Theology: Think for Yourself about What You Believe Excerpt:
Introduction: Think
Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas
about God. It will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.
--C.S. Lewis(Note 1)
What you believe matters. It may well be the only thing that matters. Your beliefs shape every decision
you make, from what you had for breakfast this morning to your career path to whether or not you choose to get married and have children. Every choice you make is too
a large degree predetermined by the ideas rolling around in your head. All those facts you know to be true along with everything you think might be true and all that
stuff you hope isn’t true have conspired together to make you who you are. Ideas are the single most powerful force in the world, and along the way you’ve put together
a collection of ideas in your mind and in your heart that have shaped you. As you continue to add to that collection, your life will evolve and change. You determine your
future today by the beliefs you now decide to hold onto as well as those you choose to reject as false.
This is especially true of your theology, that is, your beliefs about God. The word theology means the study
or science of God, just as biology is the study of life and sociology is the study of social institutions and relationships. Grouping these together may sound strange
to our postmodern ears, but that hasn’t always been the case. In the Middle Ages theology was known as the Queen of the Sciences for it was the unifying principle that
drove the study of every other area of life. We usually think of science and theology as fighting against one another, but the scientific revolution was born out of the
Christian world view. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Louis Pasteur as well as many other early heroes of science all professed faith in Christ. They believed
the universe was created by a reasonable God, which, in their minds, made scientific discovery possible. In short, their beliefs about God both drove them
to the sciences and worked as the filter through which they interpreted their research.
The same holds true for all of us. Your theology shapes everything else you believe, even for those
who theology leaves no room for God. That is why cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the earth, looked out the widow of his Vostok II spacecraft
as he hurtled through space and said, “I am high in the sky, and still I do not see the face of God.” Yet King David staring up at a night sky three thousand
years earlier said, “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). How could both men looking at the same sky, albeit one with a better view than the
other, reach such different conclusions? Titov believed God wasn’t there, while David knew he was.
Because your theology influences every other part of your life, you not only need to know what you
believe about God, but you need to think through those beliefs. Few people ever do that. Most of us walk through life collecting beliefs like my youngest
daughter chooses socks each morning. She simply reaches into a drawer and grabs whatever her hand finds first. The colors don’t matter. Wearing a green
and red Christmas sock along with an orange and black jack-o-lantern Halloween sock in the middle of April doesn’t bother her at all. If it will slip
between her foot and her green Chuck Taylors, she will wear it. That’s how most people put on their ideas about God. They grab an idea from a verse they
read in the Bible in the morning along with something they heard on Oprah in the afternoon and combine them with a thought a friend said in an IM conversation.
But they rarely if ever stand back and look at how all their ideas go together, or how those ideas line up with what God says about himself.
That’s not even the worst of it. Many people, maybe even most people, never look ahead to see
where their odd collection of beliefs and ideas will take them. They never consider the long term consequences or the logical outcome of what they believe
to be true. This isn’t a new phenomenon. One hundred years ago G.K. Chesterson wrote:
At any innocent tea-table we may
easily hear a man say, “Life is not worth living.” We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly
have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be
given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called
in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the
conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter. (Note 2)
But theories do matter because your beliefs matter. That’s where this book comes in. It is
designed to make you think seriously about your own theology. We want you to examine what you say you believe when you claim to be a Christian,
why you believe it, and how those beliefs will express themselves in your life when you consistently live them. You won’t find a bunch of easy answers
couched in religious clichés in these pages. Easy answers don’t fare too well when you sit down in a classroom and everything you ever believed is called
into questions. Reciting clichés in the face of credible arguments from other worldviews make as much sense as saying alligators are ornery because they
have so many teeth and no toothbrush. You need something more if your faith is to survive as it brushes up against the real world. Nor will telling you what
you should think help your faith grow up as God desires. For that you need to learn
how to think biblically. As you do you will reach the ultimate goal of this book, which is to help you
“…be mature and full grown in the Lord,
measuring up to the full stature of Christ. Then we will no longer be like children, forever changing our minds about what we believe because someone has
told us something different or because someone has cleverly lied to us and made the lie sound like the truth. Instead, we will hold to the truth in love,
becoming more and more in every way like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church” (Ephesians 4:13-15).
Black and white and shades of gray
We live in a pluralistic culture where tolerance is the supreme virtue, but the Bible doesn’t
share that sensitivity. It makes bold statements couched in absolute terms that leave no room for competing ideas, statements like Deuteronomy 4:39 which says,
“The LORD is God both in heaven and on earth, and there is no other god!” Jesus echoed Deuteronomy when he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). These statements must be true or false. Either the God of the Bible is the one true God, and
Jesus is the only way to this God, or both are liars. They cannot be true for me and not for you, no matter how hard we may wish otherwise. The Lord God
refuses to play that game. You don’t have to believe these statements are true, but, according to the Bible, the consequences of refusing to believe last forever.
However, everything in the Bible and Christian theology is not so cut and dry. The Bible boldly
declares that Jesus died, rose again bodily, and ascended into heaven. It also says he will return to earth some day to establish God’s kingdom once and for all.
But, it leaves the details of his second coming very sketchy. Questions abound as to whether Jesus will return to rule on earth for a thousand years before the
ushering in of the eternal age, or if he will come after Christians have established his reign on earth for a thousand years, or whether all the references to
Christ’ thousand year reign are to be taken metaphorically. Even those who agree on the first scenario disagree as to the details of how and when Christ’s
reign will come, and how his return relates to a time of trouble called the Great Tribulation. In the same way, Christians do not always see eye to eye on
theological issues such as baptism, the role of women in the church, tongues, the age of the earth, and who we should vote for, just to name a few.
