Three Premises for Teaching Theology

In March 1984, British missiologist Lesslie Newbigin delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary on the topic of the gospel and western culture. In these lectures, which were later compiled into a book entitled Foolishness to the Greeks (Eerdmans: 1986), Lewbigin considers what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and the peoples of the West. 

The starting premise may be surprising to some, especially those who tend to think of Christianity as a western religion. How can missionaries bring the gospel to a culture that has lived and breathed it for two millennia? Indeed, how can a civilization that has benefitted more than any other from Judeo-Christian values experience a renewed missionary encounter?

Some pastors, including Tim Keller, have suggested that reaching contemporary western culture for Christ may be the most difficult missionary frontier yet. The majority of westerners have some knowledge of Christianity, a vestige of a bygone era, but this knowledge is usually false or distorted. As a result, these caricatures of the orthodox Christian faith have come to serve as vaccinations (a fitting metaphor for our present moment) from hearing the gospel rightly. Newbigin himself believed that western culture had devolved into a pagan society, and its paganism is born out of the rejection of Christianity (20). 

Unfortunately, these caricatures are about all that is left of the so-called Christian West. The latest pew research is clear that Christianity is on the decline in North America and Europe, even if it is growing elsewhere. While it is true that many westerners still identify as “Christian” to describe their religious affiliation, and may even continue to participate in the Christian rite of baptizing their children, genuine and orthodox faith is absent. Whether it is due to disillusionment with tradition, the alleged conflict between faith and science, disdain for outdated religious moralism, or some other factor, westerners are abandoning orthodox Christianity.

With this backdrop in view, in this article I want to share three starting premises for teaching theology to our students. But first, I will comment briefly on our present cultural moment and the cheap theology our students often receive as a spurious substitute. Ultimately, I hope to encourage teachers and parents that the Christian faith can be effectively passed on with confidence when a proper theological foundation is put in place.

A Post-Post-Enlightenment

When Newbigin was writing in the late 20th century, western culture was still very much influenced by post-Enlightenment modernism, the belief that human reason could lead humanity out of the darkness of religious superstition and into a promising scientific era. Harnessing the power of inductive reasoning, modernists developed a scientific method to deliver humanity from the errors of the past and lead them to fact-driven certainty grounded in empiricism. 

As it turns out, there are multiple problems with this approach, though I won’t have space to spell them out here. But suffice it to say, we have learned through the aforementioned modernistic experiment that human reason is far more limited than once thought and human morality far less noble. The prophesied utopia was never realized, leading cultural analysts like Ross Douthat to believe we have entered instead into an “Age of Decadence.”

Most recently, western culture has entered a post-post-Enlightenment era (also known as Postmodernism) in which truth itself has undergone a re-tethering from objective reality to subjective experience. Truth can be found in each person, we are taught, and, consequently, what is true and right is dependent on the individual. There is no big story (i.e. a meta-narrative) that binds humanity together, whether it be religion, modern science, or something else. Each person is on their journey, seeking to cultivate the good that lies within.

The rise of the internet and, specifically, social media, hasn’t helped matters either. With the sheer amount of information available to users today as well as the algorithms designed by computer engineers to sort and present information users want to believe is true, it is difficult to know where to turn for reliable information, much less objective truth.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

If Christians in the West are going to raise their children in the faith, the first step is going to be a proper grounding in theology. When it comes to the development of our beliefs about God, i.e. the discipline of theology, we are heavily influenced by the culture around us. Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), a Dutch reformed theologian, makes precisely this observation when he writes, “In no domain of life are the intellect and the heart, reason and conscience, feeling and imagination, the epistemic source of truth but only the organs by which we perceive truth and make it our own” (Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt; 16). He goes on to explain that all humans are situated in particular concrete contexts and necessarily influenced by the world around them. This includes, in our case, the religious and theological formation of our students.

So what does the world around our students believe?

In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton published research on their findings about the religious beliefs of youth at the time. Compiled in their book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Today’s Teenagers (Oxford: 2005), their research indicated that the religious and spiritual practices of the day look very different from orthodox Christianity. They coined the term Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to describe this emerging religious phenomenon.

According to Smith and Denton, the creed of this “religion” reads as follows:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die (pp. 162-163).

As the authors observe, this religion is not about repenting of sin, keeping the Sabbath, living as a servant of the divine, observing religious holy days, or praying fervently. In other words, it looks nothing like traditional religion. Instead, it is a human-centric worldview in which God serves as the cosmic butler. He exists to answer the beck and call of our creaturely whims, being sure to not interfere when not summoned, and certainly not to give any divine mandates.

It hardly goes without saying that this cultural theology is a far cry from the theology taught in scripture and carefully handed down by the Christian tradition. It strips God of any real authority to govern his creation as he sees fit and instead places humans as the moral arbiters of the universe. Perhaps most importantly, it lacks the richest and most defining feature of Christianity: the grace available to all through repentance and trust in Jesus Christ.

