Podcast: 6 Objections to Studying Theology That Don't Hold Up (Jon Nielson)

May 22, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Bad Excuses for Avoiding Theology

In this episode, Jon Nielson addresses six common objections to studying theology that he’s heard over the years as a pastor, including that it’s too impractical, too confusing, and too divisive.

Knowing God's Truth

Knowing God's Truth

Jon Nielson

Pastor Jon Nielson has written Knowing God’s Truth to make systematic theology clear, meaningful, and practical for those new to theology, covering the basic categories of systematic theology—Scripture, man, sin, church, and more.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:02 - Objection #1: I’m not smart enough. It’s too hard.

Matt Tully
John, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jon Nielson
Good to be here. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about some of the common objections that people often have when it comes to systematic theology. For some people, they love theology and they love talking about these things, but for others, it’s a pretty intimidating topic, or it has all kinds of baggage that they don’t love. And so today I want to talk about some of that baggage that people might. We’re going to go through a few of these together. The first one, and I think maybe the most common one that people would resonate with, is that systematic theology is just too hard. I’m not smart enough. I don’t have a degree. I never went to bible college. It’s just hard. What would your initial response be to that?

Jon Nielson
It’s a really common response, as you note. I think I would start by saying, yes, I agree with you. Systematic theology is hard. There are people who give their professional lives for years and years and years to the study and the discipline of systematic theology. What has been said about the Bible, that it is deep enough for an elephant to drown in and yet shallow enough for a child to play in, I think is true of systematic theology as well.

Matt Tully
There’s a paradoxical nature to it.

Jon Nielson
Yes. The deeper you go in systematic theology and systematic theological study, there’s more complexity, there’s more depth. You’re not going to run out of work that you can do in the discipline. But I also want to say everybody, if they’re having thoughts about God, if they’re studying the Bible, even if they’re checking out Christianity for the first time, they are beginning to engage in theological thought at some level. I want to think about systematic theology more as a trajectory rather than this insurmountable jump that you can’t even begin accessing.

Matt Tully
It’s like a journey. It’s not necessarily just the final destination.

Jon Nielson
That’s exactly right. I’ve got young children, and even my young children are beginning to formulate the most basic of thoughts about the gospel, about sin, and about salvation. My four-year-old is beginning to try to wrestle through the question, What does it mean that God is one God and yet in three persons? She’s doing systematic theology as a four-and-a-half-year-old and trying to figure out what God is like.

Matt Tully
You’re a pastor, and so as you talk with people in your church, how do you try to get them to broaden their view to be that systematic theology isn’t just an academic discipline for scholars in a classroom context, but it’s actually something that we’re all doing all the time, and it permeates all of our thinking about God? How do you help people to understand that?

Jon Nielson
I don’t know that I always do that well, frankly, in my preaching. I’m trying to do it better. A couple of the ways I think I’ve tried to do it more explicitly and intentionally is that I preach, generally, in an expositional way, so we’re working through books of the Bible, but I’ll try to intentionally stop and highlight if there’s a theological theme or a systematic theological concept that’s being taught clearly in Scripture. I’ll highlight that, and sometimes I’ll even say, We’re going to have a little theological moment here. And then I’ll try to directly apply it to what that means for their lives. We’re in the book of Judges right now, and so I’m preparing a sermon for this Sunday on Judges 4–5—the story of Deborah and Barak, Heber the Kenite, and his wife, Jael, who’s the one who kills—

Matt Tully
This is an exciting story.

Jon Nielson
It’s an exciting story. So she’s the one who kills the general Sisera, the evil, oppressive general who’s assaulting God’s people. And there’s a moment right in the middle of the narrative where the story of Deborah and Barak is going on, and then in Judges 4:11 it’s kind of this aside, and the narrator goes, Now, by the way, Heber the Kenite had moved his tent from one place to another. And then it goes back to the story of Deborah and Barak, and you’re like, What in the world? And it’s this moment that is showing God’s sovereign, providential oversight of even that detail—of Heber and his wife, Jael, moving. And in God’s sovereignty, Sisera is going to end up in their tent as he’s running away from the battle, and Jael is going to be the one who’s going to put him to death and have a role in delivering God’s people. And that’s a moment that’s teaching us about the sovereignty of God, his providence. And then I’m going to try to connect that to helping our people understand God is active. He is providentially controlling and ordaining all the events of our lives, even when we can’t tell.

Matt Tully
That’s a great segue into another one that we’ll talk about in a few minutes, just about systematic theology being too abstract and impractical. But maybe before we get there, one other critique I’ve heard sometimes from people who maybe don’t always love our focus on systematic theology is they can say that the language often employed in theological discussions is just too esoteric. It’s too technical. It ends up making people feel like they can’t do it. It ends up feeling like using that theological language is unnecessarily difficult or complicated. How do you think about that, especially in your preaching and your teaching and your discipling? Do you try to call people to some of the technical language that has been developed in church history, or do you tend to say, No, I want to restate things in a more accessible way?

