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A Theologian is One Who Prays

By Luke Stamps–

I recently came across this passage from Robert Louis Wilken’s book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God.  In it, Wilken describes how early Christian theology served the piety and worship of the church.  Every Christian theologian (which is to say, every Christian) would do well to remember this inseparable link between true theology and the worship of God.

“All the figures portrayed in this book prayed regularly and their thinking was never far removed from the church’s worship.  Whether the task at hand was the defense of Christian belief to an outsider, the refutation of the views of a heretic, or the exposition of a passage from the Bible, their intellectual work was always in service of praise and adoration of the one God.  ‘This is the Catholic faith,’ begins an ancient creed, ‘that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.’ Often their treatises ended with a doxology to God, as in Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter: ‘to whom be glory forever. Amen.’ They wished not only to understand and express the dazzling truth they had seen in Christ, by thinking and writing they sought to know God more intimately and love him more ardently. The intellectual task was a spiritual undertaking. In the oft-cited words of the desert monk Evagrius, ‘A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian” (pp. 25-26).

Luke Stamps is a Ph.D. candidate at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in systematic theology. Luke is a weekly contributor to the Credo blog and also blogs at Before All Things. Luke is married to Josie, and they have three children, Jack, Claire, and Henry. Luke is a member of Clifton Baptist Church in Louisville, KY.

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