To preface this series, as part of my theology class at Midwestern, each student must write a one-page response to a question about the material. As we have had a few weeks in, I have plenty of non-SBC politics stuff to share with the faithful few of you who still read this blog! Enjoy and feel free to comment!
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“What is theology?”
Theology is the contemplation of the divine. Its aim is not the completion of the journey, but the fulfillment of the growth of the person traveling its road.
Intellectually, we consider God with our logic, our gift from Him as part of our human nature, as reflections of His image. His revelation to us in the Scriptures conveys the basis for our deductions concerning the character of His divinity, as well as many other truths. As we read and study and grow into His image, we somehow come to understand, while knowing that the infinitesimal comprehension we have is nothing compared to the vast fullness of His nature our limited minds cannot even begin to fathom.
Emotionally, we engage God first through the struggle of our will against His, our rebellion bearing testimony both to our inadequacy without Him and our inborn desire to oppose Him nonetheless. At the moment of crisis, when we see our sin and its harm to ourselves and to our Maker, we next feel the emptiness of our past life and the wonder and promise of the eternal one He offers. We learn of God’s love not as a sterile, academic reality, but a vital and thriving force that draws us to Him and sustains and strengthens our weaknesses before Him. In the day-by-day walk that follows salvation, when we hourly surrender ourselves to His wisdom and guidance, we finally and progressively learn of the greatness of His glory and character, to which we respond with the unspoken plea to know yet more of Him.
Finally, there is an aspect of our nature that lies beyond description in our frail English language. For lack of a better term, one might call it the deep place of our soul. Here the truth of God resonates like a deep ocean current, a tide draws to its peak by the proximity of Immanuel. More than head knowledge or heart empathy, we commune here beyond words, maybe even beyond conscious, concrete thought, with the Transcendent Savior and the abiding peace that He brings. it is here that theology truly resides. Beyond the systematization and the flowery language, past content and passion and human ideas, He waits for His own to return to Him, “to be still and know Him”, to find their end at the palce of their beginning: in Him.
