In this conversation, KJ Drake and Brannon Ellis explore the vital connections between practicing theology, being a faithful disciple, and making disciples of others. Our conversation has been edited for length, flow, and clarity. If you'd enjoy an deeper dive, you can watch the full-length version on Sola's YouTube channel.
KJ, how did you personally become passionate about theology being essential for discipleship, especially when the art and skill of careful Christian thinking is relatively neglected in our day?
It’s something that grew over time. I had a similar training to yours—seminary and then PhD work—but while I was doing my PhD I was also a ruling elder in my church. So there was a continual need to apply what I'm learning to the concrete life of the congregation, trying to see how doctrine can actually equip people to live their lives. I feel like I'm sensitive to the importance of theological thinking because at times I've failed to see the doctrines connect, or failed to actually make those connections between doctrine and life.
A noteworthy moment for me came while discussing ordination with a young man. I asked him about the doctrine of the Trinity, and he was able to tell me, rightly, that God is one substance in three persons. Then I said, "Okay, can you explain anything more?" He couldn't. And it wasn’t all his fault. It dawned on me that if we just have these theological slogans but we don't understand the substance of them—the why of them—they're of no use. No wonder an average church member might scoff, "I don't know what good it does to learn theology. Yes, I'm sure it's true, but how does it change me?" That time in my life really drove me to think about these things more thoroughly.
Another part of my growth came from reading John Webster, who I believe was one of the best Christian reasoners of the past generation. Theological thinking displayed by theologians like Webster fell on hard times a long time ago. There is a sense, as Western culture moved into the modern period especially after 1800 with the rise of the Enlightenment, in which many theologians began to separate out doctrine into these discrete packets. We began to think of these doctrines as purely propositional (clear and logical statements of truth) or, later on, others rejected that they’re propositional.
By Brannon Ellis
Drake’s reflections here remind me of a conversation I had with Joseph Byamukama, a Ugandan church leader and participant in our Theo Global annual symposium in East Africa in 2023. Dr. Byamukama also addressed our sinful human tendency to divide intellect and experience, but from within a very different cultural context.
This disjointed approach eventually permeated theological education, even among those who believe biblical doctrine is true and carries authority. We now chunk up the doctrines. So we learn the Trinity one day and the gospel another. Very rarely do we draw connections among them and explore their implications. We talk about eschatology (the doctrine of the last things) one minute and soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) the next. But how do they relate? We have doctrinally educated people who know the right answers—even coming out of seminary, perhaps—but who don't know how or why we got those answers to begin with. Why does it matter that Jesus is of one substance with the Father? Every seminarian is going to know that's what the Nicene Creed says. But why that language? We need to be able to take a step back and see the interplay of all these theological truths. Why does it matter that the gospel is triune? Because the Trinity is the God of the gospel. The Father sends the Son to redeem us in the Spirit, for the eternal glory of the Father, Son, and Spirit. This interconnectedness of doctrine (a mutuality that the entire Scriptures display) is essential for discipleship, both being and making disciples.
We must not look at theology as mere manuals of correct statements. It’s an organized and integrated way of understanding God and ourselves by faith. As Calvin says, there's only two main things that we need to know: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. We've allowed this knowledge to become rather staid. But when Calvin talks about it, he says, "I don't want knowledge that merely flits about in the brain, but transforms the heart and the life." And so throughout the 20th century, as we've focused on doctrine and doctrinal truth, we've often lost those sinews, those integrations, that come together and allowed something like Athanasius’ timeless classic On the Incarnation or the brilliant work of Calvin in his Institutes.
I had a conversation with some Jehovah's Witnesses years ago. I was answering their questions about theology, and when they ran out of criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity, they said, “Well, if it takes a PhD to understand it, then it can’t be something that's required for faith.” I told them they’re missing the point. I’m not a Trinitarian because I have a PhD. I’m a Trinitarian because the Holy Spirit testifies to my spirit that I’m a child of my heavenly Father in his only Son. Yet that doesn’t mean I worship three gods. I don’t dishonor my heavenly Father when I trust his Son. I don’t reject the lordship of Jesus when I rely on his Holy Spirit.
