Sermon From Sunday

This is a lame excuse for a real post, but I did teach in College Group this previous Sunday. Find the sermon audio here.

It's All What You Ask

I'm in a bit of a hole in my Historical Theology Seminar. I'm setting out to write a paper on the soteriology and Christology of Clement of Alexandria. The trouble is, when I went in to run my thesis past my professor, he immediately noted that I was using anachronistic language in describing what I wanted to look at regarding Clement's Christology.

I was trying to use post-Nicean language to describe the theology of a man who lived two centuries before. To do so is not only unhelpful, but unfair. It is proper to judge Arius by Nicea; to judge Clement's theology by measures made centuries later does not even ask the right questions of Clement.

So as I regear my paper and despair at my failure to have realized this problem on my own, I relate this incidence to contextualization as a whole. I'm becoming continually more convinced that the main thing in life is asking the right questions. The problem with my thesis was not what I wanted to examine, but the questions I asked in that examination.

Just as stepping into the 2nd century requires me to gear up with different questions, so does every different ministry field, local or abroad. Learning to ask the right questions of people, of religins, and of institutions—now that's the rub.