Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
The philosophy student lounge at Notre Dame was half of a threadbare little room in one of the oldest buildings on campus. If you wanted a bit of conversation with your peers, then you climbed three long flights of stairs to maybe find a place in one of four wooden chairs and pay a quarter for a cup of coffee if anybody remembered to make it that day. The theology department was right across the hall from us and, if anything, their quarters were more Spartan than ours.
Occasionally some of us would walk across the quad to the law school and view the opulence in which law students relaxed. Their lounge was twenty times as large as ours, with plush carpets, deep upholstered chairs, and soft indirect lighting. They had free coffee, soda and snacks. It was enough to make you wonder if you were in the right discipline.
It’s interesting to note the differences in resources devoted to various disciplines at contemporary universities. At the University of Oregon, the Biology department has well over 100 professors. 82 teachers serve the Business school – their web page proudly states that they just hired 14 more faculty. The English department has 39. 18 people teach in the Art department. Philosophy gets along with 6 professors. But the department of Religious Studies, which is more or less theology, has only 5 full-time faculty members.
I believe a similar scenario would be found at most major universities in the United States. That is a huge change from “the way things used to be.” The most prestigious schools in the country, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, were originally founded for the primary purpose of teaching theology. They were divinity schools, devoted to the training of pastors.
In the middle ages, theology was commonly known as “The Queen of the Sciences.” Philosophy was her “handmaiden.” All other disciplines were regarded as preliminary and subservient to the final aim of engaging in study of the truth about God and His dealings with human beings. You studied grammar, logic and rhetoric, then went on to arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, philosophy and ethics. But the ultimate and final course was theology. The university was invented in Europe in order to teach all the other disciplines in the context of a program aimed at theological study.
Theology was what put the “uni,” the unity, in the term “university.” Nowadays, universities are just a mishmash of dozens of disciplines, each trying to get a bigger piece of the budget. Being in one of the largest departments didn’t stop an Oregon biology professor from writing to the editor last week to complain about the amount of money devoted to athletics. He pointed out how plush the new locker rooms at Autzen Stadium are, like walking into a luxury hotel. There is no real unity, no sense of a common educational goal and, as I’ve pointed out, other subjects have long since supplanted theology at the top of the heap. Other than athletics, the statistics I gave you support what some suggest is the coming trend: biology will be the queen of sciences in the third millennium.
Culturally, it all suggests that concern for life here on earth has generally replaced concern for life in the world to come as top priority. We are much more concerned with staying well and living longer in the present than we are with being well and right with God in eternity. So theology has taken a back seat to biology and to almost any other subject.
That’s why it’s necessary to point out that Jesus was a theologian, a theologian of the first order. And of all the aspects of His genius, none is more important than His theological brilliance. Whatever He might have had to say about ethics or philosophy or leadership or community; whatever He might have done to heal or feed or help people feel better about themselves, none it matters so much as what He had to teach us about God. Theology was at the very top of Jesus’ curriculum.
Theology is the science of God. It is the study of who God is, what He has done, and what He wants and plans for us. Other disciplines, philosophy among them, may touch on the subject of God, but the difference is that theology begins with what God Himself communicates to us. It begins with revelation, God’s actions and God’s words revealed in our world. Philosophy tries to say something about God based on what human reason by itself can figure out. There’s a place for that. It’s an excellent place to start with someone who won’t accept revelation. But theology begins upfront with the evidence that God Himself has entered our world and spoken to us.
When Jesus was on earth the starting point of theology was the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. That was then the whole of the revealed word of God. Jewish scholars devoted their lives to study of those scriptures, to learning a theology founded on what God had told them about Himself.
Jesus came onto the scene and upset the theological applecart. His theological genius created a revolution in that subject as profound as that which Copernicus created in astronomy and Einstein began in physics. There was no New Testament. Christ took the Old Testament scriptures that had been studied for centuries and taught them in a new way.
As our text today tells, Jesus brought a new dimension to His teaching. When Jewish theologians wondered where Jesus got His theology, He simply told them in verse 16, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me.” That was revolutionary. The Old Testament closed with Malachi five centuries earlier. Now, for the first time in 500 years, God was speaking again. There was new revelation.
Yet the theological genius of Jesus is that His teaching of the new revelation was in complete harmony with the old one. He makes it plain that His coming did not throw out Abraham or Moses or any of the prophets. He hadn’t come to change their message, but to fulfill it and make it clear.
