The Heart of Theology

Is not the central vocation of each theologian or pastor or anyone else who wants to be called Christian to be a "follower of Jesus"? Is not practice the ground-level vocation of each of us?

Scot McKnight, Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University, addressing "the practitioner lobby."

I'll suggest that Scot underlines an important point. We've suggested elsewhere that evangelicalism as a whole has inordinately emphasized the value of mere propositions with a spiritual formation philosophy of information transfer.

But denying the absolute necessity of information is an over-reaction. Scot speaks to such an over-reaction. Lexical symbols are only symbols but God has given them to us to point to transpropositionalities. We should be grateful for these gifts.

Theologians are called to peer more deeply through these gateways to truth and then to call us alongside. We should celebrate them - and thank God for them - while at the same time diligently seeking to incarnate the truth to which they point us.

The heart of our respective vocations is always the same but the colors are different.