We study the attributes of God now so that we will not be total strangers to His beauty when we see Him on His throne. We study the person and work of Christ now so that we can begin to learn the language of the country we are marching toward.

We live in an era characterized by a tragic divorce. In the modern church, we have allowed a devastating wall to be erected between the mind and the heart, between the study of doctrine and the pursuit of holiness. On one side of this wall stands a cold, detached academicism that treats the deep things of God as nothing more than a complex intellectual puzzle to be solved. On the other side stands a shallow, anti-intellectual emotionalism that values feelings over truth, reducing faith to a subjective therapeutic experience.

Both extremes are deadly.

Both represent a severe failure to understand what the study of Christian doctrine is actually for.

To heal this self-inflicted wound, we must return to the final movement of the classic scholastic maxim we have been exploring: Theologia a Deo docetur, Deum docet, et ad Deum ducit. Having established that our theology is taught by God as its source, and that it teaches God as its formal subject, we must now confront its ultimate, breathtaking telos: theology leads to God (ad Deum ducit).

Because theology is not a sterile academic exercise but a pilgrim science, its ultimate end is not intellectual self-aggrandizement, but the transformation of the entire man, leading him through worship and obedience to his final beatitude: the eternal, face-to-face enjoyment of the Triune God.

The Nature of the Science: Speculative or Practical?

To grasp why theology must lead to God, we have to look at a debate that occupied the finest minds of the medieval and Protestant scholastic eras. The question they wrestled with was simple yet profound: Is systematic theology a speculative (or theoretical) discipline, or is it a practical one?

A speculative science is one whose primary goal is the simple acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. Physics, metaphysics, and mathematics are classical examples; you study them to know how things work. A practical science, on the other hand, is one whose knowledge is oriented toward an action or an end outside of itself. Medicine is a practical science; you do not study the human body merely to collect anatomical data, but to heal the sick and preserve life.

When the Reformed orthodox theologians analyzed this question, they recognized that theology defies simple categorization. Under the leadership of brilliant thinkers like Francis Turretin, the Reformed consensus emerged that theology is a mixed science, but one that is eminently and principally practical.

We do not study God the way an entomologist studies an insect. We study God because He is our chief good, and the knowledge of Him is designed to produce love, worship, and obedience. The famous Puritan theologian William Ames captured this practical focus in the opening sentence of his classic work, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, where he defined theology in a way that should be branded on the heart of every young man studying doctrine: “Theology is the doctrine of living to God.”

If your theology does not teach you how to live to God, then it is not true Christian theology. It is merely a baptized philosophy. The knowledge of God is never an end in itself; it is always a road that terminates in His presence.

The Pilgrim’s Path: Theologia Viatorum

To keep our feet on this road, we must understand our current location in the history of redemption. The Reformed orthodox made another crucial distinction when describing the knowledge of God: the distinction between the theology of the homeland (theologia patriae) and the theology of the road (theologia viatorum).

The Theology of the Homeland

The theologia patriae is the knowledge possessed by the saints and angels currently in glory. It is a theology of sight, of immediate presence, and of perfect, unclouded communion. They no longer see through a glass darkly; they see Him as He is.

The Theology of the Road

By contrast, our theology in this life is theologia viatorum—the theology of pilgrims on the road. We are travelers journeying through a wilderness, and our systematic theology is our map. A map is an incredibly valuable document; it tells us where the rivers are, where the cliffs are, and how to reach our destination. But only a fool would mistake the map for the destination itself. No one goes on vacation, spreads a road map on the hood of his truck, pitches a tent on top of it, and claims he has arrived at the Grand Canyon.

Read More