read you, it doesn’t just expose you. It heals you. It shows you where you are in the story — fallen, yes, but not abandoned. Broken, yes, but not beyond the reach of the God who has been restoring broken things since Eden.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

That invitation is still open. But you have to put down the shield first.

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Three things you can do right now:

1. Subscribe. I publish weekly. Each piece takes one real question — the kind people are actually losing sleep over — and walks it through Redemptive Correlation. If you’re tired of theology that informs but doesn’t transform, this is what I’m building. Hit subscribe below, and you won’t miss what’s next.

2. Start from the beginning. If this is your first time here, last week’s post introduces the full Redemptive Correlation method — the four steps, the logic behind them, and a complete worked example. Read that first, and today’s piece will land even harder.

3. Share this with one person. Not to win a debate — to start a conversation. Think of the friend who has all the right theology but still feels stuck. The parent who doesn’t know how to answer their teenager’s questions. The person who left the church because nobody took their doubts seriously. Send them this and say: “This helped me. I think it might help you, too.” That’s it. That’s enough.

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1. Quoted in Roger Olson, The Journey of Modern Theology: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction, (Downers Grove: IVP, 2013), p. 374. Hereafter Olson.

2. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, p. 8 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Hereafter ST.

3. Method in practice: ST, p. 59. God as ground of being: ST, p. 64.

4. ST, p. 64.

5. Existential analysis: ST, p. 62. Tillich’s engagement with Heidegger: ST, pp. 90, 102, 106.

6. Olson, p. 390. Olson is summarizing Tillich’s own principle as stated throughout ST.

7. Tillich, ST, Vol. 1, cited in Olson, p. 389.

8. Tillich, quoted in Olson, p. 392.

9. Olson, p. 393.

10. Tillich, ST, Vol. 2, cited in Olson, p. 394.

11. ST, pp. 152–158. Tillich rejects both physical and spiritualistic interpretations on pp. 155–156.

12. Tillich, ST, Vol. 2, cited in Olson, p. 395.

13. Tillich, ST, Vol. 2, cited in Olson, pp. 387–388.

14. Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 182. Hereafter CTB.

15. CTB, p. 194.

16. CTB, p. 190.