The Dish is not the Recipe: What Dungeons and Dragons reveals about Doctrine, Fundamentalisms, and Use

Responding to C. Thi Nguyen’s recent work on the philosophy of games, I argue that both the history and form of the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons have profound lessons for theological doctrine. I critique Nguyen’s brief treatment of D&D and argue that his own distinction between a ‘dish’ and a ‘recipe’ reveals the danger — navigated by players, religious studies scholars, and practitioners alike — of reducing games to rules, and theology to doctrine. This is a particularly salient danger for theological education, wherein students are familiarizing themselves not just with doctrines but what doctrine itself is and can do. Drawing from recent work on theological education and method, I argue that students must be brought to terms with the constitutive ambivalence of doctrine, and work to gain a more capacious understanding of doctrine’s varied uses, contexts, politics, and corresponding — but never containable — ways of life.