Why Should I Care About Theology?

Many people including many professing Christians find theology boring.  Frankly the reason they find theology boring is because they are bored with God.  The liberals of old proclaimed Christianity is life not doctrine.  Unfortunately many modern evangelicals seem to echo those sentiments.  

Theology is basically the study of God.  Theology comes from two Greek words, "theos" meaning God and "logos" meaning word.  We might define theology as knowledge of God or knowing God.  Theology involves us learning to think God's thoughts after him.  

While the liberal slogan that Christianity is life not doctrine is untrue, the reverse is also not true.  Christianity is life based on doctrine.  True love for God involves a desire to know God and to know about him.  Theology is necessary to live a godly life.  We must know what God is like, what he desires, what he loves, what he hates, what he thinks.  Our ultimate purpose is to glorify God and this is impossible without knowledge of God.  

(Matthew 22:37, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5) "And he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."  (ESV)

We are to love the Lord our God with all of our being including our mind.  Being anti-intellectual is not pleasing to God and mindless emotionalism does not honor him.  We must love God with our mind in order to glorify him.  

We can know God because he has revealed himself to us.  He is there and he is not silent.  There is general revelation (the world) and special revelation (the Bible).  General revelation involves creation, the conscience of man, and our sense of morality. We all have a sense of the divine.  God's eternal power and divine nature are plain to everyone.  But general revelation is limited in what it reveals to us about God.  

God is more fully revealed to us in special revelation.  We learn much more specifically about God from the Bible.  We know God in a more personal way through the Scripture.  There we find man's problem and God's solution (the gospel).  In the Bible we discover truth and reality.  Our minds are set straight and we see things as they really are.  As we learn to think God's thoughts after him we should also grow in holiness.  

True worship, devotion, godliness, and morality must be based on sound theology.  So anyone who loves God and desires to glorify him must care about theology.