Non-Systematic Theology

Following Jesus is not intellectually demanding, and Jesus places a straightforward and easy path for us (Matthew 11:28-30).

  • Theology, however, is simply a branch of “applied philosophy” toward knowing God.
    • The higher the theological thought, the closer the study compares to raw philosophy.
  • Many theologians won’t agree that their views are philosophical in nature, but that’s a product of their indoctrination.

We all need some form of theology.

  • Without the logical reasoning of philosophy, we’d have nothing but sentiment.
  • “Theology”, as a word, has two possible perspectives, which profoundly affects how far we’ll need it:
    1. Self-defined understanding, as we perceive and conclude it in our minds.
    2. God-given understanding, since we have at least a limited ability to come to understanding of God’s wisdom ourselves (2 Timothy 2:7).
  • Often, without extra thought, we often believe theological ideals that sit within worship music:
    • Time doesn’t exist in eternity.
    • God never changes.
    • God will heal all pain in this life.

Most Christians who go to college must read very dense books by intelligent people called “systematic theology”.

  • These books are in the spirit of the ancient Greek tradition, memorialized by books such as Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”.
  • Theology is a God-focused branch of philosophy, and a systematic theology will unpack absolutely every domain of Christian understanding possible on a subject.

Unless someone legitimately enjoys the deep exploration of thought, a systematic theology is an utter waste of time.

  • Within a few minutes of an illiterate person’s soul leaving their body, they’ll have vastly more accuracy about this life and the next than the wisest possible theologian could ever hope to discover.

There is also a more subtle risk to philosophical inquiry:

  • Philosophy does have its uses, but philosophy is the exercise of the mind.
  • Within the mind, logic is inherently exclusive (i.e., divides things out, separates for a purpose), while our emotions tend to unite unrelated elements.
    • Emotions can definitely be exclusive, but they are the primary thing that makes connections across seemingly unrelated elements. For example, we use the language “cold-hearted” as an association with the temperature of cold, but that is a strictly patterned association across feelings.
    • Logic can merge ideas across a larger domain, but it does it at the exclusion of other aspects. For example, saying, “the man is in a windowless room, so he is not outside, meaning he can’t see the sun right now” is also indicating “a man can only be in one place at a time”, “a room is not outside”, “the sun only shines through rooms with windows”, and so on. This can often omit edge cases (e.g., if the room had a gaping hole in it).
  • Excessive use of a rational discipline like philosophy risks dividing something that shouldn’t be divided, or should have been divided differently.
  • Typically, philosophers have to use many words to get their extremely in-depth thoughts across, and many of them aren’t aware (or don’t communicate) how much their conclusions are clear facts or their experimentation they’re only partly certain about. This risk becomes proportionally more likely as the words increase.
  • Philosophers and theologians are seeking mysteries (and often finding them), but can’t prove whether those mysteries are precisely true, since there’s no real way to scientifically test spiritual beings or God Himself.
  • The clear answer to find wisdom in all the talk requires the hybridization of both logic (which separates) and feelings (which unite), which requires living a well-lived life then trusting your “gut”. It takes decades, involves living a lifestyle that doesn’t involve sitting quietly for long periods, and will never generate full certainty.
  • Therefore, the smartest people in the world have difficulties with holistically knowing things. Their quest for truth is often the quest for meaning through thorough understanding until they find certainty.

Intellectual understanding doesn’t define the fullness of what we can understand, and the following is more information than legitimately necessary for a legitimate walk with God.

  • I’ve tried to avoid philosophical jargon, which can obscure a lack of understanding, even while it signals messages to academic groups.
  • It’s a good start at the brevity required to follow Jesus (1 Corinthians 2:1-2), but it’s difficult for me to simplify the concepts any more than what I have here, and I’d be happy to hear anyone else’s more articulate distillations.

Conventional (Secular) Branches

These are the broad branches that most philosophers articulate.

Our minds are framed on stories, meaning that any basis of understanding becomes the foundation for all the rest of the branches:

  • For example, someone who defines beauty as the purpose of all existence will then form the rest as subordinate to beauty.
    • Metaphysics is an inherently beautiful thing.
    • Ethical things are that which is beautiful, and unethical things are ugly.
    • Epistemology is our understanding of the beautiful.
  • As another example, someone who defines order or math as the purpose of all existence will form the rest as a type of order.
    • Metaphysics is an inherently ordered system.
    • Ethics is that which enhances order, and it is wrong to increase chaos.
    • Epistemology is our understanding to the degree it is ordered.
  • In this case, the framing is built solely on the belief that God designed man and the universe for the express purpose of having a relationship with man.
    • Metaphysics is created for man, with God’s involvement being part of it.
    • Ethics is what God desires, and sin is anything that moves against what God desires.
    • Epistemology is our understanding as it pertains to what God has made.

