Interesting links

Talking Snake is still conducting his research trip around the Bible belt. He falls out with Ken Ham, visits a rather odd passion play, experiences bits of the US culture war, and encounters one of the beasts of revelation. Interesting stuff.

The Daily Gazelle is also on tour in the USA, and offers some reflections on gun control and Independence Day celebrations.

Chris Petersen offers some interesting thoughts on the development (bad choice of word, I know) of early Christology.

Richard's recent sermon on the trinity is now available online, and he's found an interesting quote from B B Warfield on revelation and scripture.

Finally, Q asks if it is essential for Christians to believe in the trinity. He makes an interesting case, but I think I disagree.

On finishing my studies

My computer and internet connection have been raised to life, though not completely resurrected, and I expect both to die again very soon, but I hope to squeeze in some blogging before that happens. I'm also preparing to move house in the next few days whilst fruitlessly attempting to find a job so I don't have too much time to devote to blogging. More worryingly, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I have absolutely zero inspiration to sit down and write anything that is in any way connected with Theology and Biblical studies. It must be post graduation fatigue, or something like that.

It's quite rare that I ever write anything directly about my own spiritual journey (this being the one exception to date) but I think now might be a good time to reflect on the last few years that I've spent studying Theology and how it has changed my faith.

Does studying Theology ruin your faith?

This is, I think, a question that gets asked quite often. In fact in the charismatic-evangelical circles in which I've spent most of my Christian life it is more or less a given that the academic study of theology and the scriptures is, generally speaking, a bad thing. Everyone knows someone who has gone off to Bible College or University and lost their faith and thus, it is assumed, academic theology is at best something to be approached only with the longest of barge poles, if it all. Not unrelated to this is another paradigm that embraces academic study - but only on the provision that the fruits of one's own academic efforts tick all the right boxes and stay within all the right boundaries. It is commendable to study Genesis for example, but only if you remain a convinced six-day creationist at the end of it all. Or it might be considered a worthy calling to study scripture, but not if this causes you to question the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. This paradigm is, I think, almost as lamentable as refusing to engage in all academic study of theology from the outset.

-> A dashing young blogger in the first year of his theology degree

Theology may not ruin your faith, but it will certainly change it. Some of the people that I started my degree with back in 2002 have drifted away from their faith altogether after leaving college, some have gone on to be pastors, missionaries, and youth workers in the service of the Kingdom. Both groups sit in the same classes, read the same books, and write the same essays, and yet studying Theology in detail impacts people in very different ways.

I look back at my pre-University teenage faith with mixed feelings. Most are positive, though I do look back at some aspects of and incidents in my life of faith that are positively embarrassing in the same way that several of my haircuts, fashion choices, and appearance on Fifteen-to-One For Schools were embarrassing- they were great at the time but do not look so good in hindsight. I was a staunch young earth creationist, a vocal defender of biblical inerrancy (though I couldn't have explained to you what that was, just that I was supposed to believe it), and heavily-armed with my copies of Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict (hardback, 2 volumes in 1!) and Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology I was more than prepared to give an answer to everyone who asked me, or even those who didn't ask me.

I was also slightly suspicious of theological types who in my view were generally not quite "on fire" enough, and who ought to be, well, as on fire as me and the preachers that I liked to listen to. I don't think that I ever actually articulated this thought even in my own mind, but I'm fairly certain that I thought that when I began studying theology, I would learn a few new things but that basically I had a lot more to teach than I had to learn.

Happily, I was very wrong.

Asking questions

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of studying theology is the questions that we begin to ask. Questions are the means by which we open up doors to exciting and challenging new adventures, but they are often also the means by which that which is familiar and comfortable can quickly unravel and fall apart. I was quite surprised to learn for example that there are questions over the authorship of some books of the Bible, or that the Bible sometimes contradicts itself on some historical matters, or that we don't have any original manuscripts of the New Testament, or that the warm fuzzy feeling I get when I worship is a disastrous place to begin my doctrine of God, or that the doctrine of the Trinity is not an obscurity that we can really do without, and so on, and so on.

Perhaps the most difficult and arduous part of building a faith that was intellectually rigorous was that so much of the old had to be swept away before the new could be built. Theology was not, I quickly discovered, a matter of simply assembling proof-texts, baking them with my own presuppositions, and then voila! - producing doctrines by the dozen. Early on I learned that the most important lesson that I think anyone can ever learn in studying theology is to understand the mystery of God. For every question you answer as a theologian, you raise twenty more. We can never apprehend God or exhaust the depths of his being, we can only truly know him in wonder and in reverent awe. For me, the key to being a theology student is to remember that all our learning about God is such a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of all that God is, and that we can never have all our questions answered, and neither can we always claim to answer for God about things of which we are ultimately ignorant: I don't know where evil came from, or where it will go. I don't know why God allows holocausts or why children die of terrible diseases, or how Jesus is both fully God and fully human, or how God will redeem time and history itself, or how we resolve the tension between human will and divine sovereignty, and so on, and so on.

