Category: theology

The context of theology

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 2 – The Kingdom Revealed – Chapter 13 – Distinctives within the body of Christ

The Context of Theology

[Bible references: Matthew 22:37-39; John 13:34-35; 15:1-17; Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12; 13; Ephesians 4:11-16]

More than doctrine

Everybody has an opinion of some sort when it comes to ideas about God. That is, everybody practices theology. According to one classical definition, theology is “faith seeking understanding.”[1] The only question is. whether our theology is good or bad. That said, there are some who may question whether or not to make a big deal of theology because it seems to create such divisiveness and others think that we should just keep everything as simple as possible.

We were created by God with mind, body, and soul – and it is through all those means that we can come to know God. The formal field of study that we call “theology” has often been restricted to academia, focusing on the intellectual – the mind; but as beings created in the image of God it would be a mistake to restrict our theology to just our mind. It is through our whole being that we can come to know and be transformed by God. Jesus once said that this transformed people would be recognized not by their knowledge, but by their love. Although it is beneficial if our love is informed by our knowledge, love is expressed in its action. In fact, Jesus identified the greatest commandments as loving God and loving our neighbors. Therefore, the practice of following Jesus (aka discipleship) is something we practice in community.

Once we understand all this, that our understanding of God requires the effort of our whole being, then we can see that while theology may have an academic component, it is more than an intellectual exercise. In fact, our soul, or spirit, is the first place in our being to examine our theology. Our theology is lacking if our God’s love is not overflowing through us into the rest of our lives.

To evaluate what our overflowing love might look like, we can consider the descriptions we find for the “fruit of the spirit” as shown in Galatians 5 and in 1 Corinthians 13: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, does not envy or boast, is not proud, rude or self-seeking, is not easily angered, takes no account of wrongs, takes no pleasure in evil, rejoices in truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. We can also consider how we express our love through the various gifts of God that He provides each one of us for the purpose of building each other up in the faith: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophets, discernments, tongues and their interpretation, leadership, serving, exhortation, giving, mercy, helps apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher.

It is interesting that many non-Christians, even those with limited knowledge of the Bible or of the church, are able to critique Christians by contrasting Christians with Christ. They may possibly misunderstand Christ, but because they have been designed as image-bearers of God, even they have some basis to compare the behavior of others to Christ.

The whole of faith

Meanwhile, in this in-between time, even disciples of Jesus are affected by sin and our theology is subject to corruption. We misuse theology in various ways: sometimes using it as a tool to achieve something else such as gaining power or justifying bad attitudes (e.g., arrogance or hatred), sometimes by focusing on just the academic side while neglecting the spiritual or practical aspects; or sometimes neglecting the academic side and try to avoid the truth or complexities of theology and simply stop asking questions, preferring instead to yield to fideism, which can be described as the “exclusive or basic reliance of faith alone” [2]

A robust faith is not a blind faith, but rather a thinking faith, a faith with eyes wide open to the realities of life’s circumstances and the reality of God’s providence,[3] a faith that seeks God with our whole self: body, mind, and spirit. So, we should not ignore the academic side of our faith or our theology. The process of taking all the knowledge we have gathered about God and then using that to “build up into an organic and consistent whole all our knowledge of God and of the relations between God and the universe” is called systematic theology.[4]

The all-encompassing nature of systematic theology requires care. Scientific models are helpful in understanding natural phenomena but are limited in predicting future behavior because the models are only approximations of the phenomena they describe. Similarly, our systematic theologies are helpful in understanding the infinite God and his works, but we need to be aware of its limitations. One of those limitations is how our perceptions are influenced by our particular personality, our particular environment/culture, our particular language, and our particular historical context.[5]

The problem of the other

Ever since the creation of humanity, we have continually chosen to idolize ourselves and to not love God, which also meant we have chosen to not love others. This mindset then causes us to blame whatever problems we have on others or even to blame God. It is this sort of mindset that would cause the New Testament church to disconnect itself from its Judaic heritage, setting the church up for continued divisiveness in the future. So it is worth exploring what led to the church to the severing its Judaic roots.

We know that Jesus spoke of how scriptures – and he could only be referring to what we call the Old Testament scriptures – pointed to him and his ministry, and how he was the fulfillment of those scriptures. That would mean that Jesus’ ministry was a continuation of God’s love and grace as set out in the Old Testament. Later on, as the ministry of the church strongly expanded to Gentiles, the apostle Paul spelled out that the Gentiles in the church were like the branch of a wild olive tree being grafted into nurtured tree; the tree being the Jews that were in the church and whose roots went back to the Old Testament people of faith. Paul then warned the Gentiles not to become arrogant about any of the other branches that were broken off because God is capable of grafting the original branches back onto the tree.

As the ministry to the Gentiles proceeded and expanded, Christian Jews still met in the temple and the synagogues with the non-Christian Jews, increasing their ministry there even as many of the non-Christian Jews strongly resisted. But there were two events that would change the trajectory of the church.