Metaphysics

God’s purpose for the universe is to have a relationship with man.

  • To that end, the entire scope of metaphysics is encapsulated under Teleology (see below)

Epistomology & Logic

God designed values and order in our minds as an intentional discrepancy to nature itself.

  • Within our essence, we have a beautifully-constructed design that fits itself into a series of “layers“, traveling upward as a network from subconscious animal reaction all the way to advanced, higher-order thinking.
  • Within nature, then, we create a desire to “fix” the inherent chaos that always floats within nature, and it represents as creativity.
  • Since God designed us, He directly speaks to us through stories (including bias), held together by symbolic associations.

This entire design was made by God, and is an implementation of how He Himself creates that allows us to see a microcosm of Him through our actions.

  • God Himself is complete order, and He created nature as a chaos-developing entity that needs “pruning”, and He built us to do the same (i.e., tending to His Garden).
  • From our point of view, though, God lives in the Unknown, since most of His qualities are hidden from us, for a wide variety of reasons.

All aspects of order can be defined by logic (and math, when more articulately constructed), but there are always components that God designed that surpass the constraints of language.

The above-stated values, including feelings, exist only in our minds, but that in no way diminishes its significance if a relationship with God is the ultimate purpose for our existence.

  • However, by removing the Creator and only defining its structure, our inherently social characteristics will make our mind-based values less significant.
  • Any diminuition of these values in a community is a consequence of sin (see Harmatiology).

Aesthetics

Our understanding of art and beauty is a secondary byproduct of God’s design for us to have a relationship with Him.

  • We are, therefore, perpetually bound to specific universal characteristics of quality, no matter how far we remove Him from the equation.
  • Any effort to remove from the standards established by God will invariably trend toward deconstruction in each person’s mind.
  • However, to conform to those standards will mean a person’s trend will stop at its apex and change into a dialectically superior form with the later convergence of a second trend.

Ethics

The entire scope of morality is encapsulated much more in detail through the conventionally-labeled branch of Theology, but more particularly Harmatiology, Soteriology, and Orthopraxy (see below).

As a consequence of Christ, though, all other religions are insufficient by comparison, all “stock wisdom” is inferior to God’s, and all philosophies that don’t acknowledge or conform to the God of the Bible is a waste of time.

Conventional (Christian) Branches (i.e., “Theology”)

These are the groups formally defined in most systematic theologies.

Theological Anthropology

God made mankind for a relationship with Him.

  • To permit this to happen, He gives a freedom of decision to all His intelligent creations.

Our fallen state (see Harmatiology) essentially makes our bodies (and souls, to a secondary extent) live in constant opposition to God’s desires.

All lasting meaning that can ever be derived for living a good life comes through following God’s will.

  • To follow God’s will forces change inside us that profoundly affects our personality.
    • His changes transform us at the deepest possible level we can imagine and in the most uncomfortable ways we can’t conceive.
  • Every purpose must be subordinate to His will, and the rest will be wiped from history.
  • The only lasting identity of any significance comes in being a redeemed child of God, which is antagonistic to our modern culture (see Teleology).
  • Even when we receive tremendous glory or shame from our efforts, our legacy will all be held to God’s judgment at the end (see Eschatology).

Our fallen state creates a stable-enough, morally disastrous social existence.

There are only two things that pass past this life into eternity, and everything will be at least partially destroyed or changed upon death:

  1. Our friendship with God.
  2. Our friendships with other believers, who are destined to become closer than family.

There is much more on this in the above-stated Metaphysics, Epistomology, Logic, and Aesthetics.

Additional exposition

Christology (and Paterology, and Pneumatology)

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a three-part God.

  • This God is a god of love, first and foremost, with all other qualities subordinate to that essence.
    • Any judgments we deliver against God are demonstrations of our failings, not on God’s essence.
  • Each of the Persons of God are distinctive, but they are all God.
  • From the framing of our understanding, God could have been anything, but He chose to be a God composed of three parts.

God is incorruptibly good, indivisibly powerful, and perfect.

