I read academic theology mostly because it is the medium that keeps me closest to God; other than a voracious commitment to reading large quantities of Holy Scripture. So, it hits me strange when I hear people claim, in my low Free church location, that academic theology is dry, arid, and doesn’t really hit home with the real needs of the people in the churches. This is strange to me, as I think to myself in that moment, because I’ve always figured that I am one of the many; I am one of “the people” in the Church. Because of this, and when confronted with this sentiment, it makes me wonder why if academic theology (so called) can have the benefit it does for me, why it can’t have a similar benefit for every Christian? I am not special; I am a justified sinner like the rest of us. I am prone to wander, as that ole’ time hymn so rightly lyricizes for us. What helps me be less prone is to constantly WORK at staying ‘in step with the Spirit.’ I take it that because Jesus has raised up teachers for His Church’s edification (cf. Eph 4), that these teachers and teachings are gifts to the Church; and gifts with the goal of building us up rather than tearing us down. As the case may be, and it may, academic theology, at least for me, typically contains a rigor and order that this world system just can’t muster; as such it has the capacity to feed my soul and form my spirit that orders its way to and from the eternal and Triune Life of the Living God. I live in a chaotic world, and I feel that pressure every day. It is only as I feed my soul with well ordered thinking, an order that comes directly from paying close attention to the in-breaking and apocalyptic reality of the Gospel, that I find solace and peace of heart.

But even greater than the aforementioned, the sort of theology that I find most life-giving is indeed the sort that is grounded fulsomely in the Gospel reality itself. Meaning, that the best theology is of the sort, in my view, that is grounded in the concrete and historical Yes of God for us in Jesus Christ. Herein is the wisdom of God. You see, I don’t live in some sort of Gnostic-Holy Land, where I find my source of life and energy by ruminating on abstract and speculative ideas. Nein! I am a flesh and blood human being who is simul justus et peccator, and I fail at life moment by moment. As such I need God’s wisdom to confront me afresh and anew every moment of every day; outwith this confrontation, and joyful encounter, I simply fall off into a woeful mire of despair and depression. And when I fall off into this land of wane and woe, it is on this plane that I engage in my most egregious sins before God. So, good theology for me, is a theology that meets me in the existential day to day and elevates me out of the muck of the mundane and energizes me with new creation life of enchantment with and praise of the mysterium Trinitatis (mysterious Trinity). It as I get lost in this sort of theological life that I start to sense the power and freedom that the Son of God said He has placed me into (cf. Jn 8.32).

This is good theology. Theology that meets each of us in our most dire moments, often what we’ve come to consider as the mundane of day to day. Good theology gets down into the blood and dirt of our lives and recreates it anew and afresh in and through the risen humanity of Jesus Christ. But in this recreation we are like Israel, a newborn baby wrapped-up in the bloody afterbirth of our sinful inception; it requires God to pick us up, wash us off, and declare what is new and holy about us in Christ. It is in this ongoing process—mortification and vivification—that we actually feel the growing pains of this new birth as we are constantly being given over to both the life and death of Christ in us that our mortal bodies might be enlivened with the life of God in Christ with us. But herein is the daily struggle. Prior to this we had no experience of this, we had no ‘struggle.’ We may have had a secular struggle that we ourselves had constructed based upon conditions and pressures that this world system has set forth; ones based upon self-projected and incurved ends. But prior to the new birth in Christ we had never experienced this battle between the ‘flesh’ and the Spirit of Christ in us. Herein good theology is that which comes to us and succors us unto the womb of God wherein He is explained to us over and again by His Self-explanation for us in the dearly beloved Son, sweet Jesus.

But if we are not WORKING at this relationship with God, if we are not availing ourselves of the teachers He has provided for the upbuilding of His Church; then we genuinely will live in a mundane world denuded of any sort of ultimate significance other than what we existentially attempt to construct ourselves (which at the end of the day is idolatry). This is what continues to plague the evangelical churches, in my opinion. People have become too satisfied with a church culture that is based upon cultural platitudes baptized as ‘good theology.’ As such, people do not have the critical apparatus to actually recognize the holy from the profane; how can they? If the holy has been conflated with the profane precisely because people aren’t putting in the WORK, then this sort of confrontation with God cannot actually occur. This is the hard truth of the Christian life. We are called to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Christ. Instead the majority of pastors out there have been inculcated into a church culture ‘out there’ that has sold its soul for a pottage of entrepreneurship and upward mobility. If the church’s primary theologian is caught up with visions of doing ‘real ministry’ that have no basis in the theologian putting in the WORK, then how in the world are the people in the churches supposed to ever be discipled in the ways of Good Theology?