How Important is Theology for Every Believer?

Some years ago, when I found myself passionate so much for Jesus, I just got extreme in my philosophies. I believed and thought to myself, “I do not want to be a theologian, I want to be a person of God..” This perhaps was not just because of my heart burning for Jesus but because of some arrogant theologians that I met along the way. Nonetheless, as time went by, the Lord taught me that as His follower, as His child, I have to grow in His knowledge. And that a person of God is also a sound theologian.

With sound theology, our faith will not be easily shaken. With the Biblical understanding of God, we are sure that we will also not feed the flock with poisonous philosophies. Hence, as a commissioner of God, we are to be ready to defend our faith because there is a flock under our care to be protected.

Jesus asked Peter three times if he truly loves Him, and everytime Peter says yes, Jesus would tell him to feed and take care of the flock. Thus, if we truly love the Lord, we are to make sure that we know God and His Word well. Apologetics and our grasp of Christian history and facts should be sturdy then.

Apologetics is important and we can only be effective in it if our philosophy about God is truly Biblical. Christian History and facts are important also especially when we go to places where there are many “stoics” and “epicureans” who will shaken our faith or the faith of those who are under our care.

Both apologetics and evidences (history) are God’s tools to save us from false teaching and actually, to save us from ourselves as well. On my end, I still find myself in crisis of some sort at times. I have questions about God and His mysterious dealings in the world from time to time. But the Word of God tells us so much that all these crises do not take so long to linger and that God remains to be God as the absolute authority and Creator designer of all things.

God is eternal, infinite, unchanging holy and so forth. He is not created by anything / anyone but He is the Creator Himself. He is not bond by anything that any of our language could speak, not any third party at all. He exists outside all of these, be it time, language and so forth.

God is absolute. He is God. He cannot be explained fully because if He can be, He is not God anymore. No one is capable of knowing it all about Him but we are called to know Him anyway. We are to understand all that we can about Him and not all that there is because the infinite God forever have the mystery that only Him can decide whether it shall be revealed fully to us or not.

Week 6

Digest, Sept.28-Oct.4, 2022

Lanilane Ocbina

WCTS, ThM program

 

Maintaining the Eschatological Perspective

As children of God, we are recipients of God’s saving grace hence we are to act as those who are not just under the common grace. God’s salvation for us has to lead us to the original cultural mandate of God which is to subdue the earth and we are to stick to the Great commission of Christ. The problem in our Church today is the tendency to get stuck in the present temporal issues rather than kingdom purposes of significance for both time and eternity. Most Christians forget to think eschatologically and miss the fact that apart from the common grace, there is also the common curse, and that there is an idea of the catastrophic.

The Antithesis drives us to focus and maintain our journey to win more souls for Christ. This is not because we have the power to determine who are the elect but because we are made to be obedient to the Lord and do as He instructs us to do. It is only God who knows who will be saved and who will be the reprobate and our role is to live the cultural mandate and Great commission of Christ. Having this in mind, we need to understand this and take by heart because it will be dangerous to go forth and win souls and then share to them a different Gospel.

Being a missionary, I met a lot of frontliners in the battlefield who are so bold as driven by Christ’s Great Commission. Most of them inspire me but it hurts me though when some of them criticize theologians because for them, there is an urgency for the harvest and theologians just waste time figuring out and solving many errors when the great problem is actually how to bring more souls to Christ. To me, there should be a balance because missionaries, theologians, and others are all parts of the body of Christ and have important roles to work on. And actually, missionaries really need to be theologians themselves as well because in the battlefield, there will be so many false teachings and errors that will lead to the corruption of their teachings as they share the Gospel to communities. Hence there should be the clarity of revelation as per the Reformed Apologetics is concerned and theologians have an important role in this matter.

Missionary theologians will not be easily swayed by some teachings especially things like the dualism of the Romanists, which apparently introduces a different god. The Scripture teaches us that man was totally disposed to God in the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis and is not having two different natures as in the RC’s teachings of concupiscence. 

The testimony of the Holy Spirit is of prime importance when we serve in the missionfield. It is then always important to base all understanding and teachings on the Scripture which exhibits fully as clear evidence of truth . Anything that is apart from this form of God’s special revelation will lead anyone astray no matter how good the theology of a minister sounds.

