Courier Conversations
This Podcast of Courier Conversations will be a conversation of topics with a variety of guests that concern, inspire and inform Christians about current events Worldwide. We hope you'll find our stories informing and encouraging in your daily walk with Christ.
Courier Conversations
Unpacking Systematic Theology in Local Churches (Part One)
Doctrinal avoidance has become a disturbing trend in modern churches, exemplified by an Arizona pastor who proudly declared: "I don't do doctrine or theology, it's too divisive. I just love Jesus and love other people."
This episode tackles this theological aversion head-on with Dr. Walter Johnson, retired dean of Christian Studies at North Greenwood University. He expertly dissects why this pastor's statement is fundamentally self-contradictory – the moment someone preaches about Jesus, they're engaging in theology. The question isn't whether you're doing theology, but whether you're doing it well.
We explore the historical roots of anti-intellectualism in American Christianity, tracing how the Second Great Awakening shifted focus from scriptural depth to emotional experience, and how fundamentalism's withdrawal from intellectual engagement created a false association between theological thinking and liberalism. The shift from Jonathan Edwards' substantive preaching to Charles Finney's emotional appeals fundamentally altered how American Christians approach doctrine.
Dr. Johnson offers profound insights: "Truth is divisive – it divides truth from error, right from wrong, and ultimately heaven from hell." Yet this necessary division differs from being divisively argumentative. When Christians lack theological understanding, they remain vulnerable to false teachings, unable to distinguish between the biblical Jesus and counterfeit versions offered by various groups.
The consequences are startling – less than 5% of Christians can articulate the fundamental differences between orthodox Christianity and Mormon theology. Without systematic understanding, believers lack the framework to interpret Scripture coherently or engage with competing worldviews.
Ready to deepen your theological understanding? Join us for part two where we'll explore practical ways to implement systematic theology in your local church. Subscribe now and follow the Baptist Courier for more resources that inform and inspire believers beyond surface-level spirituality.
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Welcome to another episode of Courier Conversations. My name is Jeff Robinson, I'm President and Editor-in-Chief of the Baptist Courier and my co-host, travis Kearns, who is Mission Strategist for the Three Rivers Baptist Association, is with me as always. And this afternoon we have another one of our frequent guests, dr Walter Johnson, named after one of the greatest baseball pitchers of all time. So I never forget his name. Retired dean of the Christian Studies Department at North Greenwood University and 32 years as professor of theology and philosophy and church history and everything else you can teach within Christian studies. Good to have you with us this afternoon, dr J.
Speaker 3:Glad to be here Always. Good for me to have Dr J in a room because he was my first systematic theology prof, my first philosophy prof Wasn't my first history prof, but first theology and philosophy.
Speaker 1:We'll have to go into what kind of student he was at some point. He doesn't remember. He doesn't remember.
Speaker 2:I'll put it this way he passed, Evidently he passed.
Speaker 1:So, he's on Courier Conversations.
Speaker 3:Of course he passed. That's a glowing recommendation.
Speaker 2:I always say I could not recommend him too highly. A little bit of a double entendre there. That's like saying when did you stop beating your wife.
Speaker 1:We're fine for fishing, right, yeah? Well, this afternoon I'm going to start off I want to read something to you. We're going to talk about a topic today and also the next stuff next these two weeks, actually to finish up April here. That is near and dear to all three of us. I'm going to introduce it this way. Here's a quote from a pastor in Arizona, a senior pastor, who said this I don't do doctrine or theology, it's too divisive. I just love Jesus and love other people. Dr Johnson, what's your response to that? I don't do theology. We don't do doctrine, it's just too divisive.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, he does do doctrine. When he's preaching, he is taking a specific view of who Jesus is. So he is doing. If he's preaching, he is doing doctrine. He may not be doing it well and that may be why he wants to conceal the fact. He may not be consistent in it, but he is doing it, you know. He would say, for instance no question, I believe in Jesus.
