C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 78 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The opening session is the course about the course. Patton and Dyke walk through what The Theology Program is, how the six courses fit together, and the commitments they ask of every student: to set cherished beliefs in limbo for a season, to engage the mind as fully as the heart, and to do theology not alone but in community. Listen for the cast of students they introduce, from Practical Priscilla to Struggling Sam, and ask which one walks in wearing your shoes.
Introduction to Theology is a theological studies methods course. The teachers are not lecturing on what good theology is so much as teaching people how to do theology: how to think through theological issues, how to learn what orthodoxy has handed down through the centuries, and how to make these things one's own. Patton is blunt that he and Dyke are not the students' magisterium, an infallible teaching authority to hand out the truth; both are fallible, and their aim is an informed understanding of theology and its development, with the evangelical tradition presented alongside the wider Christian traditions so that everyone can see the whole theological playground and come to their own convictions.
Dyke frames the whole program around one observation: in the book of Acts, as the church is being born, Luke refers to Christians some forty-two times as believers, ones who believe. Church attendance and prayer do not by themselves make a Christian; belief does. So the program asks in turn what we believe about truth (this course), the Bible (Bibliology), God (Trinitarianism), humanity and sin, salvation (Soteriology), and the church and the end times (Ecclesiology and Eschatology). The idea is not new: the early church catechized people in the faith for a long season before they were counted members, teaching what Christians believe and why.
The hardest assignment of the whole course is stated up front: the student will critically evaluate their own theological method and worldview. That means honestly setting one's beliefs in limbo for a time, deconstructing them not to leave them in pieces but so they can be properly reconstructed. Many of us hold our beliefs simply because we have held them so long, inherited from family and tradition, and they may well be right; but to truly own them we must take them down and build them back. The teachers insist this is not a demand to empty the mind, not a Luke Skywalker theology; it is a careful clearing of the table so the table can be carefully reset.
Every class in the program gives doctrine, but teaches it historically: where the early church stood, what happened in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, and where the church is today. None of the classes are history courses, yet all of them show doctrine developing through history, because that is how the doctrines actually came to be. The courses are also intentionally ordered, and students are asked, where schedules allow, to take them in order, since each builds on the one before.
The course textbooks are Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology and Roger Olson's Mosaic of Christian Belief, with a Bible brought each week, preferably a formal translation such as the New American Standard, the NET Bible, or the English Standard Version. Scripture memorization should not be done from a paraphrase, because what is memorized then is really someone's interpretation. There are weekly readings, eight memory verses, two vocabulary quizzes to give students the words needed to converse theologically, two case studies in which the student walks a friend or family member through what they have learned, and an honors reading, J. P. Moreland's book on loving God with all your mind, which Patton calls the engine behind the whole program.
The teachers introduce the class to itself: Practical Priscilla, who has never seen the practicality of deep theological study; Scared Susan, whom big words frighten; Know-It-All Nick, here to see if the teachers know as much as he does; Fundamentalist Fred, guardian of orthodoxy; One-Answer Will, who wants theology written down with pen and paper; Traditionalist Terry, who wants his preconceived notions confirmed; Confrontational Carl, an unbeliever here to argue; Struggling Sam, a believer with doubts looking for a safe place to voice them; and Curious Carla, not sure why she came. To the one who says, I don't know the big words, I just love Jesus, the answer is gentle but firm: the moment you say who Jesus is, you are giving a theological answer. And to Scared Susan the answer is the imago dei: everyone in the room is created in the image of God, and that image includes rationality and intelligence. You are smart, whatever the world has told you.
Patton rejects any divorce of theology from practice or of the Spirit from the mind. It is impossible for the heart to receive what the mind rejects. He recounts reading the stories of people who walked away from the faith, Bible study leaders and pastors' wives who became not agnostics but atheists, and finds a common denominator: crisis came, and because they had leapt with the heart while leaving the mind behind, the mind could not catch up when it was challenged, and once the mind falls the heart is sure to follow. The conception of God built on experience and emotion will fail in the day of trouble; the God known and worked through from Scripture will not.
In the twentieth century the great schools founded on Christian principles, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, went liberal, and fundamentalist Christianity responded by going into educational hiding. The church stopped engaging the mind, sermons and theology were dumbed down, and words like atonement, propitiation, and hypostatic union were traded away. Once the school systems dropped logic, philosophy, history, and the Scriptures, the church did not take their place, and so it must now: an avenue is needed through which the average layperson can be truly educated in theology.
