Why We Need Theology

When you grow up in certain denominations, you aren’t always trained in theology. Some denominations are explicit about their doctrines and about the statements and creeds and confessions that help define who they are, why they are here, and how they should live. For others, the theology is still present, but implicit and unstated. The trouble with this is that an implicit theology is more difficult to defend and keep with any consistency. Doctrines that are implicitly held may be in greater need of upkeep without anyone realizing it.

Of course, denominations that emphasize doctrine have their own troubles, such as the difficulty of modifying it when it, too, needs some polishing. But the greatest sin of all—or so I often hear—is that the Bible could lose its place of honor and authority, replaced by man-made summaries and credos.

After all, the Bible is a complex book—a collection of books, in fact. It was written by many different authors spanning centuries of time. And even the letters that seem to be the clearest and whose authors seem the closest to one another, even they seem to contradict each other at times. When we come down one way on a question that the Bible leaves muddy, so the argument goes, we elevate human reason over God’s Word.

I am proud to be a theologian. And while I’m sensitive to some of these critiques, I think we sometimes miss the importance of theology. In fact, I would say that no Christian who takes the Bible seriously can afford to shrug at theology.

If you care about the Bible, theology isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Here’s why: if you believe that God has truly spoken, then your worship demands that you take His words seriously.

There are at least three ways that we try to do this: by meditating them, by understanding them, and by obeying them. But in order to obey them, you first have to understand them. And if you spend time meditating on Scripture that you have not sought to understand, you have only the feelings that impress upon your soul and the hope that these are coming from outside and not from within.

No, I agree with one of my professors, Abraham Kuruvilla, who said, “The Bible is not a magic book.” It isn’t a collection of spells and incantations with mystical words that alter reality when spoken. Their power is in their meaning. If we want to know the mind of God, the heart of God, the commands of God, the plans of God—He has told us!

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Understanding is crucial for worship, crucial for obedience. The Bible has many a warning and lament for those who fail to understand what it says. Jesus sometimes taught with parables to obscure meaning from those who did not believe, but at the same time He made sure to explain their true meaning to the disciples. Jesus doesn’t just want you to hear, He wants you to understand!

So far so good. We should take the Bible seriously and understand what it says. But where does theology come in?

Well, at one level theology just is that understanding that develops when we take the Bible seriously in our reading. When you explain something in the Bible, you are articulating theology. But when the scope of our understanding expands to include not just a verse or a paragraph or a chapter, we’re forced to go deeper. We meet situations and sayings that make us scratch our heads. Once we expand to try and understand two different human authors, we have to work much harder.

You might wonder: isn’t this what the Holy Spirit is for? Well, yes and no. The Holy Spirit, Jesus promised, will lead us into all truth, absolutely. But Jesus never said we wouldn’t have to work for it. Just as the fruit of the Spirit is love, and yet I still find myself straining to love at times, so the Spirit gives wisdom and yet not necessarily without struggle or sacrifice.

If the Bible is the Word of God, then we must take it seriously. Taking it seriously means seeking to understand it so that we can obey it and meditate on it profitably. Our worship depends on it!

So I think failing to understand, articulate, wrestle with, and relate Scripture is one danger in theology. Those who want to stop at a superficial reading aren’t being humble. They are being lazy. (And perhaps self-protective. Who wants to come away from God’s Word frustrated rather than inspired?)

Another way this problem manifests is when we pit one biblical author against another. I understand the Red Letter Christians movement has done some great things in the name of Christ, but if they pit the Gospels against the rest of the New Testament, they have failed to take God’s Word seriously. People who discount Paul because of something in James or John or Hebrews think they are honoring God by not putting Paul on a pedestal. But if God has authored it all, you don’t get to choose. (And of course that means you can’t be “of Paul” and not also of Peter and the rest.)

But to be fair, there is another danger in theology, and it’s the danger many people are reacting against. When you get an advanced theological system in place that has been worked on rigorously by numerous scholars—a system like Calvinism, for example—the nuances sometimes get overshadowed by the conclusions. An advanced system in the hands of everyday people can quickly become oversimplified. Or worse, the authors may oversimplify things for the sake of advancing their system.

I think this, too, is a failure to take Scripture seriously. If you really want to take the Bible seriously, that means embracing all its complexity, too. We must strive to understand, but an understanding that irons out wrinkles that God left in place suffers the same problem of dishonoring God’s words.

True faithfulness to Scripture requires working to understand without oversimplifying. True faithfulness to Scripture requires a theology that takes a stand on what the Bible is saying without trampling on the awkward. To do less than understand it is to say the Bible doesn’t really matter; to exalt one Scripture at the expense of another for the sake of your system is to say essentially the same thing.

What we need is not less theology. We need better theology. We need a theology that doesn’t forget its humble roots while at the same time daring to stretch to the heavens. We need better theology. We need a theology that admits its limitations even while it maintains a death grip on its essentials. We need a theology that points people back to Scripture—back to God as He has revealed Himself and not as we would have made Him. What we need is not less theology. We need better theology.

Dear friends, don’t look down on the theologians for writing flawed books that sit alongside of Scripture. Thank God that people devote their lives to struggling with God’s Word in the hopes that you and I might have a head start in our worship. If you must look down, look down on those who don’t care enough to understand, who don’t care enough to wrestle, who don’t care enough to preserve nuance. But don’t look down in pride; these are brothers and sisters in need of a helping hand. Look down only to draw them up.

If you really love the Bible, then you need theology. There is no other way around it. The question is how hard you are willing to work to make it better.