Speaker 2:When you say, what does it mean to believe in Jesus? He would have to say something like, well, that he is the son of God, that he died for our sins, and anytime there's a belief, that that's doctrine. And so you really can't believe in anything without believing that certain things are true. And when you delineate what those things are that are true, you're doing doctrine. And so the first thing I would say is you actually are doing it and everybody's doing it, and you need to be aware that you're doing it. The second thing you said is it's divisive.
Speaker 2:Well, truth is divisive. I mean it does divide. I mean it divides truth from error, it divides truth from error, it divides right from wrong and it ultimately divides heaven from hell. And so, yes, it's divisive. Everything that's divisive is not necessarily bad. I think Jesus probably got killed in part because he was divisive. If he would have just agreed with everything, he would have lived out a good, healthy 80 years, or whatever else, and failed in his mission. So I think there's just several things wrong.
Speaker 2:I would add to that too, you know, because I don't want to say divisive is good, but it is a fact of life. Truth is divisive. But you know, I don't think God is worried very much about our divisions. People are, you know. I mean I don't think he wants us to compromise our convictions and not have divisions. I think what he's opposed to is us being divisive, and that is a difference. Division is a noun, divisive is more of an adjective. That you know is an attitude is a noun. Divisive is more of an adjective. That you know is an attitude. So yeah, I mean I would say the guy's just completely uninformed and I'm not sure I would want to hear him preach, because hearing him preach I might come to the conclusion that he doesn't do doctrine.
Speaker 1:Well, our topic today is systematic theology. In the local church and at some point in our lives, all three of us have taught systematic theology, and I'm teaching it right now in my church here at Abner Creek Baptist Church. I'm co-teaching a class there. That is systematic theology. We're looking at all the doctrines, Travis. What is systematic theology?
Speaker 3:for those who may not wake up in the morning thinking about these kinds of things, yeah, theology, simply put, is just the study of God, theos in Greek meaning God, ology meaning the study of, so it's just the study of God. Systematic theology would be taking the doctrines we find taught in Scripture and putting them together in a systematic way, in a rational, logical way that we can understand them, put them in an order such that they tend to make sense. So you start with either the doctrine of God or the doctrine of Scripture, depending on which systematic theologian you read and argument. You hold to starting with one of those two and arguing up from there. So arguing from God or Scripture to the other one, then to Christ, then to the Holy Spirit, but just putting things in order so that we can understand them.
Speaker 1:One of the things I've found in my years as pastor. It seems like that church people are afraid of theology, and by that I mean by the idea hey, we're going to have Sunday night service, we're going to talk about theology, we're going to work through doctrines, and for some reason and I've never really understood this, so I'm going to ask both of you to weigh in on this why do Christians fear the phrase and the pursuit of doctrine or theology? Do you think?
Speaker 3:I think they're scared to read. I think they're scared of learning. I think that's been true since probably the mid-19th century, when especially pastoral knowledge wasn't seen as the apex of society, when the pastor was the leader of society, especially through the mid-17th and 18th centuries. But you get to the mid-18th century and later and suddenly the rise of secularism means that the pastor is no longer respected and people just look. That's why Twitter rose to the prominence. It did 140 characters, and I'm done. The faster I can say it, the easier I can say it, the better off it is. Danny Akin at Southeastern Seminary calls it Mech World. You can have it your way right away, as quickly as possible, and that's just the way it is. People are just. I think they're just scared.
Speaker 2:And I think it's so much still associated with liberal theology. Liberal, if you do much deep thinking, you must be a liberal. Now that's changed some in my lifetime. I mean, you know seminaries the way they were when I attended, thankfully, are very different than they were now. But I know when people just associate if you're deep into theology, you're liberal, You're going to get us, you're going to get.
