| | I keep hearing from various people that theology isn't important. Their claim is that theology focuses on intellectual issues that distract us from real life, sort of like debating how many angels can dance on the end of a pin.
My friends are saying these things because they care about the church and about me. They want God's people to continue in their mission unhindered by intellectual baggage.
I understand and appreciate these motivations. However, I can't agree with their claim that theology is unimportant. Theology is a way for us to define our terms and set our goals in a distinctively Christian way. If we do so, we will achieve success as only distinctive Christians can. In fact, that's what I'm talking about when I (in particular) use the term missional. To be missional is to be covenantally successful. I realize that other people will disagree with me, but in order to do so, they have to make a theological case over what is essentially a theological question.
No Avoiding Theology
The true question is not whether we have a theology but which one we hold to, if only unconsciously. Even the question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is important.
I've also written about how theology connects such seemingly unrelated concepts as joy and vulnerability. Because it sets the framework for how we understand and connect ideas, a Christian theology creates a distinctively Christian understanding of every subject people learn in school.
Think about this for a minute. Isn't our beef with the public school system the fact that humanism has created a distinctively non-Christian understanding of every subject from biology to government to English? Our problems with government education are really over theological issues. We've allowed secular humanism to define all of the concepts and interconnections between ideas that students study.
As an example, look at how much the concept freedom depends on theological perspective.
Freedom in the Biblical Worldview
In the Biblical worldview, man was created to serve God. When we fell away, we turned from God to idols, but our servant nature wasn't wiped out. Instead of serving righteousness, we served sin. This reversal was complete in principle, since no one can serve two masters.
True freedom is therefore found in turning back to God and serving him. To love God is to obey His commands, and to know that we love others is to love God and obey His commands.
God's Law gives freedom, in spite of everyone who says that freedom is to be released from the Law. We are released from the requirement of the Law for our salvation and set free to walk in good works which stem from, but are not responsible for, our salvation.
A free society, in Biblical terms, is one in which we are under God's Law. Since we are servants by nature, if we are not ruled by God's Law, we will serve an ungodly ruler. Ungodly rulers grant us not freedom, but slavery.
Freedom in Other Theologies
Consider the Buddhist theology in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The characters in the movie are all trying to rid themselves of their attachments in this life in order to achieve true freedom. Mu-bai and Shu-Lien struggle with their romantic attachment to each other, realizing that this is keeping them from being free. Jen runs away from one life situation after anothing, constantly breaking rules in an attempt to break free from dependence on other people. In the end, Jen commits suicide rather than to allow Lo to love her.
The result is consistent with what the Bible teaches: freedom apart from service to God is in fact slavery to another master and is only counterfeit freedom.
Stargate SG-1 is an epic tale about freedom from aliens posing as gods that enslave humans all over the galaxy. The mission of the humans on Earth is to destroy the false gods, which will bring freedom to the galaxy. Their concept of freedom runs into a snag when they rescue a woman named Linea. They realize after setting her free that she was responsible for creating a plague virus that killed half of the people living on her planet. They realize too late that they could have kept her imprisoned in order to save millions of lives.
In order to give the galaxy freedom, the humans on Earth would have had to enslave Linea and hold her captive. They would have taken the place of God in order to maintain order in the universe. They would have become Hobbes' Leviathan, the dictator that would maintain peace by controlling society.
That's the same problem that communism and liberation theology have. In their attempts to free people from horrible dictators, they've placed the same people under the control of a large and tyrannical state. Society is built on servanthood. If men will not serve God, they will serve each other to the point of their own destruction.
What about The Matrix? Freedom seems to be a simple concept in the beginning of the movie: liberation from the machines that control people's minds. The main character, Neo, is the prophesied superhero who will defeat the machines and release people from their grasp. Halfway through the movie, he starts to realize that there is a fundamental tension between his concept of freedom and the optimism of a prophecy that cannot be defeated. If Neo's victory over the machines is the result of a prophecy, is Neo really free to make any choices that would invalidate that prophecy? How is a man truly free if his choices were determined by a prophecy that was made before he was born?
This is the same problem that causes many Arminians to become open theists. Open theists realize that their concept of man's freedom is not compatible with the fact that God knew all of history before any of us were born. Instead of letting go of their definition of freedom, they have chosen to say that God is not all-knowing when it comes to future events.
Tyranny?
Would a society ruled by God's Law be tyrannical? I've addressed that question here. Anyone who wants to disagree would have to re-define freedom as something other than societal obedience to God's Law. Because this would be a theological argument, to disagree with me here would be to concede the point that theology is in fact important.
Theology is so important that where it touches one concept, human freedom, it influences what country we want to live in, how we'll vote, our reactions in situations where we feel people are controlling us, and even whether we believe God is all-knowing.
Whatever happens, I hope never to live in a society where we have forgotten theology, and by extension, forgotten whom we were made to serve. May God rule in our lives forever. |
| | Posted 7/6/2008 10:58 PM - 64 Views - 0 eProps - 3 comments
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