Christianity may be a religion of the Book, but not everyone agrees on which translation of the Bible should be used. There’s even disagreement over
whether a Christ follower should dance, play cards, or have a glass of wine with dinner. While these questions do not determine whether a person will
spend eternity in heaven or in hell, disagreements over them have caused more than one person to wonder why Christians can’t get along.
The fact that everything in the Bible is not crystal clear surprises most newcomers to the faith.
They wonder why God would leave anything in his word open to interpretation by the reader. In response, many people run to one of two extremes. The first
is the all gray group. In their eyes, nothing in the Bible is set in stone. Every idea is fluid. God. Jesus. The Holy Spirit. Who they are and what they
do all comes down to preferences, not absolutes. Theology is whatever you decide to make it. For the all gray group, there are no wrong answers. The
second extreme is the “there’s no such thing as gray” group. People in this group want to uphold truth and the Bible and absolute standards of morality.
Unfortunately, in their zeal to combat
the fuzziness of the shades of gray group, they make everything black and white. Pick an issue, and they have the answer. From the kind of music that
is proper within a church service to the clothes you wear, the Bible has one, definitive teaching. For the “there’s no such thing as gray” group,
there’s no room for compromise, because compromise means falling onto a slippery slope toward relativism.
Further compounding our difficulty is the fact that some of the theological issues people
think of as black and white aren’t so clear in the Bible, and some of the grays appear more distinctive when we actually read what God has to say about
them. That is why, for the purposes of this book, the essentials of Christianity are those teachings of the Bible that have generally been agreed upon
by followers of Jesus around the world for the past 2,000 years. These are the central truths of our faith that believers have given their lives to uphold,
the key teachings of both the Old and New Testaments that define what it means to be a Christian. The essentials include the belief that God has spoken with absolute
truth, the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Jesus and his bodily resurrection from the dead, along with the deity of the Holy Spirit, salvation
through faith in Christ alone, and the need for Christian
community called the church.
We will also explore the gray areas of Christianity, those issues that have divided believers over the
past 2000 years. While some may seem as black and white as the print on this page to you, another person reading this book who comes from a different background
may hold a completely opposite view. His ideas seem as black and white to him as yours do to you. Believe it or not, the theological gray areas play a very
important role in God’s overall plan for your life. Jesus said the key distinctive of his followers would be the love we have for one another (John 13:35).
Anyone can love those who are just like them. It becomes much more difficult to get along with someone who’s ideas clash with yours, much less love them. These
gray areas allow us to put into practice Paul’s words to the church in Rome, “Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don't see things the way you do.
And don't jump all over them every time they do or say something you don't agree with--even when it seems that they are strong on opinions but weak in
the faith department. Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently” (Romans 14:1 MSG).
Diversity within the Christian family also fits the pattern we see in the rest of God’s creation.
God loves variety. Why else would he make somewhere between 200 and 400 breeds of dog? (Note 3) Only God could dream up a way to have ten pound miniature
dachshunds and 130 pound mastiffs come out of the same genetic stock. It shouldn’t surprise us then to find such variety within the Christian faith. If
God had wanted every believer to be a hymn singing, organ playing, loud sermon preaching Baptist, he would have made sure every church fit that profile. Since it
is hard to find two Baptists who are exactly alike, much less trying to fit Presbyterians, Catholics, and Charismatics into a single box, we must conclude that God
finds pleasure in the diversity within his family. This is not meant to imply that every group that calls itself Christian is actually part of God’s family. Many
cults such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses that deny the essentials of the faith try to portray themselves as followers of Jesus, which only underscores
the importance of understanding biblical theology.
Nor does saying God finds pleasure in diversity mean that the doctrinal differences between
denominations do not matter or that such questions do not have a right or wrong answer. Beliefs do matter for they will determine your approach to the
entire Christian life. Not all of the answers believers have come up with to the questions over which people disagree within God’s family are correct.
When Jesus returns the question of the relationship between his return and his thousand year reign as well as every other theological question will be
settled once and for all. But, until then, differences of opinion over baptism or tongues or the role of women within the church should not distract us
from the work Jesus gave us to complete while we await his return. Nor should they cause us to turn our attention to fighting against one another while a
lost world slips further and further away from God.
That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of this book. By exploring both the essentials of the faith
as well as the areas where sincere believers disagree, you will be equipped to go forward toward God’s purpose for your life without getting sidetracked.
That also explains why this book does not contain a definitive answer on the gray areas. We called this Think For Yourself About What You Believe for a
reason.
One final thing before we begin. Because this book is designed to make you think, you will
find it raises almost as many questions as it answers. Even in those areas that are essential to the Christian faith, we want you to think about how
your life should change if these ideas are true as well as what you should do if they are not. Your beliefs set the course of your life. Look ahead to
where taking the doctrines Christians have claimed are essential will ultimately take you. Also ponder how your life should change if these truths turned
out to be nothing by myths and legends. When we get to the gray areas, we will present both sides to the issues involved without telling you which is right
and which is wrong. That is by design. Examine the issues involved. Listen to what the Bible has to say. Then think. Your future depends on
it.
Note 1) C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1952, 1980,
Harper Collins Edition: San Francisco, 2001, pg. 155
Note 2) G.K. Chesterson, Heretics, (New York: John Lane Company, 1908), CCEL.org e-edition, pg. 7
Note 3) The American Kennel Club officially recognizes only 150 breeds. However, when you throw in mixed breed dogs along with customized
breeds such as the Labradoodle (half Lab, half Poodle) the number jumps considerably.