You’ve touched on how the academy has divorced all these things that should be connected in the practice of thinking theologically as Christian disciples and disciple-makers. But what happened in the church?
As you alluded to in that story, many people imagine theology as a special knowledge that’s so complicated. And the idea that you need a PhD or special training in order to know the Trinity comes about because it's only addressed in specialty classes on the Trinity; it has ceased in many churches to suffuse our prayer, to suffuse our liturgy. You learn who the Triune God is by how you pray to the Father in the Son through the Spirit. You are baptized into this Name. When Christ gives us the Great Commission, we often miss one of the most remarkable things about it: we’re called to baptize in the singular name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That’s the identity of the Triune God who redeems us. In other ages of the church, that confession was a constant presence in our prayers, hymns, and liturgies. And so Christians were trained up in how to not just think in a trinitarian way, but to worship in a trinitarian manner, to live the Christian life in light of who this God is.
Too Little or Too Much: Troubleshooting Contemporary Trinitarianism
By Fred Sanders
In this essay, Sanders examines contemporary currents within Trinitarian theology, where some theologians propose jettisoning the Son's eternal generation while others recast the definition of a divine person towards a social model. Sanders questions whether these revisions truly reflect a more biblical understanding or rather deviate seriously from the historically established doctrine affirmed by the church fathers and the Protestant confessions.
It’s important to take a moment to make sure people understand what we mean by thinking theologically or Christian reasoning. It’s something like thinking together in line with Jesus, and so growing deeper in grasping what it means to successfully navigate life as a Christian in light of knowing God and seeing everything in relation to him. What does it mean that all of our life and thought and action is from God and through God and ultimately to God in Jesus Christ?
In such a healthy theological atmosphere, we learn well what theologians often call the grammar of theology: how to think and speak in such a way that we honor the Father through the Son by the Spirit not only with our minds but in all of our lives.
A stalker might know a lot about a person—going through their trash, knowing when they go here and there—but they would not know them. Because knowledge of a person comes through self-disclosure. I know my wife because she has disclosed herself to me. That’s the essence of knowing God in this deeply theological way. We know God because he has revealed himself through his word by Christ and the Spirit.
Nowadays, we who are theologians or doctrinally minded often fail to appreciate this. We want to approach God objectively, from the side. I think that's why we also find a frequent tension between the academy and the pews. There's a kind of proper skepticism that many average Christians have about the academy or academic theology. Doesn't theology just overcomplicate things? Doesn't it just remove from us a real relationship with a personal God? That was never how it was supposed to be, but it often can become cold and unconnected to true, personal knowing. And as far as it goes, that’s to academic theology’s discredit.
One of my favorite definitions of theology comes from Petrus van Mastricht, who says, "Theology is the doctrine of living to God in Christ." Everything we do is about knowing God in Christ and living that out. And so in this true sense of the word, everything we do in the church is theology, this deep personal knowing of God in Christ by the Spirit.
By pigeon-holing theology as mere information, we've taken away from most people the joy of what is at the heart of who they are as a Christian, because knowing God and seeing everything in his light is the purpose for which the world was made. Whether or not we call that theology, we still know it, because we're Christians. It's for all of us because it's for living.
Kevin Vanhoozer, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago, argues that doctrines are tools to help us understand the world. They help us to communicate the gospel well. They help us to cope with difficult situations or things we struggle to understand. Doctrines are shorthand ways of speaking and living unto God as the church has been led by the Spirit in submission to his word. Doctrines are never an end in themselves, but are always tools of faith and life and ministry.
Now, we don't want to go too far to the other extreme, because there are those who see theology as purely intuitive, beyond language, either as a pure mystical experience or purely action. Our God is the God of truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. And so we need to have intellectual content and specificity. We need to know the doctrines, but not as some sort of checklist of ideas or as special words you've got to say to qualify as orthodox. We need to know who God is, what he’s like, and what he has done so that we can know him in true faith, discovering also who we are and what we are to do in light of his grace.
