Behold, God is great, and we know Him not! – Job 36:26
We desperately need a revolution in theology. It seems on the one hand we have those that so articulate and systematize God that it appears as though they believe the human mind can comprehend and outline the Divine One. On the other hand, there are those who practically reject the human mind as having any worth in relation to an understanding of God and so fail to articulate a theology. Neither approach is the theology which we desperately need in this hour.
The Theology that is Needed
In this hour, the majesty and mystery of God are desperately missing. As believers we have so diagrammed and defined God because of our own discomfort with the mystery that God is that we have lost the very sense of awe which must result from any valid theology. We have embraced systems of theology, rather than embracing the One for whom theology exists. This is because it is much easier, and must less costly, to deal with ideas and facts than it is to interact with a holy God so far beyond anything a fallen man can conceive of. Theology, by definition, is to be the study of the One upon the throne (Revelation 4), and the primary result of studying that One must be worship rather than dissection and descriptions of a scientific kind.
Let the student of theology see the heavenly reaction to God pictured in Revelation 4 as the culmination of a proper study of theology. In a valid study of theology, the mind does not grow more confident in its apprehension of God, but rather trembles even more at the uncreated One as He unfolds another facet of His being to a lowly man. The more you comprehend about God, the more you realize that you do not know about the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity.
This new theology then must be a theology of wonder that focuses, not on defining God in human terms, but in describing Him as best we can until the heart is provoked to cry out in wonder and adoration at the majesty and mystery of the Godhead. Theology merely provokes the mind to this adoration and once the rush of adoration comes and you touch God, the perceptions that flood the human spirit transcend anything that could be contained in something of a systematic kind.
Theology must drive us to encounter with God. We must approach theology with a trembling hand, lest we come to believe that we can apprehend God with our own minds. It should be quite obvious that God transcends us on every level and yet theology often fails to acknowledge this in a way that touches the human heart. Theology must point the way to worship and encounter with God and Scripture clearly teaches us that any encounter with God leaves a human crying out, “woe is me, for I am undone!” In this hour, we desperately need a theology that is designed to produce that cry.
The Proper Place of the Mind
What then is the place of the human mind? The human mind is significant because God made it and our ability to comprehend and reason exists solely because we are made in His image. The animals do not have a mind like ours, as the human mind is unique to those created in God’s image. With this understanding, we can see clearly that God desires that believers exercise their minds and He also desires to infuse the human mind with a knowledge of Himself as the operation of our minuscule minds reflects His glorious mind.
It is critical then how we think about God with our minds and it is for this purpose that theology exists. Consider for a moment how you think about another and how drastically that can affect your communications, your actions, and your devotion. The things that you believe or feel to be true about another individual have an immense effect on how you relate to that individual and what the eventual outcome of your relationship with that individual will be.
Likewise, though the mind only has a minuscule understanding of God, that understanding is significant. If we think wrongly about God, we will relate wrongly to Him. Conversely, if we think rightly about God, it will liberate us to approach Him in the spirit. This is not to say that we need to think correctly before we can encounter God in an authentic way, for if that were the case then no man could ever relate to Him. The issue, rather, is that wrong thinking about God can hinder our pursuit of Him and our relationship to Him.
The idea is not so much that all our thinking about God will be perfect, but rather than we strive to avoid thinking things about God that are untrue so that those things will not serve as hindrances to encountering God in an authentic way. While God mercifully and repeatedly breaks through our mental errors to touch us, we do well to avoid erecting any unnecessary barriers.
Conversely, proper thinking about God drives the heart to wonder and worship so thinking correct thoughts about God is an invaluable aid to worship in the spirit and we should expect a proper theology to produce this outcome. So, while avoiding wrong thinking about God, where possible, can help eliminate barriers to interacting with God, likewise thinking correct thoughts about God, as much as possible, can be a tremendous blessing and serve to lead us into worship and adoration.
The problem with the mind comes in when man limits His understanding of life and of God to the capacity of the human mind. We must rather see the human mind as a limited thing that can comprehend elements of God, but cannot comprehend anything approaching the fullness of God or the intrinsic nature of God. The mind must stand below the Spirit in the aspect of relating to and comprehending the Divine. The mind then can serve as a useful servant in union with correct theology, but must not be seen as the dominating element of man’s relation with God.
