The MTC Manifesto

Theology matters. It shapes how we see the world, how we treat our neighbours, and what we believe is possible. Even when people are not actively engaging in theology as a discipline, they are doing “ordinary theology” every day of their lives. It is about how we live, make ethical decisions, and what and how we worship. Good theology sets people free. Bad theology does real damage to real people. MyTheologyCorner exists because I believe the world needs more of one and less of the other.

What Is MyTheologyCorner?

A theological resource, an expression of vocation, and the hope for honest faith lived out through the renewal of our minds, leading to loving service

MyTheologyCorner is a Salvationist theological blog, resource hub, and newsletter. It exists to make serious theology accessible to everyone in plain language. I will not dumb down my work, but I will make it as accessible and engaging as possible for everyone who finds their way to this site. Theology belongs to everyone, not only to academics or the ordained.

The tagline says it simply: Accessible theology for every kind of mind. That is not a slogan. It is a commitment. If you cannot read the Bible and make sense of it, if you cannot explore what the church believes and why it matters, that is probably not your failure. It is a failure of how theology has been taught and how churches form their communities.

Accessible does not mean shallow. It means clear. It means structured. It means written for the person who has never studied theology formally, and for the person who has studied it for years. Both should find something here that stretches and grounds them. Accessibility is a justice commitment, not a compromise. That is what I am trying to do here.

Why Does MTC Exist?

Because theology that cannot change a life is not doing its job — and because some theology is actively doing harm

I have a simple test for theology. Does this theology bring people closer to the Sermon on the Mount — to a life of mercy, justice, peacemaking, and love of neighbour? Or does it move people further away? If anything takes you away from the radical truth of the Sermon on the Mount, then it is taking you away from the way of Christ.

When theology is done faithfully in response to the revelation of Jesus, it should change things. It changes how you think. It changes how you see the world. It changes how you treat the person in front of you. It leads you to seek the Holy Spirit in your daily life, to read your Bible with hunger, to act with courage in the face of injustice. Faithful theology leads to becoming a follower of Jesus — not just intellectual affirmation, but commitment to obedience to the command of grace.

When theology is not working, the results are not just disappointing; they are dangerous. People are excluded, diminished, or told that God wills their suffering. Communities turn inward. Convictions become weapons. The vulnerable are abandoned, and the powerful are blessed. Bad theology has been used to condone slavery, the oppression of women, and the murder of countless thousands. Bad theology hurts people.

That is what MTC exists to push back against. By encouraging better theology. By naming what is harmful and building something more faithful in its place. I do not always get this right. I recognise my own bias, my historical and social privileges, and the complexities of the tradition I inhabit. I seek to do my best, to give my all for the one who gave their all for us, in the recognition that it is only by grace that my theological endeavour is at all possible.

Who I Am

A Salvationist Officer, a theologian, and a pastor — writing from the inside

I am Captain Chris Button, a Salvation Army Officer currently serving as a Corps Officer in the United Kingdom. I hold a doctorate in theology. I work daily with families struggling to have enough to eat, people recovering from addiction, escaping domestic abuse, and trying to rebuild their lives from scratch. But I also write, teach, and seek to bring the richness of Christian thought into those situations — so that the theoretical is always thought through in the context of reality, but our daily work and ministry are always shaped and formed by our reflections on Christian thought and belief.

I am a Salvationist. That is not incidental to this project; it is the root of it. The Salvation Army’s theological tradition is my home. Its doctrine of entire sanctification — the belief that God can make us genuinely holy, day by day — is not a thing of the past. It is one of the most radical and hopeful claims in Christian theology. I believe it. I preach it. I am learning to live it day by day, although of course I often fail to do so.

But I am also formed by other traditions. The theology I do cannot be contained by any single stream. I have been shaped by the Wesleyan holiness tradition in which the Army stands. I have been shaped by Dietrich Bonhoeffer — his call to costly discipleship, his insistence that faith is “this-worldly,” and his courage in the face of murderous power. I have spent a decade thinking with Bonhoeffer, and years reading every surviving word that he wrote for my doctorate.

