Post-It label Theology...

In his impressive book Bound to Sin, Alistair McFadyen makes an appeal against ‘Post-It™ label theology’, which, he explains, is when God is ‘stuck on’ to secular analyses and descriptions of the world. For it to carry explanatory force, theology must add something significant to our level of explanation and understanding of the world. As McFadyen puts it with regard to his study of sin:

If God is the most basic reality and explanation of the world, then it must be the case that the world cannot adequately be explained, understood, lived in, without reference to God in our fundamental means both of discernment and action.

Which means that theology ought to be more attentive to its own way speaking and to its own concepts than to concepts drawn from elsewhere.

(Alistair I. McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine; 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p.12. )