Three Premises for Teaching Theology

While Smith and Denton published their research back in 2005, I think it is safe to say that much of the content of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism remains influential today. The high school students they were observing are now millennials in their early 30’s, beginning to raise families of their own. Meanwhile, Gen Z, today’s high school students, are even less likely to remain solidly orthodox in their beliefs (see this article from Barna, for instance).

Parents and teachers must therefore be intentional to pass on the faith, which includes teaching good theology. In the remainder of this article, I will offer three premises for teaching biblical and orthodox theology.

Premise 1: God is the transcendent creator of the universe, who exists independently of our thoughts about him.

God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal and benevolent creator of the universe. There was not a time when He did not exist and there never will be. He is self-existing and self-sustaining. He created the world out of nothing to serve as a theater for His glory. He sent his Son into the world to rescue people from the domain of darkness and transform them as citizens of His kingdom. The Christian life is a matter of understanding and embracing this vision of reality. This is the gospel recorded in scripture and passed down through the centuries. 

As much as God desires our good, he doesn’t exist to make us happy. He desires to make us whole, to sanctify us through the power of the Holy Spirit. All of this he seeks to accomplish for his glory, to magnify his great name throughout his creation.

Premise 2: We would not know God without his divine self-revelation.

It was tempting during the modern era to approach the discipline of theology using the same empirical method as the natural sciences. Of course, committed modernists quickly realized that God is not a material being and therefore cannot be studied using the five senses. The result was either to ground theology in morality (Kant), a feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher), or history of religions (Troeltsch).

Herman Bavinck, the Dutch theologian I mentioned earlier, offers a strong critique of these approaches. He writes, “One arrives at metaphysics, at a philosophy of religion, only if from another source one has gained the certainty that religion is not just an interesting phenomenon–comparable to belief in witches and ghosts–but truth, truth that God exists, reveals himself, and is knowable…the first theological step for a person of faith is to acknowledge revelation” (13). 

Here Bavinck makes the profound point that true theology, as an academic discipline, is only possible if God himself has revealed himself to us. This is a result of who God is: “If God exists and he is truly God, he cannot, by definition, be contained by our senses and reasoning. An accessible God, called up by our will, and under our our control cannot be said to be God” (14). 

Humans are completely incapable of knowing God, much less speaking about him, if he did not divinely disclose himself to us. Otherwise, he would not be God, but some finite entity our minds were capable of conjuring up on our own. Bavinck writes, “For a theologian to work with the reality of God, God must speak first. If theology is to deal with real knowledge, God must be knowable and have made himself known, and we human creatures must have the capacity to know God” (15).

Thanks be to God that he did speak first and did so through the gift of holy scripture. God has made himself known through the Old and New Testaments, and Christians can study the Bible with confidence that their beliefs come not from some human source, but from God’s own self-revelation.

Premise 3: All truth is God’s truth.

This may sound cliche at times, but it is a key starting point for basic Christian epistemology. In the quest for knowledge and understanding, this is an incredibly liberating yet guiding principle. Christian scholars can confidently engage in discussion, ask hard questions, and seek to discern the truth, knowing that when they do, it is truth grounded ultimately in God’s being himself.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes,

“He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven, and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together .

Colossians 1:15-16, ESV

Here Paul explains that Christ is lord over all creation. There is not an aspect of the material world that is independent of Christ’s lordship, which in turn means that knowledge about the world ultimately concords with Christ himself. This does not mean, of course, that Christian scholars hold the corner on truth across the academic disciplines. It may be that some non-Christian scholars arrive at the truth on a matter before believers do. But what it does mean is that whatever the truth is, it exists under the domain of Christ.

When it comes to scholarship and the Bible, we don’t have to fear coming to believe something that is antithetical to the truths of scripture. The Bible is God’s Word and all truth is God’s truth. At the end of the day, all apparent conflicts between current scholarship and the Bible will fade into the distance. The truth will come to the light because the truth is ultimately God’s.

Conclusion

While there is much more that goes into raising children in the Christian faith, our approach must be grounded in good theology. This theology must be coherent, orthodox, and biblically-informed. As Lesslie Newbigin discovered when he returned from his time as a missionary in India, western culture is very much the new frontier of missions. There is more confusion and disbelief in the West today since the gospel first descended upon the Roman Empire, and it falls to today’s Christian parents and educators to ensure that this next generation is raised in the core doctrines of the Christian faith.

Among other things, we can do this through calling our students to narrate stories in the Bible and learn good habits for Christian scholarship. All of these efforts go to into the craft of teaching, a lifelong pursuit we can give our lives to as we seek to pass on what has been generously given to us.