Will Learning Theology (Or Simply Anything Else) Erode Your Faith?

 

The moment we're sure to understand is whether at your most wise & educated or in the most ignorant & less informed state, while in the climb towards wisdom you'd feel so insecure and venerable, I have pastor friends, one is a doctor of ministry, the other just obtained his PhD, they share this "imposter syndrome" notion of inadequacy which IMHO is a good thing that allows humility, a heart posture which allows more learning, understanding and wisdom.

But I don't see that illusion of mastery as to legitimize ignorance in the name of faith. That would be masking laziness, prejudices, all those dark features of chaos, the things God himself has in fact been subduing & shining upon.

The fact that almost none of us are left without invested talents, room to grow, people to meet, demands to exercise love, justice, and truth, all these in themselves display this divine paradox: denying the chance to change is the refusal of μετάνοια repentance and the denial of God's grace.

Yes, to be a believer is to embrace paradoxes. As with the recent social justice heated (and many times polarizing) discussions, the privileged v marginal, I was also reminded that human interactions are anything but simple, as we acknowledge casualties, we should avoid the naivety of dichotomizing. Evil is cosmopolitan as grace is omnipresent & immutable. 

The scholarly studies & analysis indicates that Jesus, of all people, might as well be closer to camps of the Pharisees rather than the Sadducees or any other Judaism sects of His time in terms of His unorthodox & creative hermeneutics (in which I believe coexisted in realtime parallel to His divine  omniscience and the presence of רוח קדוש The Spirit).

This in a fair maesure therefore, suggests learning will & should land you back to faith, to marvel and love of our God. Is it the same faith of the limited, the less privileged, the meek & simple? Definitely! But once you're called, you must answer, you must push forward, you must arrive back in faith as a person who's doing his part, as a person finishing the race, therefore we won't be taking God's grace for granted, but rather, in The Spirit, doing what you know of the Word, making manifesto of your worship, making it tangible, evident, appealing.

To close, parallelizing paradox & pharisaic natures, along with the fact that Nicodemus & Paul was (and in a way had still been) Pharisees, the fact that only few "camels" passed the eye of the needle, into seeing the fullest revelation of יהוה God in the person of ישוע Christ, we then come to understand that while "nature & nurture" can be tempered with, you cannot force faith the same way as you can never fathom God's grace for the most unlikely and unworthy. For God all things are possible, and in that knowledge we have the ground of confidence that He'll finish His good works in us as we do our parts.