In Tonja’s last post, she touched on the notion of studying theology, with the very good point that if we don’t study formal theology we tend to make up our own. Yes, we’ve all got a theology – even “I don’t believe in any of this nonsense” (my own position for 30+ years of my life) is a theological position because of the assumptions that underlie the statement. If only I’d known.

You can gather from the above that I’m fairly new to the idea of studying theology. I got interested because I have the good fortune to belong to a church where people not only study the Bible on a regular basis, but are also being encouraged to take things a step farther. This is possibly because we are a short drive away from a seminary of which not a few of our congregation are either active students, like Tonja, or alums.

Our church has been running a series called FencePosts, which is a systematic theology course for laymen, over the last couple of years. I hope it’ll get published some day, but in the meanwhile I’m pretty sure you can download the materials from our website. Being able to discuss these matters with a group of people who also were not necessarily familiar with big words like aseity has been a very useful way for me to begin demystifying a subject that, let’s face it, isn’t exactly Discovery Channel material.

I also, all on my lonesome, discovered a website called Reclaiming The Mind, which also provides a systematic theology course aimed at lay students. You can download the materials for free, or pay a modest fee to get a diploma for finishing the course. I chose the cheapo option, of course, although I did buy the recommended foundation books: Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology and The Mosaic of Christian Belief by Roger Olson.

It may have occurred to you by now, as it did to me at some point, that all of these sources are written from a theological standpoint that may, or may not, be right. And what’s “right”? Theologians, I have discovered, are notorious for disagreeing among themselves. Then again, the church you’re in may teach from quite a different standpoint and recommend different books to the sources I found. What’s a layperson to do?

That brings me to the question I probably should have asked about three paragraphs back, namely what am I trying to achieve by studying theology? I can think of the following goals:

• avoid the big silly mistakes that may result from trying to think things out all by myself (my brain functions quite well but I’m the first to admit I’m no Einstein)
• understand what people from the aforementioned seminary are talking about when they get together (and thus avoid embarrassment)
• grasp what people who’ve spent their lives trying to get to know God better have been thinking and talking about through the centuries
• get a better idea of my relationship to the greater Christian community by understanding what my church teaches in relation to what other churches have taught and are teaching

I was struck, when I embarked on all this, by the fact that theology and Bible study seem to have little to do with one another. Theology, it seems to me, is more about the history of ideas that have been developed by Christians from reading the Bible; so while a knowledge of the Bible is of course essential to understanding the basis for theological arguments, it’s a starting point rather than a boundary that’s constantly in view. The original chapter and verse tend to get obscured by a bunch of long words, definitions, creeds, and concepts that then spawn ever more of the same.

The danger, it seems to me, is that you can become so wrapped up in all the different arguments that you can effectively disassemble your own faith – I’ve come across seminary students who come close to losing theirs altogether because they can’t find the simplicity that defined their world in their pre-theological days. I find that my own safety net consists of making certain assumptions of what is “right” from the outset, such as that I will favor Protestant theology over other flavors, and start out from the conservative evangelical viewpoint of my own church.

Olson’s book is pretty useful in that respect, as it attempts to define the main outlines of the Christian faith over the last two thousand years, noting those beliefs that the church as a whole has decided are heresies (i.e. plain wrong) and those that are merely points of disagreement.

My last thought is, that theology, while useful and interesting (it really is, folks!) is no substitute for studying the Bible, which is the primary source of all this theology. So I don’t neglect the latter for the former. Otherwise I think I’ll end up like the emperor with no clothes: lots of pomp and circumstance, but nothing to keep the cold out.

Question for Tonja: has any one theological idea really turned your world upside down?

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