  • Any inherently good quality we ascribe is either embodied within God as the fullest definition, or we are ascribing to something that isn’t an inherently good quality.
    • For example, God is the most kind being ever, and no other being can be as kind as God.
    • As another example, God could be the most efficient, except that efficiency beyond a certain point becomes tyranny, so God’s efficiency stops when it starts to become tyranny.
  • Nevertheless, all values were originally designed by God in the first place, so God is familiar with all of their designs.

Jesus is the Son of the Father.

  • Thorough belief in Jesus requires trusting the Bible was translated correctly (see Bibliology).
  • Jesus was fully God, and became fully man, then fully died, and was resurrected by the Father.

The Father created everything, and doesn’t change whatsoever.

  • We know the Father through the Son.
  • The Bible has plenty to say about the Father.

The Holy Spirit works to fulfill the Father’s plans.

  • There isn’t as much in Scripture about the Spirit as there is about the Father or Son.

Additional exposition

Bibliology

The Bible is God’s word.

  • The spirit of Scripture transcends language barriers and travels across our human universals to deliver a message.
  • While we can infer broad concepts through God, we need Scripture to see the truths He wants us to see.

God designed Scripture to be taken on multiple levels:

  1. Literally: as a historical record of what has happened.
  2. Figuratively: as a symbolic association of what has happened, and how people today could act in light of it.
  3. Abstractly/Spiritually/Holistically: as a symbolic association of what was felt of what happened, and how people today could act in light of those myths.
  4. Broadly: a depiction of God’s design for mankind and the universe (see Teleology)

We must not only trust Scripture, but also that God has been faithful in preserving it, and there is hard evidence of that:

  • The original translations have been absurdly consistent across domains (all of them retaining the spirit even when the words varied slightly).
  • The Old Testament has survived multiple destructions of kingdoms, and was maintained by the most persecuted ethnic group on the planet.
  • The New Testament was illegal in its first few centuries, and was maintained by the most persecuted religious group on the planet.

Additional exposition (with addendum)

Soteriology (and Harmatiology)

Our first sin was to not trust God at His word.

  1. He told us to not eat of the Tree of Knowing Morality.
  2. If we had trusted God’s nature, we would have waited, and He would have given it to us when we were ready for it.
  3. Instead of building meaning through waiting, we decided to consume the knowledge early.
  4. Since then, we make irreversible snap judgments of moral injustice that generate feelings of anger.
  5. That anger is the basis for a multitude of sins including vengefulness, conceit, and bitterness.
  6. The only pathway out for us now, irrespective of our eternal state, is through replacing our wisdom with God’s.
  7. To gain God’s wisdom, we must trust Him like we were supposed to in the first place, though the situation has gotten far worse for us.

God has a two-step approach to salvation:

  1. We are given a thorough-enough understanding of our sin through the Hebrew Law.
    • The Law indicates we’ve all sinned more than we realize.
    • This Law also indicates that we are woefully incapable in any individual or political sense to fulfill it.
    • The conclusion, if we believe it, is that we are utterly condemned by God in one way or another.
    • This condemnation is only redeemable through a sacrifice that pays for our sins.
  2. Jesus, as God, chose to become the moral sacrifice for all our sins.
  3. We are also, in response to that, responsible to strive to not sin again, assisted by the Holy Spirit.
    • However, even then, God’s grace is sufficient to cover all sins.
    • This grace includes the habitual sins we will invariably fall into as long as our bodies are still programmed to them.

Due to the metaphysical nature of reality conforming to a relationship with god, the consequences of sin has created irredeemable damage to this universe.

  • All fauna (and plenty of flora) moved from a sacrifice-based approach (i.e., give and trust God to receive what is needed) to a survival-based approach (i.e., take as much as needed without considering what is being destroyed).
  • It is entirely possible entropy and other forms of physical decay have been magnified from their original parameters.

Demonology (and Angelology)

There are intelligent beings beyond humanity, which we broadly call “angels”.

  • There are multiple classifications of angels (Cherubim, Seraphim, etc.).
  • These angels are unseen, likely traveling along a parallel dimension to our standard three-dimensional perspective.

God’s design for angels, unlike our design for relationship, was for utilitarian purposes.

  • While humanity has a “multitool” design that permits all forms of action without constraint, angels are designed to do one task really well.

Being intelligent, God gave them the freedom of decision, and some of them have rebelled against what God wants.

  • The Satan, led by Lucifer and his followers, are constantly trying to destroy what God has made and subvert His purposes.
  • The dominant way they work is through creating more inner conflicts over our decisions.

Additional exposition about spiritual warfare (with additional list of the devil’s tricks)

Teleology

God created the entire universe for a relationship with man (Genesis 1-2).

