Like It or Not, You Are A Theologian

Are you a theologian? Of course you are! Do you have a systematic theology? Of course you do! The only remaining questions are how good of a theologian you are, and how orthodox your theology is.

The excerpt below is from "The Myth of Non-Theology and Neutrality" by Lisa Robinson

As I observed a few discussion threads over the past few days on Christian topics, a theme tends to emerge. Some Christians disdain any mention of theology, doctrine or hermeneutics. You’ll get one pitted against each such as theology vs true faith or doctrine vs scripture. A typical statement goes like this that one person told me – “theology and doctrine has its place but that is not the substance of our faith.” Of course this is a ridiculous statement..

Every Christian has a theology, a set of doctrine and a hermeneutic. Everyone!

Theology is whatever we think about God.

Doctrine is what we believe that theology teaches.

Hermeneutics is how we interpret what theology teaches.

If you say the substance of your faith is Jesus Christ, then you have to come to some conclusions about what that means, who he is and how you arrive at your conclusions. This is the task of theology and without it, you have no reasonable basis to come to any conclusions about the Christian faith.

This also supposes that you have some way of interpreting the facts about the Christian faith. From a Protestant perspective, this presumes that one is basing their understanding on the Bible, recognizing that it is the testimony of Jesus Christ cover to cover, breathed out by God to give us his word through the pens, personalities, and literary style of 40 authors (2 Tim. 3:16-17).  The problem then is not knowing what it is and believing that we have complete neutrality when approaching the Bible or using other means to determine our faith. We all have some way of formulating what we believe and why we believe it.....

Good article - Read it all at the link.