Thin Strong Theology: Holding the Sacred Without Metaphysical Certainty

A central structural problem confronts any attempt to develop a theology adequate to contemporary conditions: theology itself remains deeply bound to what John Vervaeke identifies as the Two Worlds mythology and to the substantialist metaphysics of traditional theism. The very discipline most needed for the work of meaning-making and sacred orientation is the one most entangled with frameworks that have become increasingly untenable under philosophical and scientific scrutiny.

John Schellenberg's distinction between thick strong and thin strong models of the sacred provides a crucial lever here. A thick strong model — traditional theism with its full metaphysical architecture — carries commitments that are difficult to sustain. Schellenberg advocates instead for a thin strong orientation: minimal and flexible in its metaphysical claims, yet genuinely committed to the sacred as ultimately real, ultimately transformative, and ultimately normative. This is not pantheism or vague spirituality; it is a disciplined openness that holds theism and non-theism as live questions rather than foregone conclusions.

The polydox theology emerging from thinkers like Catherine Keller, Sharon Betcher, and Roland Faber gestures toward exactly this kind of thought-space — one that walks the seam between the Mythopoetic and the scientific, refusing to collapse into either register. The deeper question is whether theology as an institutional discipline can undergo the radical self-transformation this demands. That capacity for transformation is not merely intellectual; it depends heavily on the physical, emotional, mental, and communal conditions of the people engaged in the work — conditions that institutional theology has rarely prioritized.