23 October 2006

Theological worldviews

I found a quiz on "What's your theological worldview?"

I was struck by the remarkably narrow and circumscribed view of the author. It has no provision for Orthodox Christianity. It has such things as "Classical liberal" and "Modern liberal", which I find difficult to conceive of. It also omitted significant movements in Western theology like liberation theology, black theology, feminist theology etc, and non-western movements like Zionism.

So one couldn't even say that it had a Western bias -- its bias seemed far narrower than that.

I posted my results for the quiz on my other blog, here and was interested to see that (in admittedly small sample) Orthodox Christians seemed to come up with
  1. Roman Catholic
  2. Evangelical Wesleyan/Holiness
  3. Neo-orthodox
in the top three.

I suppose that, of all Protestants, Free Methodists come closest to Orthodoxy in at least sharing some similar concerns.

The quiz also had an "Emerging/Postmodern" category, which I had only heard of quite recently, yet I am sure that both the Orthodox and Zionists outnumber them by several millions.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Which were indeed my top three. I think there is quite a large chunk of Anglicanism that is virtually orthodox. Tho' these days most of that tendency have made the jump across.

(Rev Sam)

Steve Hayes said...

It would be interesting to see what other Anglicans came up as -- I suspect that there might be quite a bit of variety.

Anonymous said...

I was also struck by the lack of Orthodoxy as a possible outcome of the quiz.

By the way, I'm intrigued by the combination of Orthodox and "Progressive" links on your blog.

Sally said...

glad you dropped by and commented on this quiz steve- I too found it narrow in scope and as you pointed out western biased- to be honest my true theological worldviw if I were to label it would be Liberationist/ femminist!

Steve Hayes said...

Someone posted a link in my other blog that might help to explain the apparent onvergence of Orthodox and Wesleyan theology.

I've also, in response to a request, posted an article I wrote some years ago on Orthodoxy and liberation theology on my web site.

Anonymous said...

I noted the deficiency too. Just goes to show that people shouldn't take these quizes too seriously.

Steve Hayes said...

No, one shouldn't take them too seriously, but it is interesting, nevertheless (and very postmodern!) that they reveal more about the quizzer than the quizzed.

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