My Death in Life

One of the most frustrating things about being at a bible college is the competitiveness in people to know God the most. Because somehow, somewhere along the way to getting to Moody Bible Institute we get this idea that your passion and vigor for knowing everything you can about God and his word makes you more spiritual. Pride is a serpent that slides within the body of Christ and infects a person with its venom that can be deadly to the entire body if not caught immediately. This is especially potent when you group a bunch of people who want to be leaders in ministry.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a suffering student enraged at the system because I don’t quite measure up to some of the people I meet here. I’m just like you. I want to do theology because I love God. Many people make the analogy of loving God to a relationship here on earth. Churchwell, a teacher and director of PCM and internships out here at Moody-Spokane, spoke in chapel and made this analogy. He continued to make the point that he can think of his wife by getting her chocolates and she would love them because it was token that he was thinking of her. “But”, Churchwell said, “my wife isn’t that into chocolates, she loves a bouquet of colorful wild flowers. See there’s a difference between thinking of my wife and thinking of her rightly”. The same applies to God. There’s a difference about thinking about God and thinking rightly about God. We could go into discussions about how your right thinking of God in your relationship with Him affects religion, doctrine, and action and we could bring up terms like “orthodox” and “heresy” but I want to focus on the core of it all- the relationship with God.

In writing a review of a test in my Topics of Systematic Theology class I wrote this: A common theme in the test that I recognized is that there is always a give and take between the parts and the whole of systematic theology. Tension between paying attention to details to make sure we get it right and seeing the big picture to make sure that the details are amounting to anything makes up a lot of the art of balancing a theology. If the point of theology is to know and love God, which Clark claims and I agree to, then the question is systematic theology important and is this balancing act worth it has an obvious answer. The part I love is the emphasis on application, which somehow gets lost in the study. We don’t want to become an ivory tower theologian who has our nose so far in our books that we don’t see the effect of that knowledge in life. I want to learn the lesson from the life Abelard- a man who was renown for his theology, but not for his morality. If my theology, though clear, thorough and consistent, doesn’t affect my love (emphasis on the action-verb sense of the word [y’know, like what DC Talk was saying in the 90s]) of God then I don’t think I’m really learning anything.

There are dangers when your relationship with God evolves into a study in your own ivory tower:

You wear that cross like a crown. You wear that cross like a dagger. Come down from that tower, come down from that tower. - “Vipers, Snakes, and Actors”- Norma Jean, The Anti-Mother

It is a blessing to go to Moody. It may be just what I’ve been told growing up, but Moody is world-renown for Christian education and training. It’s easy to get into this mindset that I’m a student studying the Bible at the Moody Bible Institute. That I am doing what few people can do because I get the opportunity to study at MBI-Spokane. “I must be something special”. That’s all that needs to get in my head and I can forget why I’m here, I can forget why I’m studying what I’m studying, I forget how I got out here to MBI-Spokane. Then I get the loving reminder of Prof Schneider, “This isn’t real life. Get that through your head, you will not be doing this forever. But thank God for that”. (Schneider is the teacher of the Topics in Systematic Theology course).

Some of the greatest men that had an impact on my life weren’t as smart as some of the students that I go to school with in regards to the Bible and theology, etc, etc. But they had an impact on me cause they cared of Christ and they cared for me. They showed me their faith and relationship in Christ every time we talked. I saw it with other things they did. I saw how they sinned. I saw how they repented. I saw how they were victorious. In the scheme of things, I was more impacted by their life than I was by their knowledge. Pastor Nemers back in Iowa says, “It can’t get to your heart unless it goes through your head”. But I think it can’t get to your heart if it just stays in your head.