  • The first 5 days were a constructive framework that built on itself:
    1. Reality itself and its fundamental laws, which could likely be something involving Him separating Himself from omnipresence to form the universe
    2. The implementation of physical nature, including the earth
    3. Earth’s fulfilled form and all flora
    4. Celestial bodies across the universe
    5. All fauna
  • The sixth day was devoted solely to making mankind.
  • The seventh day was God’s rest, and the fulfillment of His work through His interaction with man.

Therefore, the essence of nature is subservient to God’s design.

  • All physical existence, down to the quantum level, is composed of nothing but empty space and energy.
  • Life itself is an as-of-yet unmeasurable form of energy, but given qualities that are intended to be beyond our comprehension.

This God-centered design can’t be abstracted away.

  • If we only look at the structure without the Creator (e.g., math or most science), we miss the Divine observation represented within and through it.
  • As we increase our
  • Therefore, all qualities of philosophical exploration are only of value to the degree that they draw attention in some way to God.

Beyond God’s goodness, He is so good that He will also demonstrate His goodness beyond any question.

  • In that sense, God does care about His reputation.
  • However, there really is no need for Him to demonstrate His goodness, and He has the full authority and right to suppress all opposition to His nature.

However, the entire scope of what God plans is not possible to be known.

  • Beyond Scripture, there is very little that we can infer about why God created us or the universe.
  • God’s nature, however (see Paterology), means He won’t keep that secret forever.

Additional exposition

Ecclesiology (and Mariology, and Missiology)

The group of believers who have a relationship with God are known as the Church.

  • This word can be risky to use: it is highly contextual to either a cultural group or the people among that group who will have an eternal relationship with God.
  • If we refer to the former, it is composed of every person who associates with Christian culture, including debatably spiritual practices.
  • If we refer to the latter, it includes everyone who had believed in the coming Messiah before Jesus was born.

Christians who choose to lead the Church are held to a higher moral standard.

  • Scripture indicates that God sees them as responsible for His “flock”, so they must rightly handle the truth and live in good conduct.

The Church was established by Jesus, and was carried on through the Apostles.

  • Scripture indicates that spiritual leaders are appointed, so “lone wolf” spiritual leaders are practicing something not established by Scripture.
  • However, while Catholics assert the history of Apostolic succession coming back to Peter, the actual record of anything beyond the top bishop (i.e., the Pope) is a bit spotty (events calendar at this link).

As part of the Church, Jesus’ mother Mary was a legitimately faithful woman.

  • However, the historical development of Mary as having any spiritual significance only developed after several centuries of cultural development.
  • The dominant refutation for this comes through Scripture: there is literally nothing referencing Mary beyond the Gospels throughout the New Testament letters.
  • This, however, should not undermine the example she sets forward as what a woman of God looks like, which is a side-effect of the Reformation’s developments.

The Church is responsible to make disciples across the world.

  • This is broadly called “evangelism”, but conforming to the early Church would more accurately be framed as “discipleship”.
  • The scope of this daily practice expresses as a series of habitual changes that more articulately align us with a relationship with Jesus.

Additional exposition about leading the Church (with larger-scale expansion), evangelism, and spiritual exercises.

Eschatology

The Father’s plan is for the Son to come back, which will be the final finish to what He started.

  • There is enough Scripture to imply that humanity’s decisions can affect the timing of this development (see Missiology)

In one sense, His kingdom has already come.

  • The Holy Spirit has descended on all believers, and works intimately with each one in their own walk.
  • Walking with God expresses in this life as a small, day-to-day experience, with a relative disregard to social status or other forms of success.

But, in another, His kingdom isn’t here yet.

  • God’s ultimate purpose is to draw samples from every single cross-section of humanity with the long-term goal of bringing them together to live eternally in a community that will outlast the universe itself.

The Kingdom of God won’t be fully fulfilled until Judgment Day.

  • We will never achieve full closure (especially in this life) as long as we await the day for everyone ever living is drawn out and held to account.

At that point, we will all be present in the largest court hearing in recorded existence.

  • This hearing will judge all evil and purge it from everyone’s presence.
  • Either those who have committed evil will be fairly punished for their sins, or they will receive Jesus’ perfect sacrifice for their sins.

After the Judgment comes the more complete beginning of eternal life.

  • Anything we enjoy here that is good will be enjoyable in eternity, but without corruption.

Additional exposition (with addendum regarding His coming reign for a millennium)