By Yen Nie

Martin Luther, “Nowadays, I must suffer other thoughts from the devil. For he often casts in my teeth: ‘Oh, what a huge crowd of people you have led astray with your teaching!’”

Throughout his life, Martin Luther suffered from periods of depression, known by many as “spiritual trials”. He feared so much that God had turned His back on him once and for all and had abandoned him to suffer the pains of hell. Luther felt alone in the universe, battered by the demands of God’s law and beyond the reach of the gospel. He doubted his own faith, mission and even the goodness of God.

“I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that I could say that if ever a monk could get to heaven through monastic discipline, I should have entered in. All My companions in the monastery who knew me would bear me out in this. For if it had gone on much longer, I would have martyred myself to death, what vigils, prayers, reading and other works… My conscience would never give me certainty. But I always doubted and said, “You did not perform that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.”

Yet, hope was not lost. The struggles that Martin Luther fought with, soon shed light to his understanding the true meaning of contrition. As his mentor had once said, “The devil never disturbed the tranquility of people who were safely in his camp”. From 1513-1518, Martin Luther wrote furiously and extensively on sin, faith, justification, preaching and prayer- protesting against the theological discrepancies that the medieval Church held for so long, hence the Reformation of the Church.

Would Martin Luther have done so if he were not intensely troubled with the traditions of the Church that were not theologically-rooted in the Bible? Would Martin Luther been troubled if he himself were not deeply-rooted in theology in the first place?

1.0 Theology-an introduction by definition

Theology is reasoned discourse concerning God (Greek θεος, theos, "God", + λογος, logos, "word" or "reason"). It also refers to the study of other religious topics. A theologian is a person learned in theology. –Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia.

Knowledge is the awareness and understanding of truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning (a posteriori), or through deductive reasoning (a priori). Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value. "Knowledge" is related to such concepts as meaning, information, instruction, communication, representation, learning and mental stimulus. It is distinct from simple information. Both knowledge and information consist of true statements, but knowledge is information that has a purpose or use- Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia

The nature of Evangelicalism must be reformed and refined by the Word of God if it were to be in its true nature. Evangelical Christians are called to be loyal to Christ by constantly measuring, correcting and developing its faith and life by the standard of the Word of God. The Christian’s intellectual vocation is to think about all things in such a way that his life of thought is part of his life of faith and worship to God. He is to exercise his faith with reason, and to gain knowledge with faith.

“Faith is an essential ingredient of knowledge”- Augustine. This notion of faith should never be restricted to religious faith only. Faith involves a provisional belief in things before we can validate them through demonstration- “I believe in order to understand.” Therefore, faith is prior to reason. We begin learning by provisional trust or faith. However, though in one sense faith is prior to reason; in another sense, reason must be prior to faith. Right faith for Augustine is always a reasonable faith. One’s knowledge cannot be gained if not aided by reason, what more can be said, if it opposes laws of reason? However, we must also bear in mind that articles of faith are not dictates of reason. There is a big difference between a mystery and a contradiction; and mysteries above reason are to be expressed as ‘paradox’- the Trinity, for example. Reasoning may prepare the mind for faith in these truths, by showing their meaning and biblical basis, their congruity with the total biblical outlook and the known facts in life; but reasoning alone cannot produce faith, for faith goes further than reason can take it. For instance, one may not have a comprehensive understanding of the mystery of the Trinity, but the concept of the Trinity is not contradictory or irrational. One’s faith is in the truth of Trinity because one is convinced that it is revealed by divine revelation.

Nevertheless, we must take into account the basis of rationality that urges men to believe in it. If we should say, “Believe them, because Scriptures teaches them”, though it is right in itself, it would be an incomplete answer, because it would prompt the further question: “On what grounds should we receive biblical doctrines as true?” The proper basis for believing is on one hand, the acknowledgment that God, who is omniscient, wholly righteous; speaks only truth, and on the other; the recognition of what is proposed as something which He Himself has said- by affirmations made by the prophets, apostles, Christ Jesus or any biblical writer, as truths uttered by God. How does this come about? Through the work of the Holy Spirit, opening and enlightening the ‘eyes’ of the mind (where faith begins) so that man ‘sees’ and knows the divine source and spiritual meaning of the message that confronts him.

A Christian should not be afraid of facts, for he knows that all facts are God’s facts, and all truth is God’s truth, and right reason cannot endanger sound faith. He is called to love God with all his mind; and part of what this means is that, when confronted by those who, on professedly rational grounds, take exception to historic Christianity, he must set himself not merely to deplore or denounce them, but to out-think them. It is not his business to argue men into faith, for that cannot be done; but it is his business to demonstrate the intellectual adequacy of the biblical faith and the comparative inadequacy of its rivals, and to show the invalidity of the critics that are brought against it. This he seeks to do, not from any motive of intellectual self-justification, but for the glory of God and of His Gospel. A confident intellectualism expressive of robust faith in God, whose Word is truth, is part of the historic evangelical tradition. If present-day Christians fall short of this, they are false to their own principles and heritage.

