The Forgotten Essentials for Doing Theology: Humility

Is it arrogant to make statements about God? Some certainly believe that it is. They argue that we can know nothing for certain about God, because, after all, God is so much bigger and more mysterious than we are. To claim to understand even part of him is to diminish his glory and majesty. Of course, if God has deigned to reveal true things about himself to us through his written Word, then it would seem just as dishonorable to claim that we can’t know them. But there is still a way to do theology, even from a traditional perspective, that is full of arrogance and pride. We must always do theology with the essential characteristic of humility.

Humility must always be present in true learning. An arrogant person cannot actually learn something, for, at one level, they are always the master. An arrogant person is always in control, always knows, is always the teacher. But to truly do theology we must learn from God, and God says he teaches the humble. So the psalmist writes: He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way (Psalm 25:9). When we approach God we do it as one who has much to learn, as one who is submitting to the greatness of God, as one who needs truth revealed. We do not come to God as though we will “master” him, but rather as one who must be mastered by God. This affects, then, how we do theology.

When we do theology we must be willing to admit our limitations. Though we may know true things about God, we never exhaust him. I may say true things of God’s love, but to suggest that I fully and perfectly understand it would be arrogant. Kelly Kapic writes:

No divine reality can be flatly reduced to words, concepts, images or narratives. God is never less than these, but he is more than them. The reality of God always exceeds our expressions and our understanding of them. (A Little Book for New Theologians, 74)

God is bigger than our theological formulations; we never really become a “master of divinity.” We are always continuing to learn true things about God. And we must be willing too to refine that knowledge.

Another way we express humility in our theology is by recognizing our fallenness. Our finitude says we can never fully exhaust God. Our fallenness says sometimes what we think about God need revised as we continue to study. The more we study Scripture, the more we encounter other Christians who have studied Scripture, the more we will see our own shortcomings. No system of theology is perfect, and all need refinement and reform. The arrogant theologian alway assures himself of his rightness and refuses to interact with people who disagree. This is true too of the books you read. If the books on your shelf are all from the same publishers or the same few authors you are most likely creating a theological island for yourself. You are never challenging yourself to see the Scriptures through a different lens and to evaluate your own theological formulations. Sin causes us to be blind to our weaknesses, self-justifications, and oversights. Humility continually wants to find conformity to the Word of God and seeks every avenue to check theological work.

In the end theologians too must recognize themselves as objects of grace. Not just in salvation, but in the very task of theology too. Kapic adds, “The theologian always remains a sinner and thus completely dependent on grace” (78). We rely on grace to understand God, we rely on grace to speak about God, we rely on grace to check our knowledge of God. We stand humbly before God and humbly before the task of theology, because humility is a necessary, if often forgotten, essential.