Dethinking Christianity

There's Always a Better Argument

I. A Long Walk Off a Short Premise

Scholasticism turned theology into an intellectual obstacle course.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “natural theology.” It sounded harmless enough. Like something you might whisper under a tree, staring up through the leaves and contemplating the goodness of creation. Instead, it led me into a dark hall filled with men in robes arguing about whether God could microwave a burrito so hot that even He couldn’t eat it.

This was the fruit of Scholasticism - the idea that theology could be reasoned out, one axiom at a time, as if God were a geometry problem. The intention may have been noble. But the effect was madness. Aquinas began the pattern, building vast cathedrals of thought from fragile human premises (Aquinas, 1265–1274/1947). Others continued the work. Before long, theology no longer emerged from the lived faith of the Church, but from libraries full of increasingly obscure treatises.

What had been simple became baroque. What had been mystical became mechanical. Grace, once known by experience and preserved in ritual, was now dissected into categories: prevenient, sufficient, efficacious. The sacraments became subjects of debate. Even the Trinity was reduced to an argument—three persons, one substance, and a headache for everyone involved.

Faith had become an exercise in mental gymnastics. But no matter how you flipped or stretched, you could never land it cleanly. The ground was always shifting, because reason rests on premises—and those premises are rarely secure in divine matters (Plantinga, 2000).

This is how theology stopped being a path to truth and became a series of elaborate puzzles.

II. Thinking Too Much and Praying Too Little

Deductions replaced devotions, and we called it progress.

There was a time when the Christian man didn’t need to win an argument to be holy. He needed to pray. To fast. To love his neighbor. These were the credentials of sainthood. But Scholasticism changed the entrance requirements. Suddenly, holiness required fluency in syllogisms and fluency in Latin. The prayerful man deferred to the clever man, and the clever man deferred to logic.

Most of the theology we now consider essential was never stated plainly in Scripture. It was deduced. Reasoned out. Extracted from hints, patterns, and cross-referenced verses. The divinity of Christ, the dual nature, transubstantiation, original sin—none of them appear as bullet points in the Bible. They appear as deductions from the Bible. And like all deductions, they depend on fragile strings of reasoning (Pelikan, 1971).

The Scholastics weren’t blind to this. They knew what they were doing. They treated theology like law—precedent built upon precedent. But unlike law, the stakes were eternal. If you misunderstood divine nature, you weren’t wrong. You were damned.

And so, they reasoned harder.

But reason decays. It cannot feed itself forever. It needs firm ground beneath it, and Scripture, though divine, is not a textbook. It offers truths in parable, poetry, and prayer. Not in diagrams. Not in proofs. It was not meant for the cold lights of the lecture hall.

Christ did not say, “Think this in remembrance of me.”

He said, “Do this” (Luke 22:19, New International Version).

The difference is everything.

III. The Midwit’s Paradise

Fluency replaced faith, and verbosity passed for virtue.

In the Scholastic world, intelligence became a stage play. The midwits took their seats and performed their lines. No one was required to believe. They only had to appear convincing. If the argument was clean, if the citations were ample, then the conclusion was declared sound—no matter how grotesque or hollow it became.

This was the perfect world for the midwit theologian. He did not need mystical experience, divine fear, or even moral courage. He needed pattern recognition and a good memory. That was enough. He could recite the conclusions of smarter men, deploy the templates of logic, and impress his peers with the illusion of insight.

And so theology filled with men like that. Not evil. Not stupid. Just terribly confident in their ability to prove the unprovable. They spoke in certainties that came not from revelation, but from habit. From intellectual mimicry. They repeated what they had been told, not because they had lived it or loved it, but because it was the right move in the game (MacIntyre, 1981).

The result was a great flattening. Everything was dragged into the realm of disputation. Mysteries were stripped of their veils, parables were dissected, and the rituals of the Church were picked apart like the wiring of a machine. Once the soul had been replaced with schema, the midwit declared the work complete.

They could now explain God.

And since they could explain Him, they believed they could manage Him.

They were wrong.

IV. When Premises Go Bad

Logical systems are only as strong as their shakiest assumptions.

No one talks about the premises. They’re tucked away at the bottom of the argument, like the foundation of a house no one’s seen in years. But everything rests on them. And when they rot, everything built atop them rots too.

This is the flaw in deductive theology. It treats the premises as settled. Immutable. But in theology, they rarely are. They depend on culture, translation, assumption, and interpretation. When Scholastic theologians say, “If A, then B,” they rarely admit that A is a matter of debate—and so B becomes dogma built on sand (Kerr, 2002).

It’s not malicious. It’s mechanical. That’s what logic does. Once the machinery starts moving, it carries you to the conclusion, no matter how absurd it becomes. And when the absurdity arrives, the midwit theologian doesn’t panic. He doubles down. “We must trust the method,” he says. “We must sharpen our reasoning further.”

And so new premises are laid. Each one a little more abstract than the last. Each one a little further removed from Scripture, from experience, from God. It becomes a ladder of inference reaching up into a cloud, with no one checking to see whether the ground has disappeared beneath them.

This is how the faith became absurd. Not from disbelief, but from hyperbelief. From treating divine mystery like a geometry test.

Eventually, even the theologians can’t keep track. And when they can’t, they write new books to explain the last ones.

V. Traditional Wisdom as Collateral Damage

Reason turned its back on the faithful to impress the faithless.

Before the age of syllogisms, truth had weight. It did not need to be explained—it was inherited. Traditions were not treated as puzzles but as gifts, passed down with reverence. They were old and, therefore, trustworthy. They worked, and therefore were true.

Scholasticism shattered that trust.

Not by replacing tradition, but by demanding that it justify itself in the court of reason. Everything had to stand trial: fasting, liturgy, prayer, penance, even the sign of the cross. If it could not be diagrammed, it could not be defended. And if it could not be defended, it was dismissed (Leithart, 2020).

This was the price of logic’s ascent. The old wisdoms, carried in the hearts of peasants and mystics, were declared primitive. Unsophisticated. Theological kindergarten. It was not enough to obey anymore. You had to explain why. And your explanation had to sound like something a university professor might applaud.

This punished the faithful.

Not by persecuting them, but by embarrassing them. A fisherman who knelt before a candlelit altar knew God better than the man in the cassock who questioned why the candles were there. But the fisherman had no vocabulary for defense. He only had practice. So his wisdom was discarded as superstition.

In this way, reason became a weapon against the very people it claimed to serve. The faithful were told their devotion was incorrect, not immoral, but irrational.

It was a revolution, but dressed in robes.

And it burned the past to keep its books warm.

VI. The Inquisition of the Reasonable

Reason made a prison and handed out degrees as keys.

The danger of logic is not in its form but in its enforcement. Once theology became a system, it needed enforcers. And so the Church—once a mother—became a tribunal. Its laws were written not in parables or psalms, but in academic Latin, bound with citations and crowned with conclusions. Heresy ceased to be a form of disbelief and became a failure of reasoning.

The paradox is sharp. The Scholastics claimed to love truth, but they treated it like a puzzle box. If you solved it correctly, you were safe. If you stumbled on one variable—if you misread a premise, misunderstood a term—you were branded a heretic, even if your heart was pure and your conscience clean (de Lubac, 2006).

This was not a defense of the faith. It was an exam.

The tragedy deepened because the system punished honesty. The man who said, “I do not understand” was silenced. The man who said, “I do not agree” was excommunicated. The only safe path was conformity to the structure, not conversion of the soul.

This produced generations of theologians afraid to deviate. They quoted Augustine as if he were algebra. They cited Aquinas as if he were Euclid. Even Scripture became a sourcebook for citations rather than a living Word.

And the people, watching all this, learned something tragic: that faith was for experts.

And if you weren’t an expert, you’d best stay silent.

VII. The Reflex of the Midwit

Midwit Theologian: If reason got us into this mess, then reason will get us out!

Gene: No. That’s just a thing you say because you’ve been trained to speak in language patterns. That’s one of the patterns you’ve been given.

Midwit Theologian: …Wait… Whaaa???

Gene: The pattern is: “If X can do Y, then X can undo Y!”. You proposed your solution because you’ve been trained to think and speak using this pattern. The reasoning does not hold up, though. And if you had bothered to think about the problem, instead of defaulting to the pattern, then you would have caught your error.

The Scholastic method did not teach men to think. It taught them to perform. Its great success was not in producing saints or seers, but in manufacturing midwits—those who mistake fluency for understanding, and argument for wisdom.

The midwit theologian does not question the structure of his thoughts. He follows patterns. He learns forms. He memorizes premises and applies them like a formula: If A, then B; if B, then C; therefore, Amen. But this is imitation, not insight. His conclusions emerge not from contemplation or revelation, but from inherited syntax—handed down like family recipes with all the original ingredients substituted for abstractions.

One of the most common patterns is this: “If reason caused the problem, then reason will solve it.” It sounds virtuous. It appears logical. But it is nothing more than rhetorical symmetry. It reflects no actual understanding. It is the output of a system that trains men to speak in certainties without examining their origins.

This is the failure of the Scholastic mind. It operates not from lived truth but from linguistic reflex. When challenged, it recites. When confronted with mystery, it categorizes. The language is smooth, but the soul is untouched.

True thought requires rupture. It requires silence, humility, and the willingness to be wounded by reality. Scholasticism, in contrast, produces the illusion of thought—a never-ending game of verbal chess played against opponents who vanished centuries ago.