It is not perhaps, surprising to find Christians constantly, or often unconsciously, making subjectivist assumptions. All attempts of subjectivity on the authority of the Bible rests on the same assumption that man is the final arbiter of truth. It was precisely because man welcomed the prospect of becoming the measure and judge of all things that sin first entered the world. “When you eat…your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,’ affirmed the serpent. It was as though he said, “You will not need to depend any more on what God chooses to tell you; you will be able to work out for yourselves what is good and bad, and be master of your own judgment, you will have a mind of your own for the first time”. Pride, and more particularly intellectual pride, was thus the root of Man’s sin. In the 21^st century, the authority of the Bible is challenged to great heights, and even rejected, as Man approached it by using his intellectual sufficiency by judging the authority of the Bible with only empirical evidence. Liberalism catches on Christians who thought that they need not believe in everything written in the Bible. A superficial understanding in theology would make Christians even more susceptible to the dangers of liberalism. Soon, Christians who do not engage in exercising their mind in the course of their faith would make fundamental mistakes in their theological worldviews. Fundamental doctrines such as the authority of Christ, the supernatural occurrence of the Virgin Birth and the rule of God the Creator would be shunned by Christians who used their human intellectual judgment to measure the worthiness of the Bible. Without proper understanding of biblical doctrines, one tends to edit the Scripture to make it more appealing to the secular world, without realizing that any editing of it on his own initiative is an exhibition of unbelief.

Indeed, not all are called to be theologians. Yet, we must have knowledge on Scriptures and a continuous desire to learn and study the Word of God. How then do we go about exercising our faith with our mind, as we are called to love our God with not only all our hearts, but also all our souls and all our minds?

God teaches the Church through the Word, interpreted by the Spirit; accordingly, the Christian seeks the help of the Spirit to enable him to learn what Scriptures teaches. His mind is necessarily active in this; biblical interpretation is an exacting mental discipline. A Christian does not however, by mental labour construct the knowledge of God out of his head, or attribute what God is teaching him as his own. Rather, he ascribes all the knowledge he gains, to the effective instruction of the Holy Spirit. He confesses himself blind, stupid and ignorant through sin, and cries to God for enlightenment and instruction. A humble pupil of Scripture will not build a speculative theological system which will say more about God than God has said about Himself, or, on the other, to ignore or tone down what Scripture does say because he finds it hard to fit in with the rest of what he knows. His aim is to learn all that God teaches, and give it all its due place in his own thought. He will set himself to tackle the right questions- what does the Bible actually teach? What does God’s written Word mean? All these, nevertheless, come with a genuine commitment and diligence. History has shown that an authentic evangelical approach to Scripture, creates a strong passion for biblical exposition- the likes of Luther and Calvin. One must always be eager and committed to learning, yet finds humility of a higher degree each time he receives theological knowledge.

A Christian, after receiving the teachings of God, must bring it into constructive relationship with our other knowledge and interests, and to work out its bearing on practical problems of daily life and action-moral, social, personal or political. Theology must function as the queen of sciences, showing us how to approach, interpret and use all our knowledge in such a way that the secular order is sanctified to the glory of God. ‘Academic’ and ‘Christian work’ is not to be regarded as mutually exclusive, as though Christian faith and secular studies should be locked in separate compartments in their minds, seeing no need or obligation to bring the two together for their mutual enrichment. Many come to university with their minds firmly closed, locked, bolted and barred, not just about the Bible and religion in general, but about other things as well, philosophy, politics and history among them. All these attitudes that have been mentioned betray the same lack of concern about the world and its problems, and the same unawareness that this lack of concern is in any way un-Christian. But God forbids Christians to lose interest in His world. He made man to rule the created order, to have dominion over it and to use it for God’s glory. We are to use the minds He gave us to apply revealed truth to the whole of life. When Christ enjoins us, as part of the first great commandment, “You shall love your God with all your mind”- Matt 22:37, He is telling us to use our minds not merely to learn biblical doctrine on its own, but to apply that doctrine to the facts of God’s world as we know them, that we may interpret them correctly and make a right use of our knowledge.

The duty of a Christian witness involves reasoning, as the descriptions of Paul’s missionary activity show. Faith is not created by reasoning, but neither is it created without it. The meaning and application of the Gospel must be explained to men and women in terms of their actual situation- especially in the context of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society like ours. Biblical terms and images such as sin, justification, sanctification, glorification, sacrifice and covenant, just to name a few; are not self-explanatory; it is therefore our task as witnesses for Christ to seek out ways and means of making their meaning clear. Not that we may alter or revise the Gospel in order to make it more palatable to the modern mind. The formula ‘of course, nowadays we don’t believe…”is a denial of the Gospel and should find no place in modern re-instatements of the Gospel. Nor is our faith presented as a philosophy to be accepted on grounds of rational demonstration. We must always declare it as a revealed truth, divinely mysterious and transcending reason’s power to verify, to be received humbly on the authority of God. “My speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. – 1 Cor 2: 4-5. John Stott said, “In evangelism, then, we shall need to recognize that the men to whom we preach have minds. We shall not ask them to stifle their minds, but to open them, and in particular to open them to receive a divine revelation. We shall not seek to murder their intellect (since it was given to them by God), but neither shall we flatter it (since it is finite and fallen.) We shall endeavour to reason with them, but only from revelation, while admitting our need and theirs for the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit”.

We are now facing the tensions of 21^st century Christianity, where we have to choose to accept the biblical doctrine of Scripture as it stands, or permit ourselves to re-fashion it according to our fancy. We have to decide to say that we believe in the Bible and mean it, and we have to choose whether, in presenting Christianity to others, we are going to rely on the demonstration of the Spirit to commend it, or on our own ability to make it a masquerade as the fulfillment of secular thought. Our understanding of our faith affects the decisions of the choices we make. May God grant that great questions of principles may never rest until they are settled right, for it is out of such times of questioning and studying that the great revivals come!

1. J.I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1958)
2. R. C. Sproul, The consequences of Ideas (Crossway Books, 2000)
3. D. C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Baker Books, 1995)
4. Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia, www.wikipedia.com