Speaker 2:And I remember talking with a fellow I won't talk about the name of the church he was talking about, but I just finished my PhD and he said oh, you've got a PhD, you ought to be pastoring such and such a church that's looking for. Well, it was a church. Well to the left. I mean, he assumed that if I had an advanced degree in theology that I was liberal. And so I think and as Travis is saying, it goes back even to the great awakenings, theings that were um as much good as those did. A lot of times they weren't good for theology because, uh, stress became much more um, a direct to the experiential, which we're all for, you know. But you won't, you won't. You want christian experience grounded in sound theology.
Speaker 2:And so the Great Awakening had a lot of effects. One of them Travis mentioned is the role of the minister changes and he sort of becomes a social reformer, and the impact of doctrine on people's lives. It was just more important Do you have Jesus in your heart? And I think that's what even you hear a lot of evangelicals say, and the most important thing is that I have Jesus in my heart. But you know, the question is, which Jesus are you talking about? And as soon as you start talking about Jesus, you're into doctrine.
Speaker 2:But I think they're afraid because you know it's still a fear all the way back. You know, to how fundamentalism, american fundamentalism, responded to liberalism with sort of a withdrawal from society. And because we withdrew from society we've just not been able. Like you're saying, in the 1920s and 30s, when liberalism really began to take hold in the seminaries, we just didn't have the intellectual apparatus to deal with it and people just, I think, associate it with liberalism. And if you do much thinking you're a liberal, and I'm afraid if I do too much thinking I'll end up being a liberal or an atheist or whatever. And so I've never really found anybody that thinks too much.
Speaker 2:You know, they just think wrong, but they don't think too much. People say well, you're just thinking too much.
Speaker 3:You know you can't think too much. People say, well, you're just thinking too much, you can't think too much. I think this also comes down to really poor preaching. So compare the sermons of Jonathan Edwards to the sermons of Charles Finney. With Edwards you get studied, reflection, you get a lot of Bible, a lot of theology.
Speaker 3:You get the anxious bench at the front of the church hey, if you feel the need for conversion, come, sit here. We're going to talk to you about it, we're going to counsel with you. This is not a walk. The aisle get dunked. Same day you go to Finney and you get Finney saying things like don't quench the spirit. If you feel the need to convert, do it right now, or else your brain might stop. Your eight-pound gray matter in your skull might stop the Spirit of God from converting you. You get very emotional type sermons, almost guilting people into salvation. So when you go from heavily or heavy scripture-centered sermons, heavy theologically-based sermons, to emotional sermons, you're going to go or you're going to get a congregation that moves from being biblically and theologically-centered to emotionally-centered.
Speaker 3:Hence what Dr Jay mentioned, which is let me just ask Jesus into my heart, or what this pastor, as you just talked about, jeff, which is I just want to love Jesus and love people. Well, as Dr J mentioned, okay, well, which Jesus? Is it the one of the Bible? Is it the one of the Hindus, the one of the Muslims, the one of the Mormons? And how do you love other people? Because you're inherently selfish. So what does that love mean? Who's the love come from? What is love in and of itself? On and on it goes, it comes down to a man of God standing at the sacred desk proclaiming God's word. If he's not doing that faithfully, then the people are going to fall apart.
Speaker 1:Well, in preaching, the Bible necessarily involves doctrine, does it not? And RC Sproul, one of our minister hero we all have in common, probably taught me a lot of theology through his books and tapes from years ago. And I wrote a book Tapes.
Speaker 3:Did you have eight tracks too there, Jeff? Well, yeah, I'm not going to say that was before my time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my parents did. My parents subscribed to the John MacArthur's tape ministry. Remember the?
Speaker 3:white and blue. Do you have some LPs to go along with it?
Speaker 4:I may or may not have those.
Speaker 1:But Sproul wrote a book called Everyone's a Theologian, and isn't it not true that everyone is a theologian? It's just a matter of whether or not you're a good theologian or a bad theologian, because, as you both said, when you say Jesus just the name, you've made a theological statement because you believe something about him. Is he the Mormon Jesus, the kind of the wisecracking hippie Jesus I like to call the John Lennon Jesus? That's kind of what the Jesus, the pictures of him, look like, you know, is he the evangelical Jesus or the Jehovah's Witness Jesus?
