Malcolm B. Yarnell III, research professor of theology at Southwestern Seminary, recently released the second installment in his Theology for Every Person series: Word. He joined the Equip The Called team to discuss this latest book and how he hopes it will serve God’s people.
Tell us more about why theology is for every person.
I do believe that theology is for every person. Every believer is responsible for their own faith. Evangelicalism—the Protestant Reformation—began with the understanding that each of us are responsible before God for who we are, and that personal faith is required. And so every Christian is, in the words of Erasmus of Rotterdam, a theologian. Just as William Tyndale wanted every young woman and young man to know the Word of God, we want all God’s people to hear and understand the Word of God.
Theology is our response to God’s revelation of himself in the biblical text. It’s something you do in community with others, but it’s something you must do for yourself, as well. It’s not an individualist enterprise; it’s a community enterprise. But it’s something that you have to be fully involved in, because when you and I stand before the Divine Throne, we’re each going to be responsible for ourselves.
As a person who has a call from God to be a teacher, I recognize that every person that I teach is going to be personally responsible to God, and so I want to teach them the basics of the faith. And so, Theology for Every Person gets us to the basics of the faith, and then helps people to go a little deeper each time they read it, growing their faith as they grow in knowledge and understanding.
What is the goal of theology?
I view faith and theology as a journey. Theology is our reflection upon what God says of himself, and God is without limit. He’s perfect, he’s infinite, and we’ll never be able to understand or comprehend all of him. And so we will always be growing in our understanding of the eternal, immense God who has no end. Theology is a way of coming to know God, but since we will never know him fully, we will always be on this journey with him, learning and understanding more each day. It’s not something we lack, but it’s also not something we totally possess, like the journey of Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. This classic story tells the tale of how an individual human being, an individual Christian, progresses toward God. We’re always on this journey to knowing, understanding, and loving God more.
In Word, you take a great deal of time to cover not just what Scripture says about Christ, but also what theologians over the centuries have said. Why is that?
If we listen only to ourselves, we’re going to run into errors. Yes, I do have the Bible and I do have the Holy Spirit, but God intentionally created us to have reference to one another, especially in the church, among his people. It’s like Paul reminds his readers in 1 Corinthians 7:40, “I think that I also have the Spirit of God!” What he meant by that is that every Christian has the Holy Spirit, every Christian has a personal relationship with God. Therefore, if I’m going to understand God’s Word correctly, I need to have reference to other believers. I need to be in conversation, not just with believers in my immediate circle, but with all the saints throughout the ages and throughout the world. It may shock people to learn, but Christian orthodoxy was actually established in Africa and Asia before it ever became a European and American phenomenon.
And so, we have to take this journey of faith alongside the full Christian community, the full Body of Christ. This includes the great reformers such as Martin Luther, and it also includes men like Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea. It includes Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, and it also includes the ancient church councils, such as the Nicene Council in 325, the Council of Constantinople in 381, the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. There are both true and false teachers available to learn from in our day, and consulting other Christians who have come before us is going to be helpful in discerning falsehood from truth.
This latest book focuses on the person and work of Jesus Christ. Tell us more about why this is so important to every believer.
As you read Word, three major truths are going to jump out to you about who Jesus Christ is. Number one, he’s one person. Number two, he is God, which means that he’s eternal, he is perfect, he is love and holiness and righteousness, and he is beyond our ability to understand. And number three, we see that Jesus is also a human being, which brings him close to us. He knows our weaknesses. He became one of us so that he could take our imperfections and make them perfect by dying on the cross as an atonement for our sins, as a substitute for us. We receive His righteousness, and he takes our sin away from us. That’s Jesus Christ.
So if we catch a glimpse of who Jesus is, before you know it, we’re just enraptured and in love with Jesus Christ. He is the very definition of beauty itself. He is the eternal God who, out of love, became a human being so that he could offer grace to you, to me, and to others. And when we gain this view of God, we realize how great the adventure is that he calls us to, and we want to be on that journey.