In AD 66 the zealots started to revolt against the Roman government. The Christians in Jerusalem want to avoid getting caught up in the rebellions and moved to Pella, causing tension between the zealots and the Christians. After the rebellion was defeated by the Romans in AD 70, the temple was destroyed and the Jews were scattered, but now there was increased tension between the Christian and non-Christian Jews.

Later on, in AD 132, a zealot nicknamed Bar Kokhba (meaning “son of the star”) arose to start another rebellion. He, with the support of a prominent rabbi, declared himself a messiah. Now, the Christian Jews not only did not want to participate in a rebellion, but they had to refuse to acknowledge a messiah other than Jesus. And the zealots, who supported Bar Kokhba, declared Bar Kokhba as messiah, thus rejecting Jesus as messiah, which quickly led to a hardening of those non-Christian Jews against the church, making them more resistant than before to the gospel. When the Romans defeated the zealots, Jews were now banned on penalty of death, from entering Jerusalem.

After this point, when leaders in the church tried to reach the Jews with the gospel, they encountered hardened hearts. However, instead of the recognizing that it had been foretold that Jews hearts would be hardened until the time of the Gentiles was over, the leaders in the church now arrogantly hardened their own hearts and became increasingly anti-Semitic. This resulted in the church increasingly turning away from their own roots and thus becoming susceptible to increasing influence of Greek philosophy. This would create dramatic effects in the development of theology in such areas as the rejection of the human body and sexuality as evil and sinful, and the conversion of asceticism from a form of spiritual discipline to a rejection of the pleasures God created as good things.[6]

The limits of language

Early on, in church history, there was an attempt to overcome the problem of the language barrier in the church. It was thought that the church could be united if theologians across the church world could use a common theological language. This attempt in the 5th century, when the languages included Aramaic, Greek, and Latin as well as all the local languages, did make it easier to find solutions to theological problems, but the negative consequence was that differences in theological views became heightened, leading to what may be the inevitable schisms in the church.

Theologians believed that one faith has to be expressed in one language … Distortion of language, they believed, inevitably leads to distortion of the common faith … ‘Byzantine scholasticism’ emerged in the post-Cyrillian era. This shift had both positive and negative consequences. The positive ones were that theologians started speaking one language. This helped them to easier find solutions to theological problems … The negative consequences of language-centrism were that when theologians disagreed on terms or categories, the regarded their disagreements about theological formulas as essential theological difference. This became one of the most important reasons of the church schism in the post-Cyrillian era.[7]

We cannot approach any field of study as a blank slate. All of our particular factors contribute to which particular theological method people may choose to use. Charles Hodge identified three general classes of methods used within the field of systematic theology: Speculative, Mystical, and Inductive.[8] Given all of that, we can see that there can be many approaches to even framing the questions we might ask about God, never mind the types of answers towards which we may lean. Engaging in the quest of trying to understand the current multi-faceted state of the current church can be overwhelming and most people don’t have the time to study a typical church history book of 800-1000 pages. To make this task more bearable, the approach here will not be to present a comprehensive study but to develop an overview of the church by focusing on 1) the internal and external issues that affected the development of the church, and 2) the main questions that the church has asked and briefly sharing the different answers formulated by different congregations.

[1] Migliore, Daniel L. “Faith Seeking Understanding”  William B. Eerdmans Publishing, third edition. 1991

[2] Amesbury, Richard. “Fideism” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ©2016 plato.stanford.edu/entries/fideism

[3] Migliore, Daniel L. “Faith Seeking Understanding” William B. Eerdmans Publishing, third edition. 1991 (pp. 3-5)

[4] Bible Study Tools “Chapter III – Method of Theology” Bible Study Tools www.biblestudytools.com/classics/strong-systematic-theology/part-i-prolegomena/chapter-iii-method-of-theology.html

[5] Migliore, Daniel L. “Faith Seeking Understanding” William B. Eerdmans Publishing, third edition. 1991 (p.205) Confession of Jesus Christ takes place in particular historical and cultural contexts … our response to questions of who we say Jesus Christ is and how he helps us will be s shaped in important ways by the particular contexts in which these questions arise … all theology is contextual

[6] Dualism rejects the physical world as evil or not desirable. “Mystery of Wisdom.” (p. 166)

[7] Hovorun, Cyril. Studia Patristica Vol. LVIII, Volume 6: Neoplatonism and Patristics, Peters 2013.  “Importance of Neoplatonism on Formation of Theological Language” (p. 17-28)

[8] Hodge, Charles, “Systematic Theology” (Chapter I: On Method) Eerdmans Publishing Company, (Chapter I: On Method) 1940

Reflect

How can love affect your ability to know someone?

Observe

Read John 15:1-17; Ephesians 4:11-16. How do these passages relate to each other?