In one sense, this is a rabbit trail on the gap between theology and praxis.
The scriptures ground our beliefs about God. They reveal His character and His will for us and the world. They provide a filter through which we can view our experiences and sift our thoughts. They are a corrective and a guide. Theology is our engagement with these things and the theories we come away with. I say “theories” because I am speaking generally about the ideas we have.
God, however, exists outside of the scriptures. The Bible is about God, but the Bible is not God. To know the scriptures is not necessarily to know God. Our ideas about God may be accurate, or they may not be. But if God is real, He exists outside of our theories. This doesn’t diminish the importance of scripture – God has chosen to use scripture as a primary source of revelation to us. This doesn’t diminish theology – theology is just our term for how we think deeply about God. What this does is tell me that there’s more to God than theology or the scriptures. For my daughter, I am greater than the letters I write her – no matter how revelatory they are. Likewise, the fullness of God is greater than our engagement with the scriptures.
One thing we see repeatedly in the scriptures is God’s interaction with people in real time. He speaks directly with an audible voice and indirectly through prophets. He speaks through visions and dreams, but these relate to real events in the lives of the people to whom He is speaking. The people of God have the scriptures as a foundation, and this gives broad and general truth, but they also have personal interaction with God that is practical to their particular situation – not a general application of knowledge, but divine interaction in the real world.
I believe that we should take both of these as necessary aspects of the Christian life. We should be firmly planted in the scriptures, allowing them to teach and correct and train us. We should also be open to the reality that God wants to interact in the lives of His people, and He will speak to us in different ways to do so.
The difficulty here is the level of uncertainty and subjectivity. God spoke to Moses through a burning bush but to the nation through Moses. He spoke to Peter through a vision but to Cornelius through Peter. It’s easier to trust the scriptures than to trust a dream. And it should be! However, it turns out that God does use dreams. He uses many things. And to follow His leading in the real world means accepting the limitations of our own capacity to think, accepting that His ability surpasses our own, and accepting that He is trustworthy even when we don’t understand what is happening or how.
I’m not trying to give answers here. I’m just processing. How we think about God is important. But living life with the living God is more than just thinking about Him. At some point, theory has to turn into practice. I have to shift from knowing about God to knowing God. The beauty of Christianity is that God doesn’t just invite us to know that He exists, but He invites us to follow Him, to live in relationship with Him. That sounds much better to me.
The Endeavor 