By Karl Barth, and his relentless but patient return to Christ as the centre of all things. Christ is always the starting place. We are dependent on Christ’s grace for every breath we take. By Liberation Theology, its commitment to practical salvation and its preferential option for the poor. By the English Radical Dissenting tradition and its refusal to let the church serve the powerful or be co-opted by the Powers and Principalities. By radical and pyrotheology and its willingness to ask the questions others avoid. By Rowan Williams, N.T. Wright, and by my doctoral supervisors, Tom Greggs and Phil Ziegler, who taught me how to hold multiple sources of theological knowledge in genuine, rigorous conversation.

These influences do not sit side by side neatly. Sometimes they simply disagree with each other. But they always work towards the same purpose: the Gospel of Jesus. As such, they all help me understand who God is and how I need to follow Jesus. I hold that tension openly, not quietly. All Christian theology is attempting to make sense of the same thing: the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Every tradition sees part of the picture. MTC is committed to learning from all of them, while remaining rooted in Salvationism as its home.

Theology does not come from nowhere. There is no such thing as neutrality, and especially no neutral theology. Every theologian is formed by the voices, communities, and encounters they experience in life — some of which they will not have chosen. Naming those influences is an act of honesty. It tells you where I am standing when I write, and it invites you to name clearly where you are standing.

How I Do Theology

A method rooted in dialogue, formation, and the sanctified mind

I want to be clear about how I approach theology, because our theological method matters. Theological method is about more than research techniques or how to do a literature review. It is not enough to have good instincts or strong convictions. Theology done badly, even with good intentions, causes harm. Anyone who seeks to do any kind of serious theology must do so with humility and with reliance on the love and grace of Jesus.

Theology Begins with Christ

All theology, for me, begins with Christ’s self-revelation: his incarnation, his teaching, his cross, and his resurrection. These are the sources from which everything flows. All theology is done as a graced response to the self-revelation of God in Jesus. Without that self-disclosure, there could be no theology at all. But God has made that move in the person of Jesus, in Scripture, and in the Holy Spirit, and theology is the response to that disclosure. I do not begin with a system and fit Jesus into it. I begin with Jesus and build outward from there.

Theology is the graced response of the sanctified mind to what God has revealed in Christ. That means it is both a gift — we do not generate theological truth on our own — and a discipline. The mind brought before God, renewed by the Spirit, is the instrument through which theology becomes possible. But it must then be enacted in the world. It is not just about what we think. It is about how we become the person God wants us to be.

The Sources in Conversation — Not in Competition

The Wesleyan tradition has long held that theology draws on four sources: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. My doctoral supervisor, Tom Greggs, expresses this more precisely. Theological method, he argues, is not about consulting each source in turn and then reaching a verdict. It is about holding all four in simultaneous, reflexive conversation — each one illuminating and being illuminated by the others.

Scripture is primary. But Scripture is always received through tradition. Tradition is always tested by reason. Reason is always shaped by experience. Experience is always corrected by Scripture. These sources are not competing authorities. They are the voices of a living conversation — one that is held in communion with the Holy Spirit.

Helen Cameron’s work on congregational theology is important for this method. She identifies four voices in every faith community: the normative (what Scripture and doctrine say), the formal (what academic theology says), the espoused (what a community says it believes), and the operant (what a community actually does in practice). The gap between what we say and what we do is where prophetic challenge lives.

But holding those sources in conversation is not enough on its own. Clare Watkins and James Butler, in Christian Faith and Christian Learning (Routledge, 2026), make a diagnostic argument that every church community needs to hear: most of what churches call discipleship produces people who know more about faith, not people whose faith is forming them. Information is not formation. The gap between what a community says it believes and what its life together actually produces is where the real theological work lives — and it is a gap that most church programming quietly ignores. The goal of MTC is not to add to the volume of theological content available online. It is to contribute to a different kind of movement: from knowing about Christ, to being conformed to Christ. From information, to formation. From formation, to responsibility. From responsibility, to liberation. From liberation, to Shalom. That chain — holiness lived outward into the world — is what every piece of content here is trying to serve.