  

Week 5

Digest, Sept.21-27, 2022

Lanilane Ocbina

WCTS, ThM program

 

 

Roman Catholic Theology of Concupiscence

Reckoning with the Roman Catholic theology about the state of man in the garden of Eden, I can't help but think of the yin-yang principle of the "wise" Chinese men. The concupiscence, having the body and soul or the inclination to higher rational spirit and to lower physical appetite, seems to make sense as it still happens to us even today although the thought or perspective may be quite dangerous. Some people who are not deeply rooted in the Word of God can easily be taken away by this theology since it sounds easy to chew. As it may sound Pelagian, some would see ourselves like Adam who has our own battle and own share of that concupiscence. However the Scripture does not teach us this at all. We are not on our own like how Adam was in the Garden of Eden.

It is not true that the sin of Adam was just of Adam. When Adam sinned, sin was imputed to all humankind. We are all totally depraved and that we all need God's grace so we can be brought back to the perfect eternal fellowship with Him as He originally intended in the Garden of Eden.

God has made a way for us by accommodating Himself to us so we can understand His language. He condescended to reveal it in Scripture.

All throughout the Bible, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, He communicated His redemptive plan to us in a way that we understand His revelation of grace. How His covenant of works progressed to His covenant of grace is amazing and how His contextualized manner of explaining Himself and His intention for us is overwhelming. God simply became man so He can speak to man without changing ontologically nor economically as the Triune God.

God's redemptive work was for all, whether the regenerate or the unregenerate. As Van Til said that God is revealed at all, that is revealed in nature[1]. The common grace is not very common for some though. Some believers (or some unbelievers) will mistakenly see it as the saving grace that leads to the view of universalism. But the Bible reiterates that there will be judgment in the end, there will be the saved and the unsaved, the elect and the reprobate.

On another note, I feel sad about some believers who become arrogant and prideful about being in a position of an elect when actually, such gift should lead us to humility and passion for God, leading us even more to doing His will, which is to love, to obey His Great Commission, to become light and salt in this world. I feel sad about seeing Christians who were drawn in a system that is hyper-theological (if you will) where the Sunday school level believers would feel so small about.

I pray that as God has contextualized through the so-called condescension, we as His children will do the same to others. That we adjust to a language that they will learn the truth about God but of course without distorting the whole message of the Gospel. I pray that as the Lord Jesus incarnate blessed us, we will also bless the world with the incarnational ministry that God has entrusted to us.

 

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[1] C. Van Til, Nature and Scripture (Reading assignment, page 2).

 

Week 4

Digest, Sept.14-20, 2022

Lanilane Ocbina

WCTS, ThM program

 

Do I Agree With Barth?

I must say that I agree with Barth in two points: (1) Jesus being the Geschichte in whom the life of all humankind is realized and that (2) Jesus Christ and His work of reconciliation of God and man envelops the entire history of the world and every man. However, when Barth says that Jesus is distinct from God (the Father) I surely disagree because Jesus is the Word.. He is God Himself in flesh.

Jesus was not an agent who came from on high on behalf of a superior God that is outside Him. I believe in the triune God who was, who is, and is to come. Jesus was the electing Christ with an absolute decree and not as what Barth says that Christ is the electing God and the elected man.

The subordination within the trinity is not ontological but economic, as Jesus the Son is not inferior to God the Father nor any distinct from the God the Holy Spirit. The subsistence, aseity and immutability of the trinity are incommunicable attributes of the triune God that would explain such economic or relational subordination of the three Persons.

I must admit that reading the different perspectives of theologians make me think more critical and also lead to some levels of confusion because in some ways, their positions at a certain degree make sense to me. But getting into their teachings, like that of Barth, is like going into a tunnel and the farther you go into it, the more you realize that you are being led into a bad destination.

I believe there is no perfect theology but there is always a sound theology. I would say that we should just go with the sound one but do not worship it. Worshipping God is always the goal not the theology.

