Category Archives: Theology

It’s obvious, right?

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI made an oft-hand comment on the blog yesterday: “All of that should be obvious, but what’s obvious to one person isn’t always obvious to another.”

I was remembering something that happened when we first moved back to the States after living in Argentina. We were living in a church-owned home next to the church building. One day our air conditioner stopped working. When the repairman came, he pulled a completely clogged filter out of the system. He was amazed to discover that I didn’t know that central air units have a filter that needs to be changed regularly!

I’d never changed the filter at home growing up, nor seen anyone do it. For the next 20+ years, I lived either in housing managed by others or homes that had no central air. I’d never even seen an air filter before then! The repairman had no way of knowing that a man over 40 wouldn’t know about air filters.

In a similar way, I remember preaching once on the promises made to Abraham out of Genesis 12. I had a man, who had been a Christian for over 20 years, come to me and say, “I’d never heard that before.” I never would have guessed that any Christian adult would be unfamiliar with the promises that are so central to our faith.

We hesitate to teach basic things because they seem too obvious. Yet we often need to hear just that.

photo courtesy of MorgueFile.com

Deep answers to simple questions

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adult, child with bibleI was given a couple of articles last week by one of our members. He is concerned about some of what he’s seeing during the Lord’s Supper, so in an honest attempt to help, he brought in these articles.

I don’t like them a bit. To be honest, I saw the title of the journal they were from, and I went in with a bad attitude. I read through them, but was quickly turned off. I’ve grown tired of piecemeal theology, which seeks to find words in the Bible that say what they want said rather than trying to figure out what a passage of Scripture is actually saying.

My dilemma was (and is) how do you explain that to the average church member? How do you show them that an author’s entire approach to Scripture is wrong? The man made points, with verses to back them up. To the member’s eye, it was very biblical. To my eye, it was very human and bordering on biblical malpractice.

I don’t want to come to the “well, you just wouldn’t understand” point in talking with people about the Bible. Yet I find that many biblical questions can’t be adequately answered by quoting a pair of Bible verses. I want themes and large principles. I want a passage of Scripture that is actually addressing that topic. If there isn’t one, then you’re going to have to show me how what you’re saying fits into the overriding story of Scripture. And that’s hard to do in an elevator speech.

It’s much easier to say, “Paul told the Corinthians to lay by in store every first day of the week, so that means we should meet on Sundays and have a collection.” That’s a concrete answer that people understand. It’s harder to look at principal themes of the Bible to determine how often to meet and what to do when we meet.

So much comes down to the way we view Scripture and what we consider to be an appropriate use of Scripture. Any suggestions on how to communicate such things in a way that people can understand? How do we lead people down a road that’s taken us years to travel? Should we even try?

Tempocentrism

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Anthropology talks about a concept called tempocentrism, the belief that your own time represents the norm and that all other times are to be judged by it. It’s never easy to escape the trap of tempocentrism. To put it bluntly, we think we’re smarter than everyone else that’s ever lived.

Part of that, I guess, is the influence that evolutionary concepts have on us. We believe that society is progressing, moving forward, growing far beyond what it used to be. Therefore, our ideas are inherently better than those of people from other times.

It’s not easy to reconcile this view with a high view of Scripture. If you approach the Bible tempocentrically, you either have to believe that God revealed things to the ancients that they had no hope of understanding or you have to think that some of the things expressed in the Bible are just wrong. The liberalism of the 19th and 20th century held to the latter of those views; they sought to sort through the “mythology” in the the Bible to find the truth. This led to the “search for the historical Jesus,” among other quixotic quests.

