Very often, when I teach theology, I get asked, “Why does this matter?” Or I hear something like, “This isn’t the point of Christianity anyway. Why bother to debate these insignificant issues?”
In this article I will try to answer these questions. As I understand it, the main issue is that many people have imbibed the assumption that faith and reason are opposites. Downstream from this assumption, we sometimes think that the essence of Christianity is obedience, while theology is an optional add-on. As a result, we are willing to negotiate theological convictions as long as someone is living a generally upright life.
While I don’t mean to imply that we must all have an airtight theological system, I do mean to imply that Christianity must be theological before it can be practical. Some things must be believed before we can live a God-pleasing life.[1] We cannot please God if we don’t know what He wants. We can’t know what He wants if we don’t know who He is. And just like that, we find ourselves needing to do theology.
What’s my point? That the assumption that theology and obedience are at odds with each other is ill-founded. When Paul said, “Knowledge builds up, but love edifies” (1 Cor. 8:1b), he did not mean that love and knowledge are opposites, nor that knowledge itself is the problem. Rather, he is correcting those whose pride led them to think that knowledge itself is the goal. They were ranking themselves against other Christians based on their “superior” knowledge. In this, they denied the truth they claimed to know by counting others less than themselves. They may have had good theology, but they failed to love other Christians.
Yet Paul’s critique of these proud people means nothing if there is not a true meaning of what love is. What does it mean to love? Christ is our example. How did He love us? By dying for us on the cross. This is theology in the truest sense, since “God is love.” We cannot define love (that chief Christian virtue) without defining who God is. So again, we find ourselves doing theology.
Theology as It’s Meant to Be
Between theological perfectionism and theological ignorance is a healthy middle ground which retains theology as essential without thinking that theology itself is the end goal. The end goal of our knowledge is that we be equipped to love God and love others. If our theology isn’t leading us to be better Christians, it is not affecting us the way God intends it to.
The theological perfectionist thinks that theology itself is the goal. He’s happy to debate God’s sovereignty, the nature of election, depravity, or the atonement, but these concepts are disconnected from his life. His atonement theology becomes a metric by which he ranks himself ahead of fellow Christians who don’t have it just right. His views on sin nature are fodder for debate, but they don’t produce humble dependance on God’s grace. In short, he is mainly concerned that his doctrine is in order; whether it is transforming his life is insignificant. That’s one ditch.
The other is thinking that we can be faithful or useful Christians while ignoring the truths about God and His gospel that we find in Scripture. It’s not accidental that Paul repeatedly talks of “walking worthy of the gospel” (Eph. 4:1, Col. 1:10, 1 Thess. 2:12). Notice that he grounds the obedience in the reality of the gospel. The gospel provides the paradigm within which we should live as Christians. Obedience is not something alongside the gospel, nor additional to it. It flows from it. Only obedience which flows from the reality of the gospel is pleasing to God.
We can observe a similar progression in the first chapter of Colossians: “the gospel…has come to you…and is bringing forth fruit…among you since the day you heard and knew the grace of God in truth” (Col. 1:5-6). The first contact these believers had was with the gospel, and since then the gospel itself has been bringing forth fruit. The reality of the gospel (more than just truth claims, but no less) is fundamental to their obedience.
It is impossible to divorce our experience of the gospel from its truth. We are transformed as we meet Christ, and our vision of Him must be true or it is not real. The faith that saves requires “hearing”, and that hearing comes through the “word of God” (Rom. 10).
So the Scriptural progression is from encountering the truth of Christ — and being transformed — to living in obedience to Him. See how our Christology leads to Christlikeness? We are biblically confused if we think we can please God with our lives while diminishing the importance of accurate knowledge about Him. As a house is only inhabitable if its foundation is solid and square, so our Christianity is only livable if it is built on a biblically-solid foundation. That foundation is Christ (1 Cor. 3:11), a very real person about whom things are true — and untrue. We delude ourselves if we think we can live as Christ’s disciples without understanding who He is. So I repeat, Christianity is theological before it is practical.
I struggle to understand those who dismiss theology but claim to follow Christ. While I don’t doubt that their intentions are sincere, it seems it would be very difficult to follow Him if they don’t know Him. I’m concerned that the Christ they are following may be one of their own making — not the holy, righteous, merciful, compassionate, forgiving, generous Christ we discover in Scripture.