  

Week 3

Digest, Sept.6-13, 2022

Lanilane Ocbina

WCTS, ThM program

 

The Knowledge of God is of Prime Importance in our Christian Walk

 

With all the different perspectives about God, I always remember the Apostle Paul’s constant reminder in his writings where he would always stress the great need  to grow in the Knowledge of God. This is because knowing God more in the deepest and truest sense will protect the early Church and even us today from the non-Christian philosophies that will seriously shaken our view of history, facts, the Law, the Bible per se and so forth.

The Knowledge of God is such a critical matter in every Christian’s life that will determine his destination of faith. As God’s children, we are taken by Him out from the world of misinterpretation and now placed in His world of truth. Plainly we can see that in His truth, we are truly set free.

I am raised in a place dominated by Romanism and so my worldview was initially shaped in this context of clericalism and all the distortion and offense to the person of Christ. When I met Christ in my early twenties, I have met different kinds of Christians who have views that could have shaken my faith early on. Some of them were Arminians and some were hyper Calvinists. There have been different kinds of worshippers along the path from Pentecostals to Baptists and Fundamentalists. It has also been a common thing to encounter Christians who get confused with the theology of Saving Grace and theology of Common Grace. Sadly, some would emphasize common grace in their own theology leading to universalism.

There were times that I get frustrated with all the various views that seem overwhelming. God and His absolute truth can be taken too much at times that even the teachings about the Trinity basically cracks my brain giving me a feeling of not recovering again but the Lord is good because He constantly reminds us that we are not to depend on our own understanding but in Him alone.

I agree with Van Til when he said that we are dealing with an inexhaustible God and that what we have is an approximation to the fullness of truth as it exists in God. We cannot understand God fully and totally because once we do, He is not God anymore. He is a great God and there is an unimaginable amount of knowledge of Him and relative to that, we all have our limited brains and time on earth to know it all.

I personally am thankful for the Bible, the Scriptures, to which God’s thumbmark is manifested through It’s authority, perspicuity, necessity, and sufficiency for His people, His children.

Week 2

Digest, Aug 29-Sept.5, 2022

Lanilane Ocbina

WCTS, ThM program

 

God Can Use Anyone For His Glory.. It's His Call

Cornelius Van Til  was said to be the theologian who was unlikely to accomplish something as great as being the main person behind the reformed Christian Apologetics. But God is a great God who can use anyone for His glory. God , as G. Bahnsen said, “is in a habit of utilizing unlikely candidates to mount great victories for His Kingdom…” (p.7) A supposed to be common man who wanted to be a farmer, Van Til made by God a great Christian apologist of our time.

Van Til’s proposed having transcendental, presuppositional method of argumentation as we reason with non-believers with the goal of reducing  non-Christin worldview. (p. 11) With the advancement of knowledge today, many people tend to not believe in God perhaps due to the power rendered by science or on the other hand, confusion over the many religions that emerge from all corners of the world. People get so detached from God and become more engaged to the pleasures and ever fast and advancing knowledge of this world.

As I would interpret Van Til’s approach, I thought that he was proposing that we try to look through the lenses of the unbelievers so that we will know how and where to start, even so, why to start. This is to recalibrate their thoughts in order to change gear from disbelief to belief in God. Moreso, we are to be prepared to call the pragmatists to conform to God’s plan instead of their belief that the universe is over or created God.

As the Greek word “Apologia” is defined as one’s defense of self against accusations (in the court), I’d say that we Christians are always in the position of being accused of having a foolish religion or belief. In this case, I remember how Paul always reminded (and prayed about it) that the churches are to grow in the “knowledge of God”, which we need in our defense of faith.

As I was reading, I thought of some Christians who do apologetics and sound like they are defending God before unbelievers. This I thought is foolishness because God never needs a lawyer out of us. He is God and He can defend Himself. Hence, in light of Van Til’s intentions as reformed Christian apologetics is concerned, we ought to be ready to defend our faith and be able to win others for Christ as well, not as superheroes who are able to defend God.

Our focus is to reinforce our helmet of salvation and be able to provide one for our accuser/s as much as possible. We are worshipping the one true God and we are to be able to present epistemological evidences that will present our faith in Him that cannot be shaken.

Week 1

Digest, Aug 23-30, 2022

Lanilane Ocbina

WCTS, ThM program