Where have I intimated what you claim of me? Please do not put words into my mouth.
My post made many years earlier in response to another member herein has been deleted with the past database updates, but it bears repeating:
Nowhere in Scripture are we admonished to remain at the milk level of our understanding of our faith. In fact, we are explicitly told to study and prove out that which we believe.
Theology and practice are separable only verbally and are inseparable for salvation. There are two basic questions in life: “Who is Jesus?” and “Who is God?” We all know how easy it is to create pictures and images in our minds, which turn out not to have any basis in reality. This is especially easy when dealing with something transcendent (like God) or seemingly paradoxical (like Incarnate Christ): there has to be some foundation against which we can check our interior life, so that we do not create some sort of idols or false ideas in the idol factories of our minds and then go worshipping them.
There are many that sincerely believe this or that, but sincerity is never the test of the validity of one's belief. Sincere people around the world have constructed idols from their beliefs and worship them. There are many herein that eschew any sort of appeal to the theological inclined that have preceded us, thinking that they are able to discern complex doctrines by simply reading the Scriptures, never testing what they have concluded against the community of the saints, or wrongly assuming anything men have written outside of the Scriptures is unworthy of study or consideration. Very few can lay claim to a solitary achievement of mastery of the complexities of doctrine—that is why we read the works of such persons preceding us while checking them against the Word of God. Taking every word captive for the glory of God (2 Cor. 10:5) means just that...learning from others, digesting the meat of their words while casting aside the bones.
The study of God, theology as taught in Scripture, is every Christian's calling in order that we may prove out our beliefs, be ready to defend them, and not bring shame to God. Every true believer is a theologian.
Looked at from another direction, if our view of God is wrong, no amount of good works can erase the idolatry we have erected in our heart. So, both go together: faith (theological growth in progress) and praxis (life). One guides, corrects, and balances the other. What if our faith is in something we have imagined? What if we have created an intellectual idol? The Scripture's theology is the guarantor, the check point, and the touchstone, that our faith is legitimate.
Thus, theologians, whether formally trained practitioners or the devoted believer as a student of Scripture, are something like grammarians than like scientists or detectives. Such theologians show us from Scripture how to think, and how not to think, about God, and thusly how to talk about Him. What we should say, and what we should not say. Such theologians do not control what we may say; they simply indicate the rules of intelligible speech.
Finally, gathering up all our studies of God's theology will result in a systematic viewpoint. Systematic theology is a fence that guards our exegesis from error. If our systematic theology actually comes from the organic unfolding progressive nature of Scripture, then it will not be a straight-jacket, but rather the fence that keeps the children from going out into the dangerous road.
AMR