God desires us to consider Him with our minds, as He gave them to us, but He then desires that the consideration of our minds gives way to adoration, awe, and encounter in the spirit. In this way, the mind serves its useful purpose of leading us into worship. It is worship to consider God with our minds, therefore to reject the intellectual consideration of God is to hinder an avenue of worship. That being said, the mind must also remain the faithful servant of the spirit. The considerations of the mind should always lead the mind to the conclusion that it can understand only the simplest things about God and then launch the human soul into the place of worship in the Spirit. This then is the key to a proper theology. The proper study of theology in the mind, while helpful, will always lead the mind to the place where its primary understanding is just how little it actually understands about God Himself.
Theology and Doctrine
Sadly, the study of theology has often been reduced to the study of doctrine, rather than the study of “Theos,” or God. God is a person, not a moral code, and theology must clearly present Him as a person to be interacted with. In reducing God to diagrams and outlines, we lose the sense of the person of God and end up with a rather nebulous force that can be measured and described in a rather academic way; while in reality the study of God should infuse the heart with a longing and burning to get closer to the person being described. This burning heart is to be the aim of theology over mental comprehension.
What then is the purpose of doctrine? Doctrine is to serve as a fence, as a guardian of spiritual experiences. The ultimate aim of theology is to encounter God and so the ultimate aim of doctrine is merely to serve as a fence around that encounter. When someone begins to encounter God and the resulting things violate fundamental doctrines, then we know that encounter was not with God but rather was self induced or potentially of a demonic nature.
Doctrine gives us a clear fence beyond which we do not go and so we understand that violations of doctrine are warning signs for what our heart is in contact with. God gives us doctrine for this purpose. The primary goal of Christianity is for our person to come into direct contact with His person. However, due to our fallenness and propensity for evil, God gives us the safety net of doctrine that our encounters may remain true.
Fundamental doctrines then are critical. Though theology must lead to encounter with God, we must also affirm critical doctrines in this age of deception. Fundamental doctrines such as the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the exclusivity of Christ, and others of a similar kind must be clearly taught and must be clung to with a tenacious grasp in a culture that would seek to weaken all religious distinctives and stir Christianity along with others into a single, homogeneous pot. We must then clearly stand by the doctrines of the faith. In this way doctrine is very divisive and must continue to be so if authentic Christianity is to be preserved.
That point being understood, much of our theology, and resulting doctrine, often results from the failure of human minds to accommodate the mystery of God. There are paradoxes in God and paradoxes in Scripture that we cannot understand or fathom simply because we are not God. Sadly, men tend to choose one side of the paradox and build on that side systems of theology that then divide men one from another in their descriptions of the one true God. The tale of history is full of these kinds of divisions. We must remain humble in the understanding that we do not, and cannot, comprehend all the facets of God’s character or all the methods in which He works.
Because we cannot comprehend all that He is and yet are made as a reflection of His image, different personalities tend to display and comprehend certain facets of His character more than others. When two individuals have a revelation of two sides of one of the paradoxes in God, they are not to divide the body into two camps of theology but rather both to live with the uncomfortable ache of mystery that God can contain two seemingly conflicting things within Himself.
Again, we must absolutely stand by the essentials of the faith, while understanding that within orthodox Christianity, there are many different systems of theology that exist primarily because the theologians emphasized their revelation of God over the revelation God gave another. These revelations seemed contradictory and yet were merely different facets of the Divine. Saints, if every facet of the Divine could be systematized, then explain why there are four living creatures that for thousands of years have spent every moment crying out “HOLY!” as another revelation of God strikes them?
Let us then meekly and boldly contend for a new theology. It is not a new “system of theology”, nor is it a consideration of spurious doctrines that orthodox Christianity has rejected, but rather it is the study of a Person with the aim that the end of our study should leave us in awe, majesty, and mystery knowing how very little of the Divine we actually know while having a deep ache to know the Divine One as deeply as we can.