The problem with knowing theology

Daniel Kirk today expressed well my feelings about and disillusionment with theology (which I have written about here).

Reflecting over the course on The Cross in the New Testament that he just completed teaching, he writes:

Three big take-aways from both the lecture and the readings are these: (1) when the NT talks about the cross it is infinitely more concerned with how we live lives of faithful discipleship than it is with how the death of Jesus “works” to save us; (2) there are numerous models of “atonement” in the NT that address different facets of the problem of the human condition; and (3) penal substitution might be less pervasive than you think, and probably needs to be rethought in more biblical categories.

With one of my favorite lines in biblioblog history, Kirk notes, ”The problem with ‘knowing’ how the death of Jesus works is that it keeps us from being able to see how the NT writers talk about it.“ That hit me in the pit of the stomach: despite my railing against it, I recognize the lingering tendency on my own part to view various biblical texts from some unifying principle that may not apply to all the texts equally.

One needn’t even completely reject inerrancy in order to recognize different authors’ perspectives on theology as not entirely overlapping, so long as we maintain the difference between truth, the facts as they are, and theology, our attempts to interpret facts.

And this is why I’m more broadly skeptical of erecting any theological statement, howsoever so broad it may be, as the “grid” through which we read the scripture. The spiral of reading scripture and theological articulation must always allow for scripture to come back and correct the faith of both the individual and the church.

It occurs to me that the prevailing assumption of concordism underlying the way we systematize theology is the actual problem, not the theologizing itself. Our goal as people who value the testimony of the authors of Scripture is to discover the unique theologies of Mark, of Romans, of Colossians, of Hebrews, etc., and we must never expect them all to coincide in every detail. We must use different utensils to pour out the different soups on the table, or else we’re likely to attribute to one soup or other a flavor that is actually alien to it.

Systematization of theology cannot proceed without our recognizing that the various theologies within Scripture do not always neatly coincide. Nor should it be taken for granted that the picture they provide, even when painstakingly pieced together properly, will be complete and exempt from critical analysis.

Kirk ends with a statement of quote-of-the-day caliber:

Theology: no better friend, no worse master.

Why do I even blog at all, when people like Daniel Kirk are writing such gems?

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