On a spectrum from low commitment to high commitment, the sermon sits at one end: passive learning, no homework, no attendance expectations, and therefore a particular gift, exhortation and encouragement, the power of the pulpit, short-term strength like a daily supper whose menus are forgotten but whose nourishment was needed every day. The interactive classroom sits at the other end: assigned reading, memory work, case studies, grades, and the long-term, foundational life change that builds a theology for a lifetime. Neither replaces the other; the teachers are emphatic that they are not criticizing sermons, but that the church's education must include both in balance.
Three key terms name three ways of doing theology. Irenic theology, from the Greek word for peace, is theology done peaceably, representing every view accurately even when you oppose it, never building a straw man, a weakened version of an opposing view set up only to be knocked down. Polemic theology is theology done in a war-like manner inside the church, speaking against those with whom there is disagreement, the dominant mode of the twentieth century. Apologetic theology defends the faith against challenges from outside the church. All three have their place, but the program's method is to start with irenics: a Roman Catholic listening to the case for the Apocrypha should be able to say it was represented perfectly, even though the teachers do not hold it.
The program moves one step at a time. First establish the reality and nature of truth and how truth is known, the burden of this course, in a culture where postmodernism says your truth is yours and mine is mine. Only then can Bibliology ask how much of a source of truth the Bible is: how we know we have the right books, how a text some two thousand years from its originals has been transmitted and translated, and what inspiration and inerrancy mean. Only after that can the program speak of God, humanity and sin, salvation, and the church. Jumping straight to Trinitarianism assumes too much. Patton even commends reading The Da Vinci Code, because the questions it raises about the canon and the transmission of Scripture are opportunities the church must be ready to engage rather than problems to flee.
The program's core value: truth is found not in a Spirit-illuminated individual but in a community of Spirit-illuminated individuals. The Reformers stood against infallible tradition, not against tradition itself, and semper reformanda, always reforming, lives alongside deep respect for the past. If your reading of the Bible has never been held by anyone in history, that is close to a guarantee it is wrong, for the Spirit Luther had in 1517 is the same Spirit believers have now and has not learned anything since. Every heresy comes from the Bible, from reading it in isolation and interpreting it outside the community; the gifts of the Spirit are spread through the whole body, so a man needs a woman's reading of John 4, the single need the married, and all of us need the generations who handed the faith down to us. Even the program's logo preaches: a letter drawn outside the lines and left unfinished, on a tablet broken like the sin-broken mind, beside a column, because theology is the foundation on which life, purpose, and action stand.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What kind of course does the lecture say Introduction to Theology is?
2. What does Patton mean when he says that he and Dyke are not your magisterium?
3. Why does the program begin with the question of belief?
4. Which set of questions maps the six courses of the program?
5. What does the lecture call the hardest part of the entire course?
6. How is doctrine taught in every class of the program?
7. Why does the lecture say not to memorize Scripture from a paraphrase?
8. What answer does the lecture give to Scared Susan, who fears she is not smart enough?
9. What is the problem with saying, I don't know the big words, I just love Jesus?
10. In the stories of those who walked away from the faith, what common denominator did Patton find?
11. What does the sermon uniquely provide, on the lecture's spectrum of commitment?
12. What is irenic theology?
13. Why must the question of truth come before Bibliology in the program's stair-step method?
14. Why does the program insist on doing theology in community?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 1 is complete.
The teachers ask every student to set their beliefs in limbo for a season, deconstructing them so they can be properly reconstructed. What belief would be hardest for you to place on the shelf, and what does that difficulty tell you about how you came to hold it?
Patton argues that the heart cannot receive what the mind rejects, and that a faith built on emotion and experience fails when crisis comes. Where have you seen the mind and the heart pull apart, in your own walk or in someone you love, and what would it look like to knit them back together?
Which member of the cast of students, from Practical Priscilla to Struggling Sam, walked into the room wearing your shoes, and what would it take for you to be fully honest about that in a community doing theology together?
The picture of Acts 2 that closes the lecture: the Spirit did not come down on thousands of scattered individuals but on the gathered church, and he has been at work in that community ever since.
The lecture's own directions for the week: work through the group discussion questions with someone, over coffee if need be, since the course is built for theology in community; begin the assigned reading in Roger Olson's Mosaic of Christian Belief alongside Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology; and, for the reader who wants the engine behind the whole program, take up J. P. Moreland's book on loving God with all your mind. The course turns next to defining theology itself.