Jon Nielson
I think both/and. You’re right; theological jargon and theological vocabulary can feel like it’s a hindrance. It can feel like it’s a hard bar to get over. But I also think it’s helpful. I want to define things clearly. Even in the book, I’ll use the language of soteriology, but I’ll also call it the doctrine of salvation. But I also think it’s important to teach people those terms so that they can enter into theological conversations without feeling like, Oh, I don’t know the vocabulary, so I can’t have these conversations. Even people who haven’t, like you mentioned at the beginning, haven’t been to seminary, maybe haven’t even been to a Christian college, haven’t even been a Christian for very long, I think it’s helpful for them to develop some of that theological vocabulary, because it will help them engage in conversations.

07:38 - Objection #2: It’s boring.

Matt Tully
Objection Number two: Systematic theology is boring. It’s dry. It’s just boring. Do you hear that?

Jon Nielson
I absolutely hear it. I hate hearing it.

Matt Tully
How much of that is on the teacher vs. the student?

Jon Nielson
That’s a great question. I think it is sometimes on the teacher. My advisor in seminary was D. A. Carson, who I love and I admire. He’s marked my gospel ministry. But I remember him saying, My students won’t remember everything I teach them, but I’ve found that they do tend to remember what I was most excited about. Shame on me as a Bible teacher, or as a teacher of theology, if my audience doesn’t sense my excitement about the things of God and the things that I’m teaching. So yeah, sometimes it can be on the teacher. It can be on the student if they are not connecting what they’re learning about theologically to their relationship with the living God. I do think theology can become dry and academic and boring when it’s just lumped into every other academic pursuit—I’m learning these facts about this supreme, divine being. But if we approach it as, I am learning about the living, reigning God who has saved me by his Son, with whom I’m in a saving relationship for all eternity, I just think that should be thrilling, not boring. I’m learning about my Savior and my friend and my King! That’s one of the reasons why throughout the book there are these prompts to stop and pray. When we’re doing theology, when we’re doing theological work, we want to be stopping and actually talking to God, responding to him about what we’re learning about him.

Matt Tully
Because he is a person. It’s not studying plants or insects. As fascinating as that even can be, we’re actually studying a living being. Do you remember from your own life the moment that your passion for studying theology started to grow? I imagine this happened as a young person perhaps? Is there a moment in time where you can point to and say, That was where I first grasped the excitement that comes of studying God?

Jon Nielson
Senior year of high school in Bible class. My Bible teacher had us read through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology—the old blue one. A big, thick one. There was something about the organization of themes and topics and the clarity with which he laid out doctrines and explained different views on things. I was 17 years old, and it was like a new room in my faith that I had walked into. I think I’d been taught the Bible in Sunday school and in my home, so I knew Bible stories. I knew Bible trivia. But it was my first venture into a systematic, organized approach to thinking through doctrine. That was pretty thrilling to me at that point. And I think from there it became something that I was passionate about and I wanted to learn more. And I wanted to learn what I believed about salvation, about the nature of sin, about the end times. So I wanted to dig into that.

11:23 - Objection #3: It’s too abstract.

Matt Tully
Number three: Systematic theology is too abstract. You’ve kind of already hit on this, but how do you think about that critique, that often in the way that we talk about it, it’s often not connected to practical, daily life?

Jon Nielson
Obviously, I think it is. Just one example would be when something hard comes into your life. A little under a year ago, I was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer. I have been battling that and undergoing treatment for the last year. When you get news like that, or when you lose a loved one suddenly, what you believe to be true about God matters so much. All of a sudden, theological concepts—like the sovereignty of God, like the certainty of salvation, like what we hope for in eternity—become very, very practical and much more tangible. So, I always want to start by saying if you don’t think theology matters practically, just wait. Give it a few months or a few years. When something hard comes into your life, all of a sudden it begins to matter even more what you believe. But even in everyday life, I sometimes will try to help people understand that everything you do—every choice you make every day—is in some ways a theological decision. It reflects what you believe about God, what you believe is true of yourself, what you believe about your identity in Christ. So, we’re never not making theologically informed decisions, if that makes sense.

Matt Tully
It seems like a lot of times the way theology forms us is almost subconscious. I don’t know if that’s the right term, but it’s not always us thinking, Okay, I’m going to apply this doctrine in this way—although sometimes that happens. There’s a deeper shaping and forming that can be at play there. Do you think that’s true?

Jon Nielson
Yeah, I think the more that we go deep in theology, too, the more it changes our hearts. And back to the idea of a relationship with God—it should be deepening our understanding of the God to whom we pray, with whom we walk every day. So it should be doing something to our hearts. And it should be changing us, not only mentally—it’s not a purely academic enterprise—it should be changing us emotionally too.

Matt Tully
I think the caricature of this idea we’ve been talking about, and to take your example of a scary cancer diagnosis, the caricature would be this: You get this diagnosis, but because you believe God is sovereign over all of this—over every facet of your life—you hear that news, and then you can kind of sit back, pretty chill, and just think, It’s okay. I feel fine. I trust God. But that isn’t always our experience. How would you explain how this doctrine of God’s sovereignty and providence bolstered you in the midst of that news?