Formation for Responsibility

Theology that does not form us for discipleship is not theology; it is information. My work is an attempt to support the formation of responsible disciples. A responsible disciple is someone who, through encounter with Scripture and serious theology, becomes more capable of recognising who their neighbour is — and more willing to take responsibility for them.

Bonhoeffer names the enemy of discipleship not as faithlessness but as stupidity. For Bonhoeffer, stupidity is the refusal to think critically, to discern, and to take personal responsibility for the person in need. Paulo Freire (1921–1997) names the process by which we wake up to that responsibility as conscientisation (con-SHEN-tee-ah-SAY-shun) — the raising of critical consciousness through encounter with reality and with the other.

Formation for responsibility moves in a direction: from irresponsibility, through critical formation, to responsible discipleship, toward liberative leadership. Every piece of content on MTC is written to support that movement.

The Goal: Holiness and Shalom

The goal of Christian formation — and the goal of all MTC content — is holiness: being conformed by Christ, through the Holy Spirit, to Christ. This is what the Salvation Army calls entire sanctification. Entire sanctification, also called full salvation, is participation in Christ — which is what Doctrine 10 sets out.

Holiness is not simply private or interior. It is about Shalom (shah-LOME) — the Hebrew vision of the world as God intends it. Where every person has enough, no one is crushed, and justice flows like water. God desires the flourishing of all, which will come as a result of sanctification. Holiness produces responsibility. Responsibility produces liberation. Liberation is Shalom.

The mission of Jesus was to set people free from sin and the systems and structures that form and are informed by it. We see this in Jesus’s own description of his mission. So everything I write at MTC will be grounded in Luke 4:18–19 — what has been called the Nazareth Manifesto:

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What MTC Challenges

Naming the theologies that do real harm to real people

All theology is dialogical. The development of Christian thought has always involved both saying what is true and naming what is heresy. MTC does not exist to attack other Christians. But it does exist to challenge theological ideas that harm people — and to do so plainly, with evidence, and without apology.

• 1. Theology That Uses God to Justify Suffering

  The claim that God has predetermined some people to be poor, abused, or excluded — and that their suffering is therefore God’s will — is not faithful theology. It is a distortion that has been used to silence victims and protect abusers. Any theology that tells vulnerable people their suffering is God’s design is a theology MTC will push back against.

• 2. Nationalist Theology

  The fusion of Christian faith with national identity — the idea that God is on the side of any particular nation, ethnic group, or political project — is idolatry. Salvationism is international before it is anything else. The church of Jesus Christ has no borders.

• 3. Exclusionist Theology

  Any theology that uses God as a reason to exclude people — from salvation, from community, from dignity — stands in contradiction to the God who, in Christ, crossed every boundary to reach those who had been shut out.

• 4. Prosperity Gospel

  The teaching that faith produces material wealth and that suffering indicates spiritual failure is not the gospel. It is a reversal of the gospel. It makes victims responsible for their victimhood and blesses the already comfortable with divine approval. Jesus said “Blessed are the poor” — not “blessed are the wealthy.”

• 5. Theologies That Baptise Oppression

  Any theology that has been used to justify the subjugation of women, the dehumanisation of people of colour, or the exploitation of colonised peoples — whether in history or in the present — must be named, critiqued, and refused. The Sermon on the Mount is the test.

Who This Is For

And who it is not for

MTC is for Salvationists who want to deepen their understanding of their faith. It is for Officers and leaders who need a theological grounding for their work. It is for ordinary soldiers who have sat in Corps for years and have never been offered a serious engagement with biblical and doctrinal matters. It is for anyone seeking to understand what the Salvation Army believes and why it matters.

It is also for people outside the Army — those who are curious about faith, those who have stepped away from church and are still carrying questions, and those who want to understand what a serious, thoughtful, justice-oriented Christianity looks like in practice.

It is for people building their faith and for those rebuilding it. Good theology is good for both. Whether you are secure in what you believe or standing in the ruins of what you used to believe — there is something here for you.

MTC is not for those who have decided that certainty requires the silencing of questions, or that faithfulness requires the exclusion of those who are different. It is not for those who want theology used as a weapon against the marginalised, the questioning, or the hurting. The door is open. But it swings both ways.