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January 6 - March 16, 2020
our beliefs must be put into practice, and faithful practice matters for what we believe.
To practice doctrine is to yearn for a deeper understanding of the Christian faith, to seek the logic and the beauty of that faith, and to live out what we have learned in the everyday realities of the Christian life.
biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism.[2]
Biblicism is a focus on Scripture as the ultimate authority for faith and practice; conversionism is an emphasis on life-altering religious experience; activism is a concern for sharing the faith and doing good works; and crucicentrism names a focus on Jesus’s saving work on the cross.
“An evangelical is an orthodox Protestant who stands in the tradition of global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revival movements associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield.”[4]
Every culture in every age has blind spots and biases that we are often oblivious to, but which are evident to those outside of our culture or time.”[6]
Theology, as the study of the things of God, a God who loves the world, is a discipline for all Christians. It is to be practiced with love, and, by God’s grace, it can make the practitioner more loving.
Theology begins with God’s revelatory word to us. It continues as we respond with words: words to God and to each other. So prayer, praise, testimony, preaching, and teaching are all parts of the daily theological work of the people of God.
lex orandi, lex credendi, “the law of prayer is the
law of belief.”
Before we can hope to reason correctly, we need God’s grace to transform our minds.
The discipline of theology is not first about gaining information or building a system of knowledge. It is about discipleship: we learn to speak and think well about God so
that we can be more faithful followers of Jesus. By helping the church think about God, theology helps the church worship rightly.
Theology is the discipline of learning from the Word of God and learning to use words faithfully
when we speak about God.
For this reason, medieval Christians knew theology as the “queen of the sciences.”
revelation and Scripture, God, creation, human beings, Jesus, salvation, the Holy Spirit, the church, and final Christian hope.
Like grammatical rules that govern the writing and speaking of a language, doctrines govern the Christian life.
He describes doctrines as “communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action.”b
Dogmas are teachings that are shared ecumenically across Christian communities, teachings that we have good reason to trust, teachings most central to the faith. At a
less universal level of authority, particular Christian communities treat doctrine within those communities as authoritative.
Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
Scripture is an external authority that breaks into our world from God to us, and it opens our eyes to help us recognize the truth about God.
The discipline of theology is about learning to read Scripture more faithfully. It is also about speaking the truth of Scripture in ways that fit new contexts, new times, and new places.
The discipline of theology can be seen as one long conversation—stretching over centuries and continents—about
about how to read Scripture well.
The Christian tradition gives us access to the best efforts of other Christians to think faithfully about Scripture and life.
knowing Christian tradition is a way “of expanding the range of imaginative possibilities for theological construction in any one time and place. . . . Placing one’s own efforts within this ongoing and wide stream, one grows in appreciation for the two-thousand-year, global history of efforts to say what Christianity is all about.”[9]
Listening to the tradition helps us practice humility.
It helps us recognize our limits and lets us learn from others ...
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As such, the creeds provide us with standards of orthodoxy, or right Christian belief.
heresy is simply a doctrine that has been found, in the Spirit-guided judgment of God’s people, to be wrong.
We exercise reason when we do such things as analyze facts and ideas, construct arguments, form judgments, and decide what is true or false.
We must also be aware that sin is stamped on our reason as it is on every other aspect of life, and reason cannot function rightly apart from God’s grace.
We end up making God in our image instead of the other way around, and this leaves us with an idol.
Scripture, tradition, and reason.
The doctrine of Scripture examines what Christians believe about the Bible as God’s revelation.
God makes accommodations for us, which fit what we can know.
God reveals himself in history and materiality.
True knowledge of God is available to us, not because we are perfect knowers, but because God is a good God, a God who wants us to know him. Our finitude is not, for the creator God, a problem. It is part of God’s good intention for us, and we have a God who can and does communicate with the finite.
Our God is a communicator. Our God is a revealer. We seek to know and can know God with confidence, a confidence that rests on God and not on ourselves.
revelation. General revelation typically refers to God’s self-disclosure in
creation and the human conscience.
special revelation, which refers to God’s specific self-revelation in the history of Israel, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and Scripture.
The key distinction between general and special revelation is that special revelation is not available to everyone automatically; rather, it is revealed in a unique event as something new. Often special revelation is described as the “Word of God,” which can refer to Jesus Christ, the Bible, or even to a prophetic or proclaimed word that witnesses to Christ and reflects the truth of Scripture.
General revelation, the thinking goes, is available to all and so might be accepted in a public debate where Christian special revelation, which is only accepted as authoritative by Christians, may not get a public hearing.
A theology drawn from general revelation is known as a natural theology, because its evidence comes from nature.
Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) is a well-known proponent of this position.
Barth rejected natural theology because he recognized the deep influence of sin on all human beings, and Barth’s warning raises suspicions about all that we find “natural.”
For Barth, the only reliable and trustworthy revelation of God is found in the person of Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture.
