Many people don’t realize this. For some, a document like the Westminster Confession of Faith would be demeaned if it were called a collection of theories. To be theoretical is to be ephemeral, debatable, even disprovable. But confessions are theoretical—ephemeral, debatable, disprovable—even much more generally accepted confessions, such as the Apostles Creed. The Apostles Creed, of course, has an incomparably more general acceptance among the many strands of the historic church than the Westminster Confession of Faith. But this more general acceptance is a quality of the strength of a theory, not the difference between the Word of God and the Word of Man—much like the difference between the scientific theory about gravity and current theories on the cutting edge of speculative physics. The long witness of Christ’s body in the world, the Church, has dignified the Apostles Creed with its continued acceptance and instituted use.

Precisely the theoretical nature of theology is why we practice it rather than simply learning it. Again like physics, it is a theoretical discipline progressively evolving to apprehend its subject more fully.

The relation of theology to the Bible comes up pretty quickly for anyone seriously trying to read Scripture with the eyes of faith. For example, it’s been coming up for me as I attempt to carry out my plan to read through Scripture with an eye out for the concept of obligation.

My plan involves seeing what the Bible has to say about obligation not for the purpose of extracting from its pages a concept of obligation with the imprimatur of GOD’S WORD upon it, but in order to reflect on the instances and kinds of obligation that may be found in its pages. The distinction is critical because in my notes I constantly tread a thin line between reading Scripture in search of obligation and reading it as a philosophical/legal/social textbook on obligation.Yet I also believe that when I have finished this read-through, I will have a better understanding of the concept of obligation.

To tread this line, I keep in mind a valuable insight offered by the philosopher D.H.T. Vollenhoven. Vollenhoven believed that Scripture is to be treated as naive experience. This classification, for him, was related to the notion that all theorizing is a kind of abstracting that deals with one or more aspect of a “really” multi-aspectual thing. In other words, theoretical thought deals with aspects of things, but in everyday life, as we experience things before theorizing about them, we experience them “naively,” as whole things not yet imaginatively divided into the aspects that theoretical thought deals with. I experience Michelangelo’s David naively, not as an expression of Michelangelo’s socially conditioned idea of the ideal male form—although I may end up theoretically extracting that aspect of the naive experience upon reflection.

The application of all this is to say that I experience Scripture naively—as stories, letters, poems, etc.—and not as a theoretical reflection upon everything it mentions. As has been endlessly pointed out, it is, for example, dangerous to study cosmology or astronomy under the tutelage of Psalms. This has no bearing upon the “truth” of Scripture, which is not and cannot be true or false in the sense that a theory is judged to be true or false.

I like to think that keeping this basic notion before me as I read Scripture helps to protect me from protecting myself from it. Kierkegaard famously calls for us to kill the commentators, precisely because they frequently inspire us to fix the meaning of Scripture as enshrined in certain theories that we take it to be signifying. When Scripture becomes theoretical, commentaries become more valuable than theories because only by reading them can we possibly begin to understand the theories that are Scripture. But in truth, Scripture plays the opposite role, though we (properly) make theories about it: Scripture always slips the handcuffs and breaks through the restraining nets of our theories about it, standing in judgment on us, interpreting us rather than the other way around.

Over at Ben Myers’s blog, a discussion about the potentially paralyzing effect of systematic theology relates to my claims about Scripture. It is a real danger of theology that it will become something that overtakes our pursuit of the Christian life, that it will become a shield between us and the transforming gaze of God. But only if theology presumes to treat Scripture as an extension of itself. Scripture is not theology; by that truth is our theology redeemed.