Jon Nielson
What it’s not is theological pat answers—Pollyanna: Everything’s fine. God is always working for his glory and our good. Everything’s going to be fine.

Matt Tully
So stop whining.

Jon Nielson
So stop whining. Put your chin up. It’s not that it makes hard things less hard, and it’s not that it takes pain away. But I will say it was an opportunity for me this last to say, Do I really believe what I say I believe? Do I really believe God is not just allowing this but ordaining it for his glory and for my eternal good in Christ? Because that’s what I would’ve said I believed two years ago. But it was an opportunity for me to actually cling to that personally in faith and not just say, Yeah, that’s a theological concept. No matter what happens, no matter what comes into our lives, God’s ordaining it for his glory and for our good. Yeah, okay. But it was an opportunity for me to feel it, too, and experience it. And I would say I believe it more deeply.

15:40 - Objection #4: It isn’t biblical.

Matt Tully
Praise God. Another objection people often have—and this one’s getting a little bit more complicated—they would say, Systematic theology isn’t actually very biblical. And by that I think they often mean that systematic theology is often guilty of imposing extra-biblical categories on the Bible—frameworks on the Bible that don’t necessarily exist there. We would be better off just reading the Bible on face value, taking each passage as it comes, and not trying to go much beyond that.

Jon Nielson
I first want to acknowledge that objection has a lot of truth to it. The Bible comes to us with sixty-six books, over forty different human authors, and at least six distinct literary genres written over thousands of years. It does not come to us as neatly packaged as Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.

Matt Tully
It’s not an encyclopedia.

Jon Nielson
Correct.

Matt Tuly
Which is what a lot of systematic theologies do—they organize and rearrange and summarize.

Jon Nielson
But what I want to actually argue for is that it is the unity of Scripture and the idea of God as the divine author who inspired all of it that should embolden us to do systematic theology. In other words, if the Bible does have over forty different human authors but one divine author, who inspired every single word by the Holy Spirit, then we should have confidence that he is going to speak and act in consistent ways, and in ways that we can then gather and summarize and use some organizational categories to explain. So we can begin to gather that there are consistent ways that the Bible will talk about this aspect of God’s character. A great example of this would be the doctrine of the Trinity. Trinity, as you know, is a word that the Bible doesn’t actually use. But what we’re doing when we work through forming our doctrine of the Trinity is we’re gathering all of these truths about God that he’s revealing throughout his word and we’re saying, This is here. And we are evaluating the biblical text, in its context, at every step. So that’s where you can get off in a dangerous direction is if systematic theology becomes this kind of philosophizing that’s totally detached from the biblical text. Yeah, you’re off base.

Matt Tully
Your theology has to be, in some ways, tethered by what the text is actually saying in context in every case.

Jon Nielson
And not just proof texting, but you’re actually doing exegesis of every text as you’re reading it in context. You’re not just pulling proof texts out

18:39 - Objection #5: It tries to put God in a box.

Matt Tully
Another one that’s kind of related to this one, but maybe a little bit different: Systematic theology often tries to put God in a box. And I think undergirding this kind of critique is the sense that systematic theology can try to understand and explain God in ways that we just simply can’t. He’s beyond us. It doesn’t leave room for mystery. What do you think about that?

Jon Nielson
That’s a great question. The distinction I like to make, and I think I make this in the introductory chapter of the book, is that in systematic theology, we are trying to know God truly. That is, truly as he’s revealed himself to us in his word, while understanding that we are never going to know or comprehend God exhaustively. We can come to conclusions about things that are true of God, but that’s different than saying we now know everything about God, or we understand him exhaustively. So absolutely, leaving room for mystery, leaving room for our acknowledgement of the fact that we’re finite, and we’re studying and trying to learn about an infinitely glorious being.

Matt Tully
How do we know where that line is though? Because sometimes it can feel not super clear when we’ve started to move beyond what we should be trying to take from Scripture and organizing that into kind of a detached philosophizing about God.

Jon Nielson
I know I mentioned the doctrine of the Trinity before, but my mind goes there again, in terms of that’s a great example of a doctrine where you can summarize truths about God in three persons, but there is a point where you stop and you say, My head hurts.

Matt Tully
Try explaining this to kids. That’s the best way to see how hard it is.

Jon Nielson
The Trinity’s a great one where you think about there’s actually no human analogy or metaphor that captures it. And the minute you use the egg one or the father, son, husband one, you’ve actually gone into heresy. So there’s a point where you say there’s one God who has existed eternally in three persons. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. And there’s not much further you can go other than to say there is mystery there, and it is beyond us. And that’s actually a helpful proof that God is real and he is beyond all human understanding.

Matt Tully
And it does seem like in the history of the church, where people do run into heresy, it often is them, arguably, going beyond what Scripture actually says. They’re trying to logically make it make sense in ways that maybe they can’t.

Jon Nielson
I think