Why Theology Matters

I've come to learn that theology matters. And it matters not because we want a good grade on a test but because what we know about God shapes the way we think and live. What you believe about God's nature - what he is like, what he wants from you, and whether or not you will answer to him - affects every part of your life.

Theology matters because if we get it wrong, then our whole life will be wrong.

I know the idea of "studying" God often rubs people the wrong way. It sounds cold and theoretical, as if God were a frog carcass to dissect in a lab or a set of ideas that we memorise like math proofs.

But studying God doesn't have to be like that. You can study him the way you study a sunset that leaves you speechless. You can study him the way a man studies the wife he passionately loves. Does anyone fault him for noting her every like and dislike? Is it clinical for him to desire to know the thoughts and longings of her heart? Or to want to hear her speak?

Knowledge doesn't have to be dry and lifeless. And when you think about it, exactly what is our alternative? Ignorance? Falsehood?

We're either building our lives on the reality of what God is truly like and what he's about, or we're basing our lives on our own imagination and misconceptions.

We're all theologians. The question is whether what we know about God is true.

- Joshua Harris, Dug Down Deep: Unearthing What I Believe and Why It Matters

Now the layman or amateur needs to be instructed as well as to be exhorted. In this age his need for knowledge is particularly pressing. Nor would I admit any sharp division between the two kinds of book.

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others.

I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

- C. S. Lewis, Introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation

"We do not always recognise that the mark of true growth in the study of Scripture is not so much that we become masters of the text as that we are mastered by the text." - D. A. Carson, The Trials of Biblical Studies in Andrew J. B. Cameron and Brian S. Rosner, The Trials of Theology: Becoming a 'Proven Worker' in a Dangerous Business

Links: Philosophy and Theology (3 Jan 10), I think, therefore I am (10 Aug 10), Scripture and the Interpretation of Scripture (4 Sep 10)