Ten Theses on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture
By Kevin J. Vanhoozer
In his delightfully playful way, Vanhoozer offers in this essay ten theses as tools for faithful and fruitful Bible reading. Vanhoozer’s ten theses are arranged in five pairs: the first thesis in each pair is directly theological, focusing on some aspect of who God is and the way he accomplishes his purposes; the second applies the insights of the first to our biblical interpretation and application.
One of the most difficult things about life for most people is deep uncertainty about who they are, what life is all about, and where they’re headed in the end. What are all of our daily anxieties about if not unease about who or what I'm supposed to be right now and what’s going to happen next. Theology is the answer to this uncertainty at the deepest level. Who God is, what he’s up to in the world, who we are in God's eyes as creatures redeemed by Christ, what he’s doing to preserve us in the present and ultimately how the story ends with the great victory of the Lamb—these are the hope theology holds.
This, too, is why bad or disjointed doctrine is so dangerous: it can give you false hope and steal from you assurance of the glorious gifts of life-giving truth God has given to us in his word. And so it's very important that we think theologically, not merely regarding the intellectual content of doctrine and its implications but its underpinnings in the life of the Christian before God.
I've heard it said that one purpose of theology is simply to read the Bible well. You teach theology to seminarians, many of whom are going into ministry roles centered around rightly dividing the word of truth. How do you teach them to cultivate theological reasoning, or thinking like a Christian, when it comes to understanding God's word and applying it?
With any doctrine, we need to begin by grounding it in God's self-revelation in the text of Holy Scripture. So, when I'm teaching about a certain doctrine, we'll go through some key passages that help us understand the basic truth of it. For the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, we're going to go to the Great Commission as I’ve mentioned. We're going to look at John 1, in which the eternal Word is identified in relation to the Father. But then we're going to go to other places in Scripture that strongly speak of divine oneness, like Deuteronomy 6:4. Or we're going to look at the divine Name in Exodus 3:14–15, "I am who I am." Holding these together requires a process of theological reasoning, thinking carefully along with the text. How is it true that God is both one as the great I AM and yet three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The doctrine of the Trinity is nothing less than us thinking through God's full revelation of himself.
The Bible is the foundation of our theology, the tuner of our theology, and the secondary goal of our theology, so that faithful theology enables us to interpret and teach the Bible well. I say interpreting the Bible well is our secondary goal because the ultimate goal of both the Bible and doctrinal understanding is nothing less than the knowledge and worship of God himself.
I tell my students, as well, that you have to read the Bible well in community. The church is called “a pillar and buttress of the truth” as “the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15). We’re the Father’s family, the body of Christ and temple of the Spirit. So if I go off into the woods on my own to read the Bible and figure it all out by myself, that's the surest way to become a heretic. But when I read it within the community of faith that Christ has created and upholds, over which the gates of hell will never triumph, that's when I'm doing theology properly: with the church, reading the Scriptures unto God.
I don't fault people fresh out of seminary not making all these connections. They’ve been given all of these great doctrinal ingredients; It takes time for all the flavors to simmer and to coalesce into a proper sauce, if you will, to season everything. We need that time.
We often confuse doctrinal information with Christian maturity.
That's really the key here, yes, that knowing God is about maturing in the faith. Knowing his word through the slow simmer of the truth of the gospel over time. And it's very much true that there is no technique, no technology that will enable us to know God more. God is the one who reveals himself. He’s the one who, by his Spirit, empowers his people to think and speak wisely and well.
This is why good theological reasoning, and the ability to apply theology to all of life, is often found in the pews—often, even, among those that the world neglects or ignores. That's because good theology begins with deep humility. You've got to be humble before the word and before God, asking him to be the one to reorient your world rather than you dictating what God and the world must be like according to your own understanding. Sadly, as people ascend in the academic realm we were discussing earlier, we encounter twin areas of strong resistance against proper theological reasoning: people can become proud, and we can become overly specialized. Any focused study in Christian theology should always aim, directly or indirectly, to serve the greater goal of the church’s faithfulness and fruitfulness.
