[cjf4]

The overall point Taleb makes is a good one, but he out kicks his coverage here:

> The (Protestant) Puritans who inhabited New England and the Salafis of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf have nearly identical theologies, based on shared communitarianism (refusal of a centralized authority), iconoclasm (absence of representation, of saints, and of any elaborate aesthetics), absence of an organized “church”, and very stern practice of the religion.

None of these things are theology. They can be informed heavily or indirectly by it, but theology is primarily about how we understand God, not the second order effects.

[boomboomsubban]

Isn't understanding god's rules for it's followers part of theology?

For example, in Catholicism, the Church is supposed to have some level of divinity carried over from Christ. That would make the central authority of the church part of how they understand god, or their theology, so lacking those things would become part of Protestant theology.

[gampleman]

In the strict sense, that would be called ecclesiology, which would be distinct from theology dealing with the nature of God (which has the distinct sub discipline of christology dealing with the nature of Christ specifically).

[a9h74j]

I attended a Unitarian lecture where the minister gently chided the members, "Yes, we have a theology." The gist was that there were seven or so dimensions to appreciate, including: theology, eschatology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and a few more.

So the word 'theology' != "formal beliefs", whether or not that affects Taleb's brief thesis.

[boomboomsubban]

A quick dictionary definition of "ecclesiology" describes it as

>theological doctrine relating to the church

And the few other things I checked also considered it part of the greater theology.

[Fellshard]

And yet, the church is called repeatedly in Scripture 'the body of Christ'; individual believers are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, partially for the purpose of receiving gifts by which they are to serve the church; and all believers are considered a family by common adoption by God the Father.

Theology proper is richly coupled with the nature of the church, since the church is so richly coupled with God.