As I continue to work on Woven Theology, that is, the process is which Salvation happens though space time and paradoxical reality, the question exists "why does it matter". I hear this question a lot when it comes to understanding God, or understanding the nature of Salvation, or sanctification. After all, if it happens, does it matter how it happens?
There are multiple driving forces, let me start with the weakest. The first force, which provides me with a little motivation is the drive to know where I came from in a spiritual sense. It's the same motivation that causes secular scientists to study evolution, and Christian scientists to study creation. We want to know where it came from, how it started.
My next motivation is trying to bring come unity. I believe that Woven Theology moves beyond the limiting factors of most theological systems. The interpretation of most systems today have created and either-or dichotomy. You either accept this premise, or that premise. Somehow, we have to reconcile what we find in scripture, even though they seem to be conflicting ideas. My analogy is that most present systems exist like Newtonian Physics, they are progressive, straight line, action to reaction type systems. Woven theology is more Astrophysics, where time moving backwards and forwards at the same time, contradictory things being true until an event or observation interacts with them. Things are put together, superimposed to create the reality of Salvation.
My last motivation is to help make ministry practical. A good friend of mine was talking about self-help books. If a self-help booked really worked, why are there so many of them. If one really made you a better person, everyone would buy it. They don't work, which is why there are so many. I fear our process of evangelism is similar. We have so many different tools, outlines, strategies and formulas, but they so often fall short. There is no magic bullet, no one size fits all. I wrote a book in an attempt to pull all these strategies together in an attempt to be able to use multiple outlines and resources for the common purpose of Evangelism.
I think if we better understand Salvation, we are better equipped to be involved in it. We have been too far on extremes, either sitting on the side, waiting for the predestined to just get there, or trying to argue people into the Kingdom, with little success. We need a system to understand how Salvation operates so we see our part in the structure. I really believe we pray too little, stress too much, make things overly complicated and have low expectations. We either give up or become overly confrontational, and in the end, it's been more about our duty and less about presenting the Good News. We need to learn to be the kind of Evangelists that we see in the New Testament (that is another blog).
Those are my reasoning for the creation of Woven Theology. My desire to be more in God's will, to be a good steward with the time and opportunity I have to share my faith with others. During this process, I have been able to witness individuals coming to the Lord in ways that I would not have predicted. Praying for people, and seeing them get saved in ways I wouldn't have imagined, because it's the work of the Lord, and not the effort I put into it. It's been amazing, and my prayer is that as we examine the mystery that is how the Lord moves in the work of Salvation, you will see Him work in mighty ways too.
I think most people would say there are two ways of looking at theology: biblical theology and systematic theology.
ReplyDeleteIn ST, the idea is to start with the doctrines of God, then Man, then Sin (separation), Jesus (how the two are reconciled), the church, so on and so forth. The doctrines of the Christian faith are organized logically and supported biblically.
In BT, the idea is to simply express doctrines as they are encountered in the context of scripture. The trick is to continue to modify doctrines as one comes across relevant scriptures; you cannot have a coherent doctrine of a loving and gracious God if you stopped at Genesis chapter 7.
Woven theology I believe is an attempt to combine the scriptural approach of BT with the logical approach of ST. By understanding a doctrine or theological point not as something abstract or tied to a handful of scriptures, but as being tied to multiple doctrines and theological points that are interconnected and interdependent. One cannot look at a tapestry from the back-side filled with knots and overlapping colors and understand completely the image on the other side. Likewise one cannot remove and appreciate a single thread as superior or preeminent without ignoring its original context or without damaging the threads to which it was originally connected.
We need to have some sense of the whole and the parts at the same time so we can be humbly mindful that we cannot know or understand the whole or the parts in there entirety.
We are indeed blessed to know the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a blessing that we are commanded to know Him better today than we did yesterday and more so tomorrow than we do today. Woe to us when we think we know it all.