Is Reformation Christianity Just for Eggheads?
By Brian J. Lee
In this essay, Lee addresses the stereotype that Reformation theology is perceived as being just for “smart people.” Lee argues that while biblical Christianity does require intellectual engagement, this is rooted in the self-disclosure of God as a speaking and writing God, evidenced by the Bible and church history. In effect, Lee turns the question on its head: Reformation Christianity creates smart people—not just eggheads but thoughtful believers who care about loving God with all our minds, too.
One of the tools I try to give all my students to train them to practice thinking theologically is to reflect on any doctrine through the lens of each of the main broad themes of Christian theology. These are traditionally called the “loci” of theology—think of the doctrines of God, creation, sin, Christ, salvation, and so on. Take the doctrine of vocation, for example. We don’t simply ask, “What does it mean to live out our calling as Christians?” We ask what the Bible teaches about our calling in the context of the good creation of God, which has been corrupted by sin and is upheld by his mercy. We think of pursuing our callings as those who have been redeemed by Christ and enabled by his Spirit to do what he’s called us to for the sake of his glory and for the good of the world.
When we’re doing theology, it's not as if we’re building a structure and we can kind of forget about the foundations once they’re in place. It’s more like a web of connections. And one of the joys of thinking like a Christian is getting to see new connections, making new connections and faithful applications that we might not have seen as fully before but were always there in the text.
That's why we read ancient theologians. Unlike some disciplines, theology is not a progressive enterprise—as if learning from books from a hundred years ago would put you woefully out of date, as it might in physics or biology. Although our grasp of theology and skill in it do progress by God's grace, we can still benefit greatly from the masters of the faith because the truth of the faith itself has been entrusted to the saints once for all (Jude 3). It’s wonderful to learn to reason theologically by working through the works of the great theologians. We've already mentioned Athanasius, one of the greatest teachers of theological thinking in the history of the Church. As you read his On the Incarnation, he’s wrestling deeply with the question, "Why the God-Man? Why did the eternal Son become a man? Why was that essential for God’s work of salvation?" He shows how only God can reveal God. How only the one who is the image of God in eternity can restore the image in us in time.
Only Life himself was able to borrow death from us and overcome it on our behalf.
Yes, and again, we need to practice this in community. Read these masters together. Ask yourself and one another, “What is he saying here? Why is he saying it? How does this give us more insight into Scripture and love for our God revealing himself in it? How will we encourage one another to live in light of the truth?”
And why is this important? Because, ultimately, bad doctrine or insufficient doctrine hurts people. It doesn't give them the freedom that we have in Christ. It doesn't show them the glory of the Triune God. It keeps them away from the good that God has for them. God is calling us to set our minds on things above even as we're here below (Col. 3:2). Doctrine might be boring at times, if we're getting technical, but it should never be lifeless. And that's too often what we have in our churches. And so as we're making disciples, we’re showing them the beauty of Jesus Christ in the Scripture, showing them the beauty of the Spirit changing us and leading us.
Theology is not just for the classroom. It's not just for our private study time, but for the sweat and the toil of everyday life. In those places, Christ is there by his Spirit, continually with us. Doctrine helps to give us meaning, to give us direction, to understand what it means to know God and live life unto him always. And I do think that's where theologians, or any of us who are very familiar with divine things, have to be careful. Are we treating the grandeur of God and the glories of the gospel as humdrum, rather than as mysteries of the faith that we enjoy the privilege of peering into by God's grace?
Academic theology is going to stop. We don't really need theologians in the new heavens and the new earth! But truetheology, the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ by the Spirit, goes on forever as we gaze at God in the consummation of all things. In some sense, that lived theology will continue past Christ's return as we continually know him and grow in him and love him.
And so the truth and practice of theology really is at the heart of discipleship—at the heart of what it means to be Christians as we wait for Christ to come, as we are on this journey moving towards God, so that we can live together for him, by him, and ultimately to him.
This conversation has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
