Everyone's a theologian

Back in my days as a sportswriter and broadcaster, there were occasions when my wife – who, thankfully, loves sports – would make an observation about a game or a coach or a player, and then the next day hear or read me say almost the same thing in my column or broadcast.

Sometimes she’d say, “You didn’t give me any credit for that idea. What’s the difference between what I said and what you said?”

And I’d tell her, “When you say it, it’s coming from an amateur. When I say it, it’s coming from a professional.”

Needless to say, that wouldn’t go over very well. Fortunately, my wife would simply give me her equivalent of an eyeroll (something she does not do), knowing I was attempting to be funny.

Over the course of my life, I have had to occasion to teach from the Bible. It’s always a bit daunting, because I’m not a professional. In fact, I used to start most classes by saying something like, “I’m not a theologian. I’m just like you: someone who reads the Bible, trying to figure out how to have a better understanding of and a stronger relationship with God.”

Having family members who are theologians, I knew my understanding of Scripture came nowhere close to those members of my family whose “profession” it has been to study, teach, and preach on a daily basis. Like I’d say to my wife, my thoughts and views were from an amateur; they are the professionals.

Then one day I realized that was wrong. Theology is the study of God. Therefore, if you are someone who reads and studies the Bible, who thinks about God and wants to understand Him and His Word better, you are a theologian. Anytime we think about a lesson from the Bible and try to understand it and apply it to how we live, we are engaging in theology.

Dr. R.C. Sproul wrote a book with the title, “Everyone’s A Theologian,” in which he makes that argument, that all Christians are (or should be) theologians. The real question is, are you a good one or not?

Theology is the broad study of God. That study leads to what we call “doctrine” – specific teachings that reach broad agreement on what we believe.

I have heard some Christians say something like, “Doctrine divides, Jesus unites.” And indeed, doctrine has produced some major divisions in the life of Christianity (and, for that matter, every religion of any size; Islam has two major divisions, but dozens of smaller what Protestants would call denominations) that has caused disagreements, divisions, even wars.

I was reading from that amazing passage in Nehemiah, where a number of Jews came back from captivity in Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple, and in doing so came across the ancient scrolls called “The Book of the Law,” basically Moses’ writings.

The people are excited. The priests – led by Ezra – are ready to share God’s Word with the people. For many of them, it has been at least 70 years since they’ve heard these words. So, the story tells us, the people gathered “into the square before the Water Gate, and they told Ezra the Scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses” and read it to them.

That’s apparently around 50,000 people who come together for “church,” yet we’re told they came together with a common spirit, with the same desire and hunger for a message from God.

I can almost hear them say, “We’ve been hearing from you, Ezra, and the priests for long enough. We want to hear directly from God! Read us His Words and teach us from what He is saying.”

And so, we have the “professional” class – priests, in those days; preachers in ours – who devote their lives to reading, studying, and instructing us in what God is saying through the histories, the prophets, the apostles.

But we also have the rest of us, people who (thanks in a large part to the Reformation) can read God’s Word for ourselves, study it and ask God, through the Holy Spirit, to give us discernment as to what we’re reading.

We have our doctrinal differences. We may disagree on how baptism should be done or the level of its importance; we may not all agree on what sacraments should be performed and how often; we can have discussions over interpretations of Scripture and the proper and appropriate application to our daily lives.

And those discussions are OK and can even be helpful, as long as they are done in a spirit of love. As Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians (chapter 13), “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge … but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

We should all be seeking the same thing: a greater knowledge of God and a closer relationship with Him.

While Believers may not agree on everything, there should be a common commitment to the authority of the Bible, the preeminence of Jesus as the Son of God, the priority of prayer, and the importance of worship.

And above all, a commitment to love. Paul goes on in that same chapter to say, essentially, love never dies. Eloquent preaching and spiritual gifts will one day end. Our understanding will go as far as we can go. We can only know a portion of who God is, and what we say will always be incomplete because God is so far greater than we can ever understand. Paul writes, “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.” Or as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message, “But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.”

But love is complete. That’s why love never fails.

Still, theology and doctrine are important. The 2025 State of Theology Survey, conducted by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research, demonstrates widespread theological confusion among Believers in this country. Among the findings, 64% of evangelicals say “Everyone is born innocent,” 53% say “Most people are good by nature,” and 47% say God accepts the worship of all religions. Ligonier notes that many evangelicals hold contradictory or unbiblical beliefs, reflecting weak doctrinal teaching in churches.

And yet, despite what you may have heard, Americans are becoming more religious after years of decline. Yes, church attendance in the United States has declined significantly over the past two decades, with the most recent data showing only about 30% of adults attend religious services weekly, down from 42% in 2000. But a 2026 study by a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Ryan Burge, found that the number of Americans who identify as nonreligious has declined three years in a row from 2022 to 2025. Among Christians who attend church, Gen Z and Millennials go more often than older generations, according to a 2025 study by the Barna Group that studies U.S. faith trends. Young people are searching, and that search is leading more and more of them to church.

Which is all the more reason for our churches to be more focused on proper reading of God’s word, on theology and doctrine. Some churches are so focused on attracting people they avoid anything that makes the marginal attender uncomfortable. Too often, our churches judge everything they do in a worship service by how it might affect other people. They don’t want to risk hurting anyone’s feelings or offending them so that they don’t come back.

The problem is that can corrupt our theology. And that’s not what true worship is supposed to be. All Christians are called to faithfully proclaim Scripture in every season, guarding truth and guiding others with sound doctrine and love.

Too many of us – me included – tend to look at our Sunday morning worship service and leave asking, “What did you think of the service?” We treat Sunday morning like it’s about us.

We should be asking, “What did God think of the service? What did God think of my worship?”

We have the privilege, like the children of Israel in the time of Nehemiah and Ezra, to read and hear directly from God’s Word.

The end of the story in Nehemiah says that the people left in a state of delight “because they had understood the words that were declared to them.”

So, as Paul puts it quite simply in 2 Timothy 4, Preach the Word.