Well, we’ve made a bit of a mess.

I think that's probably a good thing.

We started this series with what sounded like a fairly straightforward idea: maybe theology should be accountable for what it produces. Jesus said we'd know a tree by its fruit, so maybe the fruit of our theology ought to have some say in whether that theology is worth keeping.

Then we started poking at it.

Can a theology be biblical and still be harmful? Yes. Should harm count as evidence? I think it has to. What does good fruit actually look like? Turns out that's more complicated than it sounds. Can a false belief produce good fruit? Yep. Can a true belief produce bad fruit? Also yep.

So here we are.

The Fruit Test turns out not to be a handy little machine where you drop a theology in one end, inspect the fruit that comes out the other, and get a tidy TRUE or FALSE.

Honestly, I'm glad.

Christianity has had enough tidy little machines for deciding who's right. What we have instead is something messier.

Feedback.

And now we have to decide what to do with it.

Here's the basic idea I've been working toward throughout this series. We believe something. We live as though it's true. Something happens. And then we pay attention.

That last part seems painfully obvious, but I'm not sure theology has always been particularly good at it. When a belief produces what we expected, we're usually pretty quick to point to the results. Look at the transformed lives. Look at the healthy families. Look at the thriving churches.

See? It works.

Apparently, fruit counts when we like the fruit.

It's when the results aren't what we expected that things get interesting. People get hurt. Communities become controlling. Shame takes root. Fear somehow gets dressed up as a theological virtue. People who were supposed to experience freedom instead learn to distrust themselves.

That's usually when somebody says, "The theology is fine. People are just doing it wrong."

Maybe.

Sometimes they are. People can make a mess out of almost anything. We've demonstrated a remarkable talent for it. 

But if the same theology keeps producing the same wreckage, eventually you have to stop blaming the driver and take a look under the hood.

Some of you who have spent time with liberation theology, practical theology, or theological ethics have probably been waiting for me to get here. Because there's a pretty obvious question sitting in the middle of all of this.

Mark, haven't theologians already done this?

Yep.

And pretending otherwise would make this whole project weaker, not stronger.

Orthopraxy is usually contrasted with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is concerned with right belief. Orthopraxy emphasizes right practice. But at its best, particularly in liberation theology, praxis is considerably richer than simply "doing the right thing." Action and reflection belong together. We act, reflect on what happened, and allow what we learn to shape what happens next.

In other words, there's already a feedback loop.

Theology doesn't simply get handed down from on high, put into practice, and then receive a nice little THE END at the bottom of the page. Lived experience talks back.

So if Behavioral Theology means nothing more than "orthopraxy, but pay attention to what happens," then I've come up with exactly nothing. I've just given orthopraxy a new name, put some apples around it, and hoped nobody noticed.

That would be awkward.

Some people will probably still say, "Mark, that's orthopraxy."

And depending on what they mean by orthopraxy, they may have a point. I'm not particularly interested in winning a vocabulary fight. Praxis-centered theology already gives lived experience a role in shaping theological reflection. What I'm trying to do with Behavioral Theology is make one move within that larger tradition explicit and give it priority: the lived consequences of theology are evidence about the theology itself.

That's the part I don't want us to be able to skip or even underemphasize.

So the more I've thought about it, the more I think asking whether Behavioral Theology is different from orthopraxy may be the wrong question.

Maybe the better question is what I'm trying to move toward the front of the conversation by giving it a name.

Throughout this series, I've kept coming back to the same basic claim: theology should be accountable for the lives it shapes.

That's where I think Behavioral Theology finds its particular priority.

Behavioral Theology prioritizes the lived consequences of theology as evidence for evaluating the theology itself.

That doesn't mean nobody has done this before. They absolutely have. Liberation theology has been insisting for a long time that theology cannot be separated from lived reality, particularly the lived reality of people experiencing oppression. Praxis isn't what happens after the "real theology" is finished.

It's part of how theology gets done.

I'm standing in that stream; I’m not pretending I discovered it.

What I do want to push toward the front of the conversation is a deceptively simple question:
What happens to actual people when theology gets lived?

Because theology always sounds a little different once there are actual people involved.

