Back to Basics

I’m good at overcomplicating things, and part of the reason is I like to leverage actions for multiple outcomes. A sort of economy of intellectual motion. This tends to multiply the variables that affect my decisions, and that in turn requires more recalculating along the way.

Admitting it is supposed to be the first step. I’ll get back to you about the others.

I’ve decided to leave the question about audience for a little while and focus on what’s next for me. I’ll work on myself in public and hope that produces something worth sharing.

My first real moment of clarity on this was during the sermon on Sunday morning, when it dawned on me that the authority of Scripture was a watershed issue for me. I want to talk about it, but before I talk about it, I want to anticipate attacks. I want to defend it. No, I want to convince you it’s true.

That’s a tall order for a blog post or two.

That’s important work, and I look forward to doing it. But I’m putting it on hold as well. What I long to do most is enjoy and explore the theological world that unfolds from a life in submission to the Word.

So with that settled, I found myself today trying yet again to figure out what’s next. How do I prioritize all my ambitious plans?

This gets back to that intellectual economy of motion ideal/problem. I want something I can leverage professionally, in my personal walk, and as a parent. I always have questions I’m wrestling with. How do I prioritize them? What’s more, how do I prioritize them with so few creative restrictions?

I’m a firm believer that what you believe is the most important thing about you, to paraphrase Tom Morris. In my life, at least, I find that what I believe has a powerful impact on my perceptions, actions, and attitudes. Perhaps for some people, doctrines are just trivia, but for me, they are nothing less than the programming language of the mind. Flip this belief switch here and my patterns change there.

So since I’ve been slacking a bit on theology for the past couple of years, I thought the best first project was to revisit my doctrinal statement, identify holes or questions, and create a list of theological projects that I could then schedule out for study and use.

But the method problem always comes up early. You can start doing the work for a while, of course, but before long it will be obvious that you could be doing it a bit better. So at some point you have to stop and think about what you’re trying to do and what the best way is to do it.

In other words, if you want to be thoughtful about your process, you can’t avoid method.

So if I want to evaluate my doctrinal statement, I can open it up and just see how it strikes me. But that seems to me to rely heavily on reason and intuition. I like those. I’m very comfortable with those. At least, I am when they’re mine; yours make me uneasy.

My ideal would be to just read Scripture and let the patterns emerge. Let the Bible tell me what’s most important, then codify that in a way that is most faithful to the text and least contrived and molded by human tendencies. That’s my theological Holy Grail, as it were. It would probably take me a lifetime, but in the end I would be the only one convinced by it. And frankly, it shouldn’t say anything all that different from what’s already out there. So what’s the point? I just want to know whatever I believe is not just true but properly weighted according to Scripture.

So I’m working toward that in my devotions. Note patterns. Note questions. Launch a word study here or there. And I’ll share from that as things really strike me.

But today (and I will end with this) I chose to harvest where others have sewn. I was once at a talk where NT Wright said something to the effect that theology was a matter of picking your favorite verses and building from there. I don’t want to do that. On a more practical note, I once had a friend (who was obviously not raised Baptist) ask why one would want to write a doctrinal statement at all. Why not adopt one of the statements that already exist?

In the spirit of those insights, I started by studying the three “ecumenical” creeds: Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian. I wanted to see how they compared and what theological categories arose from there. What questions were they asking? This will help me compare what I’m seeing and hearing with what others have valued.

It’s a very modest beginning, I know, but you have to start somewhere.