I like not knowing the answers to these questions, but the downside of this is that I have begun to be weary of Christians who do claim to have an answer to absolutely everything. They can tell you exactly how Noah arranged the animals on the Ark without running out of space, what the Bible says about dinosaurs, exactly why God allows innocent people to suffer, when the end of the world will be, and so on. Christians are sometimes accused of being arrogant and claiming to know the truth about absolutely everything, and sometimes these accusations are wholly justified. I really struggle with people like this - partly because I recognise so much of my former self in them - but mainly because the idea that God can be reduced down and neatly packaged in this way is absurd. Learning to say "I don't know" is one of the most liberating things I've ever learned, and one of the most honest.

I didn't do very well in the first year of my degree, but the summer after my first year my then-fiancee broke up with me which left a lot of hurt and a lot of space to fill in my life. I threw myself into studying just to have something to concentrate on, and I found that something in me suddenly sparked into life, and that studying theology and the Bible was the most exciting, fascinating, and invigorating thing that I could do. I discovered the work of Jürgen Moltmann and N T Wright, and of Karl Barth and Martin Luther, and found that theology was not only incredibly exciting, but that it was profound and nourishing. Far from being the antithesis to a healthy Christian life, as I had believed and been taught up to then, it became a central part of the very essence and structure of my faith.

Since I was a child I have been a voracious reader and an insatiable appetite for asking questions, and as long as I continue to be so I will continue to study theology.

Changes

Studying theology has changed my Christian life irreversibly. Theology may not ruin your faith, but (and I say this as a sincere warning to anyone contemplating theological study) it will almost certainly reshape your faith, perhaps even in such a way that it becomes unrecognisable. I also think that you can't ever go back to how your faith was before, it just seems impossible. It is hard when you re-listen to preachers that you idolised in your youth and realise that often a lot of what they are saying is not true, and that a lot of it is often superficial hype. There is always the trap of becoming critical and prideful too (though you don't have to study theology to fall into that one!). Also, you gradually discover that almost everyone is a pelagian

There were a few intellectual changes that I made subconsciously at one time or another. I won't argue you into a corner over six-day creationism anymore, or teach you that your decision for Jesus is what saves you, or insist that the sacraments are only a symbol and that anything more that this is papist idolatry. Most of what I now believe hasn't replaced what I believed before, but it has simply added to it in areas of Christianity that I hadn't even considered in the past.

<- Jesus: not your girlfriend.

Perhaps the biggest change was in my own spiritual life. Previously I wouldn't have contemplated praying without babbling in tongues for at least ten minutes, binding a few demons, and then quietly waiting until I got a "word" or a "picture" from God before moving on with my day. I wanted God to tell me what to do every moment of the day, and if I couldn't feel God leading me I would immediately begin a circle of introspection in which I ruthlessly hunted for every possible taint of sin and evil within me (it's not very hard to find such things either) and then despair of my own failing and wretchedness. Such are the fruits of one raised in charismatic-pentecostal revivalism, but you cannot live and function like that as a Christian. It's mentally exhausting to try and hear God's voice 24/7, and to try and fight off every negative thought with a bible verse.

I also got really tired of people who claimed that God was speaking to them directly every five minutes and who prefaced every conversation with "I really feel God saying" or "God is really speaking to me about...". I am not saying they are wrong, or that God does not speak to people, but that in many (most?) instances spirituality of this nature is a sticky web of subjectivity, imagination, and self-projection. It's also one of the reasons so much modern worship is bland "Jesus is my girlfriend" pap-pop that reflects nothing of the glory or greatness of God. Perhaps it's just my inner recovering-charismatic speaking, but Ludwig Feuerbach certainly does have something to say to the modern church.

My own spiritual life is almost totally unrecognisable from what it was four or five years ago. I'm more likely to sit in contemplative silence than wave my arms around at Soul Survivor, and I'd rather commune with God and with others through a responsive reading than through a time of prophecy with people rolling on the carpet. I'd choose to say the Nicene Creed together with my church rather than hear about how God is about to send a mighty revival in these (the last) days, I'd rather go through confession and communion than end a service by running forward to the front of a meeting to be delivered from the spirit of heavy metal, and you're more likely to find me saying the Jesus Prayer than yelling at demons in an excessively long spiritual monologue that replaces all punctuation with the word "Lord".

Not all of these changes are simply the result of studying theology though. I was 19 when I enrolled to study Theology, and now I'm almost 25, and part of the changes I've undergone are just a part of growing up and accquiring a little wisdom. My move to more traditional and less emotionally-driven (and faddy) forms of spirituality is also partly a reaction against some of the hype, disappointment, and excesses of my days in the charismatic church. I never used to like highly liturgical services with set prayers and so on, but I now understand a lot more about them and find them to be of great value.

Studyong theology has never made me want to give up my faith. The only thing that has ever really come close to making me want to despair has been the attitude of some other Christians who are anything but Christlike in their attitude, and you get them both inside and outside of academia (but mostly on the internet, for some reason). Studying theology has reshaped, pruned, and enlivened my faith, and I have never had more confidence in the Gospel than I have as a result of attempting to add intellectual strength and depth to my heart enthusiasm, and what I understand by "the Gospel" stretches far beyond how you get to heaven when you die, and covers every area of life that human beings encounter.