The longer I am in school, the more frequently I find myself
asking definitional questions. The most life changing class I have yet taken
spent a semester examining different answers to the question, “what is history?”
This past semester I took my first formal theology course, taught by Dr. Steven
McKinion. Raised in church and having come to Christ at a young age, I have
heard the term “theology” bandied about for as long as I can remember, yet the
user rarely pauses to explain what exactly he means by it. While a quick
thought on word composition yields the obvious “study of God” definition, I
find such a vague concept unhelpful.
Before moving into my attempt at an answer to the question
posed, a definition of theology has been on my mind lately in contrast to a
group of British theologians in a school of thought called “Radical Orthodoxy.”
They propose some fascinating ideas, yet as I listened to an interview with one
of the leading lights of the movement, I noticed one missing piece in his
discussion of theology – Jesus! He explained, in very eloquent terms, how the
church was the universal redemption of the cosmos by the divine and how all who
are born into the human race are born into the church. As an evangelical, I
reject several of his established church premises, but I was stuck right back
at the beginning. If this scholar is an Oxford University theologian, what then
is theology for a Christian?
With that context in mind, I was reading in I Peter this
morning and could not move past Peter’s greeting. I normally skim through the
introductory material in an epistle, but this one gripped me. Peter writes, “To
those who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Cappadocia, Asia, and
Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the
sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling
with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you” (I Peter 1:1-2).
Verse two is what caught my attention. I wonder if theology is the attempt to understand
and relate the four headings Paul strings together in this compact sentence.
What if theology, rather than being abstract philosophy for
religiously inclined people, is the attempt to comprehend the foreknowledge of
God working itself out in the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ and
now in the body of the church? What if the telos of theology, rather than the
increase of abstract knowledge of the minutia of grammar (vital as those are),
is to produce growing sanctification, greater holiness in the believer as he
relates to God and to others?
Peter’s third subject reminds me of how Dr. David Allen
Black began his Greek II course – “Why are you learning New Testament Greek?”
thunders the elderly professor in a thin white beard. “So we can read the New
Testament?” answers the timid student in the third row. “NO! So we can obey it!”
The point of greater knowledge is to increase obedience to Christ. Theological
reflection should result in greater love of God and his creation.
Paul concludes his sentence with “for sprinkling with his
blood.” Part of growth in the Christian life is to understand the importance of
our bloody religion. The author of Hebrews spends much space on the importance
of blood in the Old Covenant sacrificial system, arguing that we needed blood
of a different kind to secure a different, permanent redemption. Perhaps the
essence of theology is articulating the need for the blood, the work of the
blood, and then how we must live as people covered in the blood of the risen
Lamb.
In my limited experience, it seems that theology, like other
disciplines, can get bogged down in terminology, obscure German names, and be
unreadable by ordinary people. If Jesus did not come to establish a race of
scholars but a redeemed community, then the best of theology remains centered upon
the crux of the faith: the knowledge of
God and its’ outworking in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the
increasing sanctification of the believer through obedience to the revelation
of God, and the importance of the blood shed on Calvary for our ultimate
redemption.