In fact, Jesus constantly challenged other theologians regarding their understanding of what God had said. In verse 19, He reminds them that the Law they received through Moses commands them not to kill, yet here they are plotting to kill Him because in chapter 5 he healed a man on the Sabbath, when no work is to be done.
Verses 22 and 23 are skillful theology by Jesus to turn the tables on the Jewish theologians in regard to the Sabbath. He points out that Jewish custom was to fulfill another command, that of circumcision, on the Sabbath. But that also technically violates the rule against working. But surely if the holy rite of circumcision can take place on that day, then so can a healing miracle worked by God Himself.
Jesus does that kind of theological work over and over. He transformed the concept of the Sabbath from a day of dreary service to a day by which God blesses humanity. In the Sermon on the Mount, He took the Laws governing our relationship to others and applied them in a new way which called for a change of heart, not just following rules. He took the Old Testament witness to God’s love for His people and explained how God wants to be a Father to anyone who would believe. And all the wild and crazy expectations generated by the prophets’ promise of a Messiah were remade by Christ’s theological concept that the greatest leaders are those who serve.
It goes on and on: Diet restrictions, animal sacrifice, the Temple, the manna in the wilderness, God’s kingdom, prayer, the day of the Lord – Jesus accepted all those ideas from God’s word as it was known then and reformed them into a new theology of faith, hope and love.
What we are celebrating in just a few minutes is a prime example of the theological genius of Jesus. With His disciples Jesus observed the Old Testament mandate for Passover, the sacrifice of a lamb and remembrance of God’s saving power bringing Israel out of Egypt. Bread and wine were already part of the meal. But He took them in His hands and filled them with new theological meaning so that they became the center of Christian worship, the remembrance that Jesus Himself is our Passover, that His sacrifice has brought us out of sin and death forever.
And that brings us to a constant theme as we think about the genius of Jesus. In every area of His expertise, our Lord is a living demonstration of its truth. He is wisdom personified. He is the embodiment of ethics. He lived the most reasonable philosophy. His resurrection was the ultimate humor. And now we see that Jesus didn’t just study theology. He is theology. In Jesus Christ we find the truth about God revealed in flesh and blood.
Christ did not create the new theology of Christianity just by thinking and teaching. He gave His people a new perspective on the Old Testament by becoming its fulfillment. He didn’t need to write it down in twelve fat volumes like Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. By dying and then rising from the dead, Jesus brought His theology to life. By knowing Him we learn theology. By believing in Jesus we know God.
That’s why the point of this sermon is not to get you to study academic theology. The fact is that most university theology departments today contain more wackos than the California governor’s race. Many theologians are trying way too hard to offer something fresh, something innovative, some brand new take on God. That’s not the point, because in Jesus Christ all the theological innovation has been done.
It’s said that a Frenchman named Monsieur Lepeaux once tried to start a new religion, which he thought would be superior to Christianity. He wasn’t having much success, wasn’t gaining many converts. So he went to ask the great statesman and bishop Talleyrand, for advice. Talleyrand told him that it was in fact very difficult to start a new religion. He wasn’t at all sure how to advise him. But then he said, “There is at least one plan you might try. I should recommend that you have yourself crucified and on the third day rise from the dead.”[1]
Good theology does not try to create a new religion. Jesus already created the only true religion, the only real theology. What good theological study is all about is knowing and loving Jesus more. It is delving deeper and deeper into who He is and what He asks of us. It is knowing God by knowing His Son and living through His Spirit.
So what I’m asking you today is to take true theology more seriously. It really ought to be the “Queen of the Sciences” for every Christian. It is the most important subject you could ever study.
That means I’d like you to consider the possibility that your sons’ and daughters’ time in Sunday School, at Confirmation, or at youth group is more significant and more necessary than their time at school. The subject they learn at church is more essential than math or English or history or science. It’s more important to their health than any sport. It doesn’t matter half as much if they earn a college degree and make a good living as it does that they know who God is and that He has entered their world through Jesus Christ. I’d like you to think about that as family priorities are set, schedules are planned, and activities are chosen.
I also urge you to consider it for yourself. Your own participation in adult education, in a home fellowship group, or in some other kind of Bible study is not just a leisure activity to tack on to your busy schedule if you have time left over. It is the central and crucial learning experience of your life. It’s more important than continuing education for your work and more crucial than studying your retirement options. Theology is not just for pastors and university professors. It’s the main subject for everyone. This fall and always I hope it will be the main subject for you.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj