Theology is words about God. You are a theologian. Be a good one.
But does theology really matter? Why not just stick to the Bible? What, exactly, is the relationship between the Bible and theology? When we set out to study theology, are we adding to God’s Word and complicating what is straightforward?
If you’re not asking these questions, you should be.
To help answer them, we can look to the Bible for help. In particular, we can look to the examples of two key figures: Adam and Jesus. In the creation account of Genesis 1, we see God bring order to the world, populating the sea, skies, and land. We know His creation is one way that God reveals Himself to us. We can look at what is made—mountains, sunsets, hummingbirds—and know something of His unseen attributes (Rom. 1). But God does something worth noting in Genesis 1:28: He charges the man and woman to take up and continue the work of bringing order to the world.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and sub- due it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”
And immediately in chapter 2 we see Adam do exactly that. God brings all of the animals to Adam to be named, to be taxonomized, as it were.
He does not say, “Let there be a new species of hippopotamus.” No, the work of creation is finished. Rather, he says, “Here is a hippopotamus, and here is a water buffalo.” He does not add to God’s creation; Adam simply brings organizing language to what already exists. In doing so, he is bearing the image of an orderly God. And he is fulfilling the command God has given him to take dominion.
You do similar things, as well. You probably use a calendar to keep your meetings and other commitments in view. Maybe you have bought organizer bins to arrange your socks and T-shirts in your closet or the items in your pantry. Maybe you own a labeler that makes you very happy. Maybe you’ve developed a filing system to keep your files in order. All of these organizational efforts do not add to what is being organized; they simply make those items accessible and useful. In a small way, you are bringing about order as you were created to do.
Like taxonomies, organizer bins, filing systems, and calendars, theology is a means of organizing the ideas given to us in God’s Word. Theology does not add to those ideas; it simply gives us a way to understand them comprehensively from Genesis to Revelation. Theology sorts ideas into categories, it provides helpful labels, it orders relationships and events from a high-level view.
We see Jesus do the ordering work of theology in a famous scene that occurs after His resurrection. In Luke 24, we find two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus trying to make sense of all that has just occurred in Jerusalem. Jesus greets them, though they do not recognize Him, and He asks them what they are talking about. They recount the confusing events that have occurred since His crucifixion. Luke notes that Jesus responds in this way:
He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Wasn’t it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?”
Then beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted for them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures. (Luke 24:25–27)
In response to their confusion, Jesus gives these two disciples a theology lesson. On a seven-mile walk that would have taken a little over two hours, He teaches them the doctrine of Christ. They knew the Old Testament prophecies. What they needed was a high-level view. He gives them an organizational lens on revelation they already had. Just as Adam brought order to natural revelation, Jesus brings order to the special revelation of the Old Testament writers.
When we do theology, our task is not to add to what God has revealed in the Scriptures, but to order it. Theology is a way to organize and better know and understand what God has gifted us in special revelation.
Excerpted with permission from You Are a Theologian: An Invitation to Know and Love God Well, by Jen Wilkin and J. T. English. Copyright 2023, B&H Publishing.