Who does this belief teach us to fear? Who does it teach us to trust? Who gets power? Who loses it? Who gets welcomed? Who gets pushed outside? What happens inside families? What happens inside churches? What happens inside a person who hears the same theological message over and over and over again?

What does it teach them about God?
What does it teach them about other people?
What does it teach them about themselves?

Those aren't side effects we get to skim over after we've settled the important theological questions. They are important theological questions.

That's evidence.

And I'm arguing that it deserves priority.

Now, the minute I use the word "priority," I know where this can go:
“So, Mark, if a theology hurts somebody, that's it? Throw it out?”

No.

We've spent the last several articles making that answer impossible.

A false belief can produce good fruit. A true belief can produce bad fruit. People can misuse healthy theology. Harmful theology can occasionally produce something good. Human beings are messy enough to wreck just about any perfectly neat theological formula we try to build.

So prioritizing fruit doesn't mean fruit is infallible. It means fruit doesn't get dismissed.

Scripture matters. Reason matters. Tradition matters. Experience matters. That's been sitting at the bottom of every graphic in this series for a reason.

All of them matter.

None of them is exempt.

But “all of them matter" doesn't necessarily mean "all of them always get exactly the same weight.” That's where I want to push this a little harder.

If a theology can be defended from Scripture and tradition but repeatedly leaves actual people frightened, diminished, ashamed, controlled, or dehumanized, I'm not willing to treat those consequences like unfortunate footnotes to an otherwise successful theology.

Move them up the page. Put them in the main text. Heck, make them the heading. They don't get to slip silently by at the bottom of the page.

Because people aren't the collateral damage of theology.

They're where theology happens.

The fruit still doesn't hand us an answer.

It gives us somewhere to look.

The theology may be sound and we've practiced it badly. Our interpretation may be the problem. We may have taken one legitimate idea and fed it until it became so large that everything else disappeared behind it. Or we may be applying a belief somewhere it simply doesn't belong.

And sometimes, yes, the theology itself may be wrong.

We don't get to decide which answer it is before we look. Otherwise, we're not really asking the question. We're protecting the answer we already have.

"The theology is right. Whatever went wrong must have happened somewhere else."

That's convenient.

And, to be fair, even orthopraxy can sometimes get caught here. If the focus stays primarily on whether we're practicing our theology correctly, bad fruit can send us back to reconsider the practice without ever forcing us to reconsider the theology.

Maybe we practiced it badly. Maybe we applied it badly. Maybe we misunderstood what faithful practice was supposed to look like. Maybe we failed.

All of those things are possible.

But so is this: maybe the theology is part of the problem.

That's the possibility Behavioral Theology refuses to take off the table.

In fact, it does more than leave it on the table. It gives the lived consequences of theology priority as evidence in figuring out what went wrong. The fruit doesn't automatically tell us the theology is bad, but it does mean the theology itself has to come back under examination.

That's an important distinction.

Bad fruit doesn't prove the tree is bad. We've already talked about why it's more complicated than that. But if the same tree keeps producing bad fruit, eventually "we must be picking it wrong" stops being a particularly satisfying answer.

At some point, you have to be willing to look at the tree.

Otherwise, theology gets a privilege very few things in life get: the ability to shape what happens while remaining insulated from what happens next.

A lot of theology seems to work in one direction.

Belief becomes teaching. Teaching becomes practice. Practice becomes lives.

And that's where the arrows stop.

One of the great contributions of liberation theology and other praxis-centered traditions has been refusing to let the arrows stop there. Lived reality belongs in theological reflection. What happens in the world, particularly what happens to people pushed to its margins, has something to say back to theology.

Behavioral Theology wants to put a big fat arrow pointing back the other way.

What happened in people's lives becomes evidence. That evidence becomes reflection. And sometimes that reflection sends us back to reconsider the theology that started the whole thing.

Then we live it again. And pay attention again.

Belief. Life. Fruit. Reflection.

And back around we go.

That's the feedback loop.

Without that return trip, theology gets to act on people's lives without people's lives ever being allowed to act on theology.

That sentence bothers me the more I sit with it.

Theology gets to act on people's lives without people's lives ever being allowed to act on theology.

