The Importance of Theology

There are many schools of thought with regard to theology today; perhaps one of the most harmful is that theology is largely unimportant, or even a distraction from the reality of living out and experiencing the true and Biblical Christian faith. This is not so, because true theology is nothing less than true Christianity properly understood, and the study of theology is the study of the true Biblical faith.

If I say that I am a Calvinist, it is not to say, as happened at the church of Corinth, that I am a follower of Paul, while another claims to be a follower of Apollos (1 Corinthians 3:3-5), for the theological position which is commonly called Calvinism is not a personality-cult formed around the man John Calvin, but is an understanding of the Scriptures which is also known as "Reformed", and has at its very heart the goal, not of taking any particular side in an argument, except the side of Scripture itself. It is perhaps unfortunate that it came to be called by any name at all, except that people love to label things, and there are so many divisions that if I were to say that I believe in "sola Scriptura" it may still convey many things to many people, so for simplicity sake I may say that I am a Calvinist, knowing that this at least gives a brief, commonly known (if not commonly understood) outline of how I approach Scripture and its message. If I were to say that I am a proponent of Arminianism, it would have the same effect.

As it is I hold to Reformed tradition not because it is a particular tradition, or one which immediately appealed to my mind and thought (it did not) but one which, after long (and still ongoing) study, became apparent to my mind as being, not one of a varied number of systematic theologies, but simply the appropriate, true and rightly handled message of Scripture itself, so that for me to say that I am Reformed and that I believe in the Gospel is to say the very same thing. It is for this reason that I consider it especially important to study, promote and encourage theology, because rightly understood theology is the study of God's own truth, and in particular the truth of the Gospel, and it is critical that the Gospel be known and understood by all, or at least by all to whom God will grant the grace to know and to understand.