Usefulness of Good Theology, Part 2

Preachers and Christians frequently speak of getting one’s “head knowledge” down into one’s heart. While common this statement is quite misleading if not qualified—for really what is required to know the truth is to receive truth into one’s heart by faith and submit one’s mind to God. Obviously we all hear and process truth statements about God, moral principles and foundational life choices through our intellectual faculties. But it is in the heart (the inner person) where we decide what to do with the truth we hear.  
The mind is useful for reflection and to organize the content of knowledge but not to discern or decide the truthfulness of God’s revelation. The faculty of the mind, by itself, is simply not capable of doing this. Those who think so are simply fooling themselves and mistaking cognitive analysis for “independent” judgment regarding the truthfulness of a statement about Reality. For the mind is servant to the heart (that is, the seat of the will); to reverse this is to make one’s intellect God. When a person has deified him or herself then naturally the capacities of the self are thought to be entirely adequate to discern moral rightness or wrongness and validity of claims about reality. But this is sheer self-deception.
This is why one’s theological views (whether they be crude, confused or refined and precise) flow out of one’s life experience. The truest test of belief is behavior—for behavior communicates the convictions of the heart (and thus the choices one makes). Yet this very fact makes it that much more necessary for biblical teaching to be clearly taught. For people need to hear the Gospel and engage their wills and intellects to learn the principles from Scripture (the truth) in order to know how to live righteously. Paul strongly emphasized to Timothy and Titus (see his letters to them) that they must press upon their hearers’ “sound doctrine”; that is, to plainly teach and make practical application of God’s Word for the people they served.
The truth one finds in the Scripture is addressed to the human heart (that is, to the human will). God appeals, pleads, warns, promises, commands and invites us to hear and come near to him. God speaks into our darkened minds, with the piercing light of truth, to reach the will. And the human heart is desperately perverse and stubborn (Jeremiah 17:9). Human beings are spiritually blinded because they choose sin over the truth of knowing the living God.
The Lord Jesus said: “‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, yours sin remains.’” (John 9:39-41, NRSV) Those who prefer spiritual darkness love sin and thus refuse to receive truth which Jesus speaks and embodies. Whether a person is religious or not, or practices some kind of “spirituality” or is an atheist, makes no difference regarding Jesus’ point. All such persons trust in themselves and love their sin more than anything else or anyone else. Such is the tragedy of the unredeemed human heart.

Thus the clear proclamation of God’s word through teaching is extraordinarily useful in people’s lives. How will anyone know about God if not taught? How can anyone turn to the living God if not taught accurately? And the person with true faith will fully utilize the intellect to engage and grow in spiritual knowledge and wisdom. “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” (Psalm 119:68) And again, “The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy. They [his precepts] are established for ever and ever, to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness.” (Psalm 111:7-8, NRSV) 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Theophan the Recluse on Combating the Passions

  “Keep to one thing: When the passionate is detected, immediately arm yourself against it with wrath and hostile anger. This anger in spiritual warfare has the very same significance as when an evil person is assaulting you; you have to strike back at him hard. . . . What does the victim of an assault by an evil person do? After striking the person, he calls for help. The watchmen answer his call and save him from trouble. This is also what must be done in spiritual warfare with the passions. Once you have become angry at the passion, you have to call out for help: Be attentive to my help, O Lord of my salvation! O Lord, be attentive unto my help, make haste to help me! When appealing to the Lord in this manner, do not fall away from Him through attention toward what is going on inside of you, but keep standing before the Lord, imploring Him for help. Run at once from this enemy as from a blazing fire.  There is something others have done, and perhaps do even now. That is, once they
Read more

Christendom, Converts and Spiritual Conversion

  “Through all those centuries of clashing and changing frontiers, Christendom in terms of time and space extended itself. Its missionaries succeeded among the barbaric as they had among the cultured, and such gatherings as the Synod of Whitby, far by the North Sea and almost on the edge of the ancient Empire, repeated, to their degree, the Council of Nicaea. Both the Gospel and the Creed mastered the new world. But the method of conversion had perhaps changed somewhat. In the old days it had been individuals who had been converted, either by intellectual persuasion or spiritual violence, by grace, by intellect, or (at lowest) by fashion. But now it was whole communities which were abruptly annexed. The prestige, the power, and no doubt sometimes the piety of Christendom subdued one dynasty after another; a sudden rain of culture and Christianity descended over their territories, and the Christianity was often no more than the chief interference of the culture. The mass of the converts
Read more

The Charisms of the Holy Spirit in the Life of Churches

The affirmation and exercise of charisms has varied over time and been shaped by the prevailing theological assumptions about formal church structure and leadership of a given tradition. Theological assumptions are, as a matter of course, profoundly colored by the perspectives of the people developing them in the context of the current hegemonic cultural presuppositions. This is especially true of ecclesiology and pneumatology. Indeed, the ways in which different Christian traditions have come to counterbalance these two categories of Christian theology speaks volumes about their fundamental views of God and human salvation. The different intellectual categories which systematic theologians attempt to describe are all intertwined in people’s actual thought and practice.  In churches with a traditional emphasis on the Episcopal model of leadership and ministry the focus of thought has been on the position and work of formal leaders. The ministry of laypersons was not emphasized becau
Read more