Contemplation of Jewish cosmology led me to all of this. To put it bluntly, the Jews believed in an active spirit world which expressed itself in the world we know. Spirits, demons, angels, false gods… these beings existed and affected our world. When God led the Israelites out of Egypt, he triumphed not only over Pharaoah, but over Pharaoh’s gods as well. (Exodus 12:12) Witchcraft was forbidden, not because there was no truth to it, but because it involved dealing with ungodly powers. When Daniel was visited by an angel, in response to his prayer, the angel said that he had been delayed “by the prince of Persia.” (Daniel 10:13) Paul says that, by eating food sacrificed to other gods, Christians can enter into fellowship with demons. (1 Corinthian 10:20–21)

All of these things, and many more, reflect a view of the world that is far different from the modern view. Do we write it off to the inferiority of ancient understanding? Do we chuckle and say, “Yes, yes, they believed such silly things”? To what degree do we adjust our own worldview based on the worldview of God’s people in ancient times?

I want to explore this a bit more, but I want to hear from you. Whose worldview is inadequate, theirs or ours? Or is there a middle ground?

Theology and worldview

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Kwast's model

Yesterday, I began a discussion of the value of theology. The insights in the comments section was excellent. One thing Adam Gonnerman pointed out is that the term “theology” is imprecise. If we were to limit ourselves to the true meaning of the word, we would only study God when doing theology. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll stick with the general usage of the word.

When talking about culture and worldview, I often use a model that was developed by Lloyd Kwast. It views culture as having four layers. The outer layer is “Behavior,” looking at what the culture does. Below that layer lies “Values,” what the culture views to be good. Under values, we find “Beliefs,” what the culture sees as true. And underlying it all is “Worldview,” what the culture understands to be real.

When we read the Bible and merely look at what is done, I think it’s like looking at a culture and merely observing behavior. We’re not really going to understand what is going on. I won’t try and find parallels for each of the four layers, though you’re welcome to do so in the comment section. I will say that I think theology is the functional equivalent of worldview in this model. In other words, theology is to our faith what worldview is to our culture.

Theology underlies the behavior, beliefs and values of the church. If we merely look at the surface, we won’t really understand what is going on. To merely read 1 Corinthians 16 as a model for church funding is to miss the significance Paul placed on that offering. To imitate Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet without exploring all of the richness of meaning that was present in that act leaves us with an empty ritual instead of the powerful example of God serving man.

Do you think the comparison is valid between worldview and theology? What dangers do you see in a surface-level reading of Scripture? What problems arise if we dig too deep in our studies?

And dare we ask… how does our worldview influence our theology?

When theology was a bad word

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When I was in school, “theology” was considered to be a bad word within the churches of Christ. I know that some of you think I’m kidding, but when I came through ACU in the 1980s, they did not offer any courses titled “Theology,” at least that I can remember. I think the Missions Department had an Ethnotheology class, but the “mainline” Bible department did not at that time.

There were theology classes, of course. I took “Religious Teaching of the Old Testament” and “Religious Teaching of the New Testament with Tom Olbricht, courses which had a major impact on my understanding of the Bible. They were theology classes, but couldn’t be called that.

I also took a course in modern theology. It was a two-week summer class, and the professor was out almost 50% of the time. Might as well have been called “Modern Gibberish” for all that I took away from that class. What it mainly taught me was that I was right to have little to no interest in theology.

Except that I was wrong. When I was young, I wanted practical stuff, and theology seemed impractical. I wanted here and now, and theology seemed to be about navel gazing and whimsical projections about God and man, good and evil, and the nature of sin. I wanted to know how to preach, how to organize a Bible class, and how to exegete a text to better do the other two.

I was wrong. Whether or not we call it theology, we need theology. We need to look at the big picture. We need to understand how the little things fit into the big ones. I know that now.

I don’t think my story is all that unique. Now our universities not only have courses in theology, they call themselves schools of theology. What once were called biblical studies are now called theological studies. Some will lament this trend. I think it’s healthy.

I think ministers need a healthy grounding in theology. I think our churches need theology. I think new Christian need theology more than we think they do. It sounds good to say, “We just give people good, practical teaching for their everyday lives.” But it’s incomplete. Without theology, that “good, practical teaching” won’t get people where they need to be.

What do you think? What role does theological study have in the church today? Is it just for “college boys,” or can theology be taught to the blue collar guys as well?

Photo by Cara Photography