Blank Slate Theology Vs. A Theology of Continuity

The 5-Minute Version

Hello friends,

Thanks to all who read and responded to my latest post, “When The Truth Isn’t True Enough.” The main idea of that piece is pretty important to me, so I thought I’d offer a quick and dirty synopsis for those who don’t read longer pieces or would prefer a bullet-point version to share with friends. Let me know if it’s helpful. Maybe I’ll do more of these “5-minute versions.”

— Ross

In what follows, I want to identify a problem I’m seeing in our contemporary Christian thinking and practice, which is leading us to a version of the truth that won’t hold water. I call the problem a “blank-slate theology” and the solution a “theology of continuity.”

The best way to sum up a blank-slate theology is with St. Paul’s famous words in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” I’m quoting Scripture here, because I want to be clear that I am not denouncing this as some false or heretical belief. On the contrary, almost nothing is more central to the gospel than the reality of new beginning, of death and new life. No, the question is not whether “new creation” is our reality in Christ, but how. How does new creation work? This is where our two theological frameworks come to fundamentally different conclusions:

In a blank-slate theology, new creation works as a kind of wholesale replacement of the old. Christ came not so much to fulfill Scripture as to override it. Jesus’s formula in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said…but I tell you…” is quoted as proof that he was introducing an entirely new ethic, even a new religion. In this view, the genealogies in the beginning of the Gospels seem out of place except as reminders of the old, crude order of things, which has been rendered obsolete by the work of Christ. Likewise, as believers in a blank-slate gospel, our own family trees exist only as reminders of what must be left behind and overcome. We were people born into a certain family in a certain place and culture, with our own natural talents, desires, weaknesses, and struggles. But now, we have been born again. Our second birth has little or nothing to do with the first.

By contrast, in a theology of continuity, new creation is understood not so much as replacement of the old, but as its redemption and fulfillment. Yes, the old must die. But it dies in order to become all that it was meant to be. Creation waits, groaning with the pains of childbirth, because God actually likes what he made. It was good when he made it, and it shall be good again–even better than it was–yet through death and resurrection. The genealogies at the beginning of the Gospels are there to remind us that we are living in one continuous story in which God has been working all along, and that Christ has entered the picture not merely to overcome the imperfect legacies of his ancestors but to redeem and fulfill them. Likewise, we who are born again in Christ share in his work of redeeming the bodies and lineages we were given.

The highest hope of a blank-slate theology is “heaven when we die,” where all things which could not be made right here on earth will be instantaneously re-made after death. I do not say this is false, but it is a leaky vessel. On the other hand, the central hope of a theology of continuity is “the resurrection of the body,” which is at once more palpable and also more subtle than its blank-slate counterpart. In the Gospels, we find that the risen Christ is so completely transformed as to be unrecognizable to his closest friends (he even walks through walls!), and yet, he is so unchanged as to retain even the holes in his hands from the nails on the cross. Profound transformation is joined with profound continuity. This is the truer truth. And it is also true of us.

Through his resurrection, Christ is making “all things new,” but he is making new things out of the old. We are who he wants to raise. Yes, our mortal bodies are corrupted by sin and destined for death. We must be born again. But we are not born again ex nihilo. Yes, we must die. But we awake on the other side of death to find, shockingly, that not all that was put on the altar has been consumed by the flames. The old has gone and the new has come, but the new turns out to be the pruned and purified perfection of the old, rather than its wholesale replacement. 

But for those of us who have grown up with a blank-slate mentality, this nuance can be hard to appreciate. We moderns have developed a certain distrust for continuity, especially regarding our identity and beliefs. For instance, if your Christian beliefs and practices were passed down to you from your parents, this is often seen as less “authentic” than if you had come to the faith completely independently (as if such a thing were possible). This is akin to believing that a truly authentic Mexican meal is the meal that feels “authentically Mexican” to you, regardless of its connection to the people and traditions of Mexico. This, of course, is absurd. But we speak this way all the time about things that matter far more than food.

Take a moment to appreciate just how much of the thinking of the modern secular world suffers from a kind of “blank-slate” mentality: “I am not defined by who other people say I am, nor even by the way I was born. I am who I say I am, by virtue of my own proclaimed identity.” Notice that this sort of belief proceeds not precisely from an abandonment of Christian truth, but rather from a deeply Christian truth misused, from a leaky-bucket version of “The old has gone; the new has come.” As historian Tom Holland has now famously shown, modern progressivism with its expressive-individualist ethos is arguably the product not of anti-Christian notions but rather of deeply Christian notions now-unmoored, in this case, a doubling down on the “blank-slate” side of the new creation without its paradoxical counterpart, continuity.

I mention this not to lodge an argument against modern progressivism (which, in some ways, is refuting itself), but rather to show just how much our modern Evangelical modes of thinking have in common with it. We “born-again-Christians” are in danger of forming our own blank-slate religion, more true than progressivism, but less true than the kingdom of God. In this religion, the old has magically disappeared and the new has magically come. The old seed has simply died. It need not rise out of the ground of death into a shoot with roots, and from a shoot into the largest tree in the garden. And we need not learn over time to embody its new life. We only proclaim it, and it is so. But when we open the pages of the New Testament, we find a different story. The kingdom of God is the marriage of continuity and transformation. We must indeed be born again. But the body that dies will rise from the grave, bearing marks of the old as well as the new. 

“Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)