THE THEOLOGICAL LIFE
OH Book! infinite sweetnesse! let my heart
Suck ev’ry letter, and a hony gain,
Precious for any grief in any part;
To cleare the breast, to mollifie all pain.
Thou art all health, health thriving till it make
A full eternitie: thou art a masse
Of strange delights, where we may wish & take.
Ladies, look here; this is the thankfull glasse,
That mends the lookers eyes: this is the well
That washes what it shows. Who can indeare
Thy praise too much? thou art heav’ns Lidger here,
Working against the states of death and hell.
Thou art joyes handsell: heav’n lies flat in thee,
Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.
—George Herbert, “The Holy Scriptures I”
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16–17
1
The Centrality of Biblical Truth
GOD SPEAKS
To a Christian man there can be nothing either more necessary or profitable, than the knowledge of holy Scripture, forasmuch as in it is contained God’s true word, setting forth his glory, and also man’s duty.
—The Church of England’s First Book of Homilies, Homily 1
Theology is important because God is important. But sometimes the God we believe in is not a God worthy of being believed. The God we imagine may not be the God of the Bible.
By and large, biblical literacy has gone down with each generation over the past one hundred years. The concern for a theological life is low. There’s a stream of anti-intellectualism in evangelical Christianity that has been well documented.1 As Mark Noll quips in his plea for evangelicals to take up the call of intellectual rigor, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”2 One seminary president summarizes the research of a recent Barna study:
Fewer than half of all adults can name the four gospels. Many Christians cannot identify more than two or three of the disciples. According to data from the Barna Research Group, 60 percent of Americans can’t name even five of the Ten Commandments. “No wonder people break the Ten Commandments all the time. They don’t know what they are,” said George Barna, president of the firm. The bottom line? “Increasingly, America is biblically illiterate.”
Multiple surveys reveal the problem in stark terms. According to 82 percent of Americans, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a Bible verse. Those identified as born-again Christians did better—by one percent. A majority of adults think the Bible teaches that the most important purpose in life is taking care of one’s family.
Some of the statistics are enough to perplex even those aware of the problem. A Barna poll indicated that at least 12 percent of adults believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Another survey of graduating high school seniors revealed that over 50 percent thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. A considerable number of respondents to one poll indicated that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham. We are in big trouble.3
How are we to believe in a God we do not really know? How are we to pass on a story that we don’t know ourselves?
In 2005, when Christian Smith and his colleagues researched the religious beliefs of teenagers, they found that the emerging generation—even those raised within the church—had some unorthodox beliefs. To summarize their findings, they coined the term “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Essentially, this system of thought says there is a god who is largely indifferent and distant from people’s lives (Deism) but who wants them to be good (moralistic) so that they feel better about themselves (therapeutic).4 Earlier in the century, Richard Niebuhr described a similar perversion of Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”5 In an effort to make Christianity more palatable to the modern generation, whole denominations were swept up into a false version of Christianity. Isn’t a wrathful God outdated? Shouldn’t we focus on human goodness rather than sin? Is our sin really so serious that it needs judgment? Isn’t the cross a little gruesome for modern ears?
Sometimes the custom-made, curated God we profess is not worthy of being believed.
I write all this to document the state of theological literacy and doctrinal fidelity. There is not much to celebrate. In our culture and in the church, we seem to neglect truth. The problem is not just “out there”—how we are being deformed by culture. The problem is “in here”—how we as the church are catechizing young and old. For reasons known and unknown, those in the church are believing in a God that is not the one presented in the Scriptures. Without a doubt, a false view of God will affect how we are spiritually formed.
The weakening of truth claims in culture further complicates the church’s public testimony. In order to avoid offense, we are prone to soft-pedal truth claims. As Americans, we believe in belief and the right to choose what to believe. We believe in a version of God that isn’t interesting enough to warrant the attention involved in denial. Like Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, we’ve presented a bland God with no glory, a gospel with no need of judgment or forgiveness, a sanitized Jesus who issues no challenge to our otherwise comfortable lives. So, in the expression of Stanley Hauerwas, American Christianity has produced a people who say, without irony, “I believe Jesus is Lord—but that’s just my personal opinion.”6 The inherent irony of such a statement is that “Jesus is Lord” cannot be relegated to personal opinion. The claim is a truth of cosmic reality. Whether you believe it or not, Jesus is Lord. The lordship of Christ is not a matter of “personal opinion.”
We all believe something. The goal of theology or truth-seeking is to believe God as he is rather than how we want him to be. That’s a difficult task because we’re all prone to imagine God in our own image—as someone who likes what we like, who has the same enemies we have, and so on.
False doctrine is like a smudge of dirt on a window, obscuring God’s being and attributes. The resulting corrupted picture of God has an impact on our own development. As Ellen Charry notes, “By and large, whether intentionally or inadvertently, willingly or unwillingly, reflectively or innocently, we become what we know.”7 Likewise, we cannot become what we do not know. Our knowing is our becoming.
THE STORY OF TRUTH IN THE BIBLE
Living in accordance with the truth is central to the Bible. In the beginning, God spoke, and what God said was intelligible. God communicates and condescends to human understanding. What a profound and unique reality of Christianity! God wants to be known, so he uses language and concepts that humans can understand.
Early in our origin story, a slithering snake sneaks into the great garden that God creates. He asks the woman a simple question: “Did God actually say . . . ?” (Gen. 3:1). All of a sudden, deception creeps into the human imagination. Maybe God didn’t tell Adam and Eve the truth. Maybe the serpent is more trustworthy. The temptation to “be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:5) is too much to bear. The woman sees that the tree “was to be desired to make one wise” (3:6), so she takes the fruit and eats it. Our first parents thought wisdom came through satanic schemes and that they were sufficient apart from God to discern where truth was found.
The story of Israel is a story of promise and the failure to remember. God makes covenants with his people, leads them out of bondage “with an outstretched arm” (e.g., Exod. 6:6), and rescues them over and over—and the people of Israel forget. Psalm 78 recounts much of the Jewish narrative this way. The psalmist pleads with his readers to “give ear . . . to my teaching” (v. 1) and “tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done” (v. 4). Remembering the teaching and glorious deeds of God was the way the people of Israel catechized their young. But as the psalmist goes through Israel’s history, we learn that they kept forgetting. The story of Israel could be told as God continuing to show mercy and the people of Israel regularly forgetting what God has done. (And the story of the church isn’t much different, unfortunately!) Israel cannot dodge the blame. The burden of passing on the words and works of God faithfully falls on the elder generations.
