A part of maturing as believers is growing in our knowledge of what God’s Word says. He has given us a book with thousands of words in it written by his people with the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit. As we follow him, shouldn’t we desire to learn more about him and how he has called us to live? As we mature, shouldn’t we desire to understand what he meant in his Word and develop our theology from it?

“Read the book before you watch the movie—it’s way better.” If you’re a novel-lover like myself, you’ve probably said this before. Perhaps you’ve read Jane Austen’s books multiple times and can tell me the reasons why you hate or love certain renditions over others. Maybe you fell in love with Tolkien’s The Hobbit when you first read it, but you were horrified how much was changed in the film.

A film is limited—often times they only have 1-2 hours to portray a story that consists of many reading hours. Inner dialogue isn’t well captured, or perhaps not captured at all. Emotions must be shown by strong acting. And beloved scenes must be shortened to fit in the other necessary pieces of the plot. The journey we went on with the author and their story becomes abridged and retold.

Something similar has happened with our theology I believe. Rich theology with it’s complex history has been abridged to memes, social media captions, and slogans. What was once discussed and believed from thorough exegesis and study can be summed up in pithy sentences on graphics. What took some years of study, question-asking, and many books from a variety of libraries to understand, others today can learn in thirty minutes listening to a podcast or two minutes scanning an article. While there are good things to be taken from these, I wonder if we’ve forsaken anything for them.

Perhaps the historic aspect of our faith has been cut from the stories of many believers. They found Jesus on their own and they learned about him without tradition or history colouring their glasses. It sounds so mature to say, “I follow Jesus, not [insert theologian name here].” Or, “I’m a Bible believing Christian, not a follower of religion.” Or, “I don’t ascribe to any denomination or tradition—I ascribe to the Bible.” As simple and profound as this sounds, what if it’s not really true or helpful? What if this isn’t meant to be the ordinary way? Abraham Kuper wrote,

No theologian following the direction of his own compass would ever have found by himself what he now confesses and defends on the ground of Holy Scripture. By far the largest part of his results is adopted by him from theological tradition, and even the proofs he cites from Scripture, at least as a rule, have not been discovered by himself, but have been suggested to him by his predecessors.¹

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