I don’t condone vain speculation; I seek to guard against intellectualism; I love studying the Word in order to minister to real people! But I can’t accept this piece of advice: “Don’t spend your time on theological arguments that have no answers.” That bit of well-meant counsel has the adverse potential to cripple the practice of serious theology.
Imagine a piano teacher who tells her students, “Don’t waste your time on hard music that you can’t master.” No one of us would have particularly high expectations for those young musicians, I’m afraid. Producing excellence in students is a matter of leading them to greater and greater ability to exercise the skill being developed. Producing excellent theologians is only possible when theologians are encouraged and taught to dig more deeply and more carefully into Scripture than they have done before.
The errant exhortation to avoid answerless arguments is flawed advice because it is based on flawed assumptions. First, it assumes that we actually know which theological questions have answers and which don’t. Discussing theological controversies (kindly and fairly!) is not arrogant; assuming that you can infallibly label which questions are unanswerable is presumptuous.
Second, this position assumes that Spirit-filled, Word-taught theologians are incapable of making theological progress today. “These have been controversies for hundreds of years.” That makes no difference whatsoever. The early church was working through Christological controversies four hundred years after Christ’s ascension. The Reformation brought a much clearer formulation of justification and other soteriological issues than the church had seen before. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an increase in the expression of both ecclesiological and eschatological beliefs with the articulation of dispensationalism and premillennialism (regardless of how we assess the accuracy of those systems). Claiming that “great theologians of the past couldn’t figure this out and neither will we” demonstrates ignorance of the entire discipline of historical theology.
Third, the assumption that we can identify and should avoid allegedly answerless arguments assumes that theology is entirely unlike any other discipline or field of study. In its subject, theology is certainly unique – the person and works of God himself are the topics under consideration! We do not approach theology, however, with methods that are radically different from methods used in other areas of study. We interpret the words of the Bible with the same normal hermeneutic that we use to understand any literature. As with science, we approach a subject that is, to our view, infinite. The universe is currently immeasurable, but no one instructs scientists to “avoid scientific problems that have no answer.” If that were the scientific mindset, we’d still assume the earth to be the flat center of the universe! There is an element in which theology is an art as well as a science, and as we noted above, no artist would hold a student back from reaching for that which is currently out of reach.
Why should we shackle theology? Why should we assume that, at the present day, we have arrived at the apex of correct doctrine and that progress is neither possible nor desirable? We cannot and must not! Theologians and students of the Word at any level (hm, that would be … all Christians!), let us press on to know our God better tomorrow than we do today. Let us stretch our minds and deepen our understanding of the Word and pursue answers to questions that appear unanswerable. Let us humbly spend time on theological arguments that currently have no answers.