We have a tendency to fashion Christ in our own likeness, and in so doing we miss part of His character. Some of us need to remember that Jesus loved tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, and declared divine judgment against respectable religious leaders. Others of us need to remember that Jesus said that the world would hate us because they hated Him. In short, Jesus stood against dead traditionalism (which loses the gospel by trying to protect it from the world) and against pragmatic relativism (which loses the gospel by trying to adapt it to the world). Does your theology wrestle with both of these realities?
Keeping the right balance requires submersion in Scripture and submission to it. We need to know enough Scripture that we know who Jesus is. And we need to be willing to change our minds based on what we discover. This second part is perhaps the hardest part of the Christian experience. Our beliefs are so deeply engrained that we often don’t realize when we are fitting Scripture into our preconceptions rather than allowing our preconceptions to be shaped by Scripture. We miss what’s right on the surface of the text because we want to confirm what we already believe instead of being conformed to Scripture.
In short, theology as it’s meant to be is (1) biblical, (2) balanced, and (3) practical. It is biblical because it is continually being reshaped by Scripture. It is balanced because it resists both ungracious tightfistedness and compromising openhandedness. It is practical because it is always moving us toward faithful obedience to Christ.
Not All Doctrines are Created Equal
There’s one more thing for us to consider: not all doctrines are created equal. We explored this a bit in the previous article in this column. There are some doctrines (eschatology as a prime example) that we can agree to disagree on. Others (the Trinity, Christ’s deity and humanity, His Messiahship and Lordship, and the sin-bearing nature of His atonement) define Christianity itself and may not be negotiated.[2] It is important that we distinguish between theological truths which Christians may respectfully disagree on and those which Christianity itself depends on.
Failure to make this distinction has sometimes led people to give up on theology altogether, because it is implied that a person must have every doctrine worked out and nailed down in order to be faithful. This is unfortunate, and may reflect as much on the theologians as it does on their counterparts. There are comparatively few doctrines which comprise the essential core of Christianity. Many, many others deserve careful study — especially in the light of Christian tradition — yet are not “in or out” issues.
That’s not to say that truth itself is relative, but instead to concede that we are finite humans who do not always see everything the way we should. We need to recognize that our experiences, our time and place in history, and our biases affect our interpretation of Scripture. Christian humility requires us to allow space for differences of opinion (in non-essentials!) even as we pursue clarity and conviction for ourselves.
I can understand why people are often uninterested in non-essential doctrines. Some of us are less cranial and more action-oriented, and that’s OK. But when the same dismissive attitude is present toward doctrines like substitutionary atonement, justification by faith, the nature and extent of sin, or Christ’s humanity and deity, we have a serious problem. When we are fuzzy on these doctrines, we are fuzzy on Christianity itself, and the authenticity of our faith may genuinely be questioned.
While I accept that (1) not everyone is interested in discussing the granular points of theology, and (2) that there are issues where Christians may agree to disagree, I’m concerned with the general apathy I see in many of our people. It’s one thing to leave the theologizing to the pastors and theologians. It’s another entirely to assume that one can be a Christian but not care about the truth.
At the heart of Christianity is a set of beliefs about a very real person — Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He is not an amorphous idea which we may conform to our liking. He is the incarnate God-Man, a living, breathing human about whom certain things are true — and not true. We meet this real person as the Spirit reveals Him to us in Scripture. He is much more than theological concepts, but He is not less. Just as the 1st century events are more real than the Gospel accounts which tell us about them, Jesus is more real than the biblical texts which teach us about Him. And yet, we need these accounts so we can know about Him — and know Him. Jesus is more than theological concepts, but He is not less than them.
Why do we need theology? Because the heart of Christianity is a relationship with Jesus Christ. Christianity is not just theology, but it can be no less than it.
[1] For some thoughts on what constitutes the essence of Christianity, see last month’s article Why We Must Look Back in Order to Move Forward and the one before How to Spot a False Teacher — Part 3.
[2] On this last item, see 1 Cor. 15:3 — “I delivered to you first of all…that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” “First of all” is rightly understood as “of first importance,” indicating the primacy of this doctrine.
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