Speaker 2:Or the liberal Jesus, the good man that was filled with the Holy Spirit and a good model for us.
Speaker 1:Was there a time when he was not? With Arius which the Jehovah's Witnesses are the modern-day Arians. So, really and truly, everyone's somewhat theological and so, yeah, I started off this because I found that to be an unhelpful model, because, as you said, dr J, I guarantee you this man is theological. The question is, is it good theology or bad theology?
Speaker 2:And if he's a Baptist, he's got a Baptist view on ecclesiology, which happens to be the doctrine of the church. That's right, and so he. You know, if you questioned him on some of the Baptist practices, he would want to defend them, and he would have to do it with theology.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I guarantee you that church has some sort of understanding of baptism, of the Lord's Supper, of maybe not of church membership, because that sounds like a church that might not be too concerned about membership specifically, but they at the very least have a view of who God is, of what the Bible is, and you can't just get up and say I'm a church or we're a church without having certain structured beliefs, say you don't want to have doctrine, say you do want to have it. Everybody's got it.
Speaker 2:I think again he was making a statement like you touched on, jeff, that people are afraid of theology because they're afraid it involves a lot of thinking, and if you involve a lot of thinking you're going to be a liberal.
Speaker 2:It's a lack of confidence, almost, in the scriptures. If you look at them too closely you might not end up believing them. And of course, evangelical theology says we welcome any kind of question. The Bible actually really does have the answers that can give us that God wanted us to have and we're not ashamed of them. And they're defensible, they're reasonable and I think a lot of times when a person is afraid of theology, they're afraid and I mean they may be afraid their view on something's going to change. You know, if I start studying this too much, I might have a change even from one evangelical view to another view within evangelicalism. So I think there's a variety of reasons there. People are just, you know, all the way back from Plato's cave analogy. You know it's like we don't want our views challenged. Leave us in the cave, leave me in the shadows.
Speaker 3:Leave me in the shadows.
Speaker 2:And I think that's another one of the fears that people have, but it has certainly led to a very negative view of the church. Churches that stress theology are going to be strong churches. Christians that are fully devoted to the life of the mind and fully understand it are going to understand. This affects the heart as well. We won't be separating those two. We won't be separating those two?
Speaker 1:And do you think that topical preaching is part of the culprit here? That if you preach the book of Ephesians you're going to run into election and predestination and the Trinity and the sealing of the Spirit? If you preach Romans, you're going to run into human sin. You're going to run into justification by faith. There's a lot of practical living after chapter 12. If you preach Jonah you know everybody loves Jonah, right, right, you're going to run into the sovereignty of God. God hurled the storm on the sea. If you preach Job, you're going to have to come to grips with the problem of evil and the sovereignty of God. And so it seems to me that maybe the cherry-picking of text and topics to avoid those things is part of the culprit here. And, travis, like you said, today, it almost seems like really, after the Second Great Awakening, the experience determines truth rather than the opposite. The truth post-Finney truth doesn't necessarily determine experience.
Speaker 2:And the liberals were very happy to say and agree with you, that experience is what tells you the truth, absolutely. It's what gives you the pathway to the truth.
Speaker 1:Especially in the SBC, because Southern Seminary taught doctrine before Al Mohler came.
Speaker 3:Or so they called it, but I'm not sure that Dale Moody's doctrine was very good.
Speaker 1:Well, they had their fingers crossed behind their backs. They used phrases like justification and eternal security and inerrancy, but they didn't mean the same thing we mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can use the same terms but have a different dictionary.
Speaker 1:Exactly, that's right. So, yeah, they have their fingers crossed behind their backs. I believe it was Greg Wills, in his theology or his history of Southern Seminary, called it doublespeak, and that's it. So, dr Johnson, how do you go into a church that's never really heard doctrine and convince them that doctrine, learning doctrine, preaching doctrine, meditating on doctrine is necessary for Christian growth and maturity?