The game is clever. But the cost is clarity.

VIII. Before the Fall: Prescholastic Peace

The sacred once spoke through silence, not syntax.

Before the rise of Scholasticism, the Church trusted mystery. It did not attempt to explain every corner of God’s will, nor did it try to harmonize the ineffable with the reasonable. It received. It obeyed. And in that obedience, it found peace.

Prescholastic Christianity was shaped by liturgy, sacrament, and silence. The truths of the faith were embedded in practice, not carved out through argument. A man knew Christ not through analysis, but through worship. He knelt. He wept. He sang the ancient hymns. And in doing so, he participated in the life of the Church as one participates in breath—not with diagrams, but with devotion (Bouyer, 1955).

This was not ignorance. It was reverence. There was a recognition that the divine exceeds the categories of man, and that the deepest truths are not spoken but enacted. The Eucharist was not debated—it was received. The Trinity was not dissected—it was adored. Theology existed, but it bowed to liturgy, not the other way around.

There was no need for the faithful to become amateur philosophers. They did not need to construct syllogisms to justify belief. They needed to fast during Lent. To honor the feast days. To confess their sins and make peace with their neighbors. That was the structure of faith. That was its genius.

It worked.

Not because it was logical, but because it was holy.

And that holiness could be seen. In the candles. In the chants. In the quiet hearts of a people who had not yet been trained to argue.

IX. Why It Gets Worse

Scholasticism is a self-feeding monster that never sleeps.

Scholasticism is not self-correcting. It is self-replicating. Every unresolved question spawns ten more, each demanding its own commentary, its own distinctions, its own mental scaffolding. The machine cannot be stopped. It grows by division, like cells in a tumor.

This is not due to malice but to method. Scholasticism encourages precision without restraint. Its practitioners are taught to refine, revise, and reorganize. Each contradiction births a clarification. Each clarification demands another. The result is an infinite regress of increasingly narrow disputes, where the pursuit of truth becomes indistinguishable from the fear of error (Gilson, 1955).

And the theologians multiply. Not because they are needed, but because the system guarantees them work. Every unsettled debate requires an expert. Every expert must publish. Every publication must introduce a distinction no one asked for.

This would be comical if it were not tragic.

Because the stakes are spiritual, the consequences are immense. Doctrine becomes labyrinthine. The faithful become confused. Pastors become scholars, and scholars become oracles. No one can simply believe anymore—they must interpret. And no interpretation is ever final.

This is why it gets worse. Because the method cannot stop itself. It is addicted to novelty disguised as refinement, to cleverness posing as faith. It rewards those who make things more complex, and punishes those who seek to return to simplicity.

The result is clear. Certainty declines. Confession fragments. And the Church becomes a place where no one agrees on what God has said—but everyone has a very long footnote.

X. Dethinking Christianity

The Church must trade logic for liturgy, syllogism for song.

The way forward is not to think harder, but to think less. Not less attentively, but less analytically. Less like a lawyer, more like a lover. The Christian does not need to solve God. He needs to obey Him.

This is the great lie Scholasticism introduced—that the mind, given enough time and terminology, could domesticate the divine. That faith could be systematized like Roman law, complete with subclauses, counterarguments, and caveats. But this project did not lead to clarity. It led to confusion. And in time, to perversion.

The antidote is dethinking. Not anti-intellectualism, but reorientation. Theology must serve faith, not replace it. It must flow from liturgy, not swallow it. The truths of Christianity must once again be lived before they are explained. The Church must return to ritual, mystery, and the humility that precedes wisdom (Schmemann, 1973).

This is not regression. It is restoration.

To dethink Christianity is to recover its heart. To recognize that revelation is not a theorem but a gift. That the sacred is not something to be dissected but adored. That silence is not ignorance—it is reverence.

The world is full of men who know how to argue about God. It needs men who fear Him.

Let the midwits keep their diagrams. Let the experts quote Aquinas for the thousandth time.

As for me, I will kneel.

And do this in remembrance.

References

Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa Theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work published 1265–1274)

Bouyer, L. (1955). Liturgical piety. University of Notre Dame Press.

de Lubac, H. (2006). Medieval exegesis: The four senses of Scripture (Vol. 1). Eerdmans Publishing.

Gilson, É. (1955). History of Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages. Random House.

Kerr, F. (2002). Twentieth-century Catholic theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism. Blackwell Publishing.

Leithart, P. J. (2020). Theopolitan vision. Theopolis Books.

MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.

Pelikan, J. (1971). The Christian tradition: A history of the development of doctrine (Vol. 1). University of Chicago Press.

Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian belief. Oxford University Press.

Schmemann, A. (1973). For the life of the world: Sacraments and orthodoxy. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

The Holy Bible, New International Version. (2011). Zondervan.