To understand this post, you probably ought to read this one.

There are a number of sports teams that I dislike only because of their fans. The teams are made up of talented decent human beings. They have godly coaches on their staff. They may even have fine owners. But I choose to cheer against them because of my reaction to their fans’ dogmatic proclamations of the singular supremacy of the team.

I think this phenomenon explains why some dismiss the systemization of biblical truth. Their negative reaction to systematic theology comes from personal experiences with brothers and sisters who profess they have discovered “all the answers” in their study. If so, then this resistance is not a reaction to the content of a theological text book, but a reaction to the people who proclaim the content as though it were unquestionable biblical truth, with no room for dissent. I’ve experienced this from both sides — both as the dissenter and as the proclaimer. Continue reading →

A friend of mine once remarked that a particular school of biblical teaching had almost drawn him in, but at the last moment he discovered that however beautiful this systemization of theology may appear, it wasn’t entirely biblical. The word picture he used went something like this: Man — I really thought I liked the logic of that position, but I discovered that it was like kissing a vacuum cleaner. You may wonder about his word picture, but I understood completely. The tightly constructed theological argument was appealing. But when you got close to it, you realized that it was not as charming as it seemed. Yet its construction, not its truth, made it difficult to break loose and experience any other perspective. Lots of systematic theology is like this.

I see this again and again when I look at humanity’s attempts to systematize theology. Continue reading →