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing I would say is you do it slowly or you'll be looking for another church Monday and so, yeah, I think whatever you have to do and I think really a lot of times is you just start modeling that, as you were saying in your preaching. One of the things that I realized and I hope I've been doing this all along, but I came much more aware of it. You know, people have said, when you study the Bible, when you look at a passage, even in your own Bible study, when you get through, ask yourself what does this tell me about God? What does it tell me about sin? What does it tell me about what I need to be doing? And I think one of the questions to ask is where does this fit into systematic theology In every sermon? I don't mean you have to, so I think one of the best ways to do that is model it to people and then, when you really start becoming more direct, like you're doing, I'm actually going to teach through a systematic theology, you know, through the doctrines. It's basically you're going to look and think, well, this is what he's been doing all along, but I also think doing just what we're doing here, and that's helping them to see that it's important. And we can come along later and discuss why it's important.
Speaker 2:What does it actually do? I think that's a good thing to discuss. But I think when you show them, show them their church doctrinal statement the doctrinal statement is not saying let's look at Genesis and then Exodus. It's saying let's look at the doctrine of Revelation, the Bible, the, and then Exodus. It's saying let's look at the doctrine of Revelation, the Bible, the doctrine of God. It's actually in almost every case a miniature systematic theology. So you could just sort of say we're going to do exactly what our church statement says. We're just going to take things a little deeper.
Speaker 1:Well, travis and we're going to get into this in the next episode. We'll just kind of tease this a little bit here. One of the things you've given your life to is ministering to Mormons, and do you think how many people realize when a Mormon visits their door? How many people do you think are lost when it comes to talking about the Jesus of Mormonism versus the Jesus of evangelicalism?
Speaker 3:Probably less than 5%. Maybe lower 5% might be too generous. The number of times I was asked when we were still living in Utah why are you there? Because that's just another Christian denomination.
Speaker 2:I could not even begin to recall how many times and we had a former US president who was a Southern Baptist that basically said the same thing. So yeah, pretty good bit, pretty good bit.
Speaker 3:So I would say the percentage is very, very small of people that realize this is a different faith tradition. That's coming to speak to me.
Speaker 1:So, at the end of the day, we'd have to say we'll wrap this up, we'll come back next time. But knowing theology is infinitely practical, especially when you have people knocking on your door on Saturdays and other times to talk about the second coming of the kingdom or Jesus or whatever else. Well, this is a very, very, very shallow discussion. So far there's because we could spend hours and hours on this, but we're going to wrap this up right here. Hours and hours on this, but we're going to wrap this up right here, but come back next time for part two of how important is systematic theology in the local church and how do you implement teaching theology systematically in the local church. So, thank you for listening. We hope you will tune in next time to hear the second part of this. Be sure, and, like us, we're on all your favorite platforms, so download us, consider giving us a five-star review and also don't miss all of our other ministries.
Speaker 1:At the Baptist Courier, our website, baptistcouriercom, which is updated daily. Baptist Publishing we have new books coming out beginning of the summer, all the time. I think we have about 25 in the queue and I think about everybody sitting at this table is going to have a book before the time is up through the Baptist Courier. Don't miss our monthly magazine, the Baptist Courier. Dr Johnson is a brand new columnist Just contributed his first column. This month will be what the Bible says about dot, dot, dot, and this month it is the image of God in man, and we're going to have to do like we did on this broadcast.
Speaker 2:We're going to have to have a part two.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the beauty of numerous episodes and volumes is that we can come back and revisit it. So be, sure to catch us next time and thank you.
Speaker 4:We're glad you joined us for Courier Conversations, where we are informing and inspiring South Carolina Baptists and beyond. For more information about these topics and more, subscribe to our e-edition or go to our website at baptistcouriercom. The Courier is located in Greenville, south Carolina. As a multimedia ministry partner of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. To comment about today's podcast, email us at conversations at baptistcouriercom. This podcast, produced by Bob Sloan Audio Productions,