Think about what that means. Theology gets to shape people's identities, relationships, families, churches, bodies, hopes, fears, and sometimes their entire understanding of themselves. Then, when those lives come back carrying wounds, theology gets to stand there with its arms crossed and say, "Well, I'm still right."

That's a pretty remarkable arrangement.

Especially if you're the one bleeding.

At this point, somebody could reasonably ask why we need another name at all.

Fair.

Theology certainly doesn't suffer from a shortage of labels. We do love naming things.

I'm not particularly interested in planting a flag and announcing that I've discovered a brand-new kind of theology. If somebody wants to argue that Behavioral Theology belongs comfortably inside the larger family of praxis-centered theology, I'm not sure I'd put up much of a fight.

What interests me is whether giving this particular priority a name helps us notice something we've become remarkably good at ignoring.

Theology behaves.

I keep coming back to that.

Theology behaves.

It leaves the page and starts doing things. It becomes sermons and church policies, marriages and parenting, votes and laws, welcome and exclusion. It shapes how people understand God, how they understand their neighbors, and how they understand themselves.

So Behavioral Theology says: watch what happens next. Don't stop with what the theology claims. Watch what it does.

And then, this is the important part, let what it does talk back to what you believe.

Absolutely.

Give Christians enough time, and we can turn almost anything into one. That’s part of what my tag “Belief Beyond the B.S.” pushes back on.

It's one of the reasons the Fruit Test can't become another theological measuring stick that nobody is allowed to measure. We started this entire series by questioning that move. It would be more than a little embarrassing to spend seven articles building another one.

Behavioral Theology has to be subject to its own feedback loop too.

If this way of doing theology produces arrogance, certainty, exclusion, or yet another group of Christians convinced we've finally figured out the one correct way everybody else should think, then we don't get to say, "Yes, but our method is right."

Nope. Look at the fruit.

The method doesn't get an exemption. Neither do I. If Behavioral Theology can't survive the Fruit Test, Behavioral Theology goes.

Seems only fair.

So, after seven articles, I think we're finally in a position to say what I mean by the term.

Behavioral Theology prioritizes the lived consequences of theology as evidence for evaluating the theology itself.

That's the heart of it.

Not the only evidence. Certainly not infallible evidence. And not some theological trump card that automatically overrides Scripture, reason, tradition, or experience.

But not an afterthought either. Not the thing we talk about once all the "serious" theology is finished.

We believe something. We live it. Something grows. Then we look honestly at what grew and allow what we discover to become part of the theological conversation.

Sometimes what we see will reinforce what we already believed. Other times it will complicate the hell out of it. It might send us back to Scripture or tradition carrying questions we didn't know we needed to ask. And occasionally it may require us to let go of something we once thought we could never let go of.

That's not theology failing.
That's theology learning.

And frankly, I trust a theology capable of learning a whole lot more than one that's never allowed to be wrong.

Whenever you encounter a theological claim, ask:
What kind of people does it produce?
What kind of communities does it create?
Who benefits?
Who is harmed?
Does it bear the fruit of love, justice, mercy, and human flourishing?

Then don't stop there. Ask what the answers are trying to teach you.

The Fruit Test isn't the conclusion. It's feedback.

And feedback only matters if we're willing to let it feed back.

Think about a belief you've changed your mind about. It doesn't have to be theological, although I suspect plenty of us have a few of those lying around.

What changed your mind?

Maybe it was a better argument. Maybe a Bible passage started looking different. Maybe you learned something you didn't know before or met someone whose life made your old categories considerably harder to maintain.

Or maybe, somewhere along the way, you had to reckon with what the belief was actually doing in people's lives.

Yours included.

Don't dismiss that as emotion or anecdote too quickly. Don't assume the "real" theological work happened somewhere else.

It might have been evidence. Because theology shouldn't only shape the way we live. The way we live should be allowed to shape our theology too.

And one last thing.

I'm not particularly interested in whether Behavioral Theology qualifies as a brand-new theological category. I'm much more interested in whether it's useful.

Does it help us notice what our theology is doing to actual people? Does it make it harder to dismiss harm? Does it make our theology more responsive, more humble, more humane?

And, yes, I see the irony.

How will we know whether Behavioral Theology itself is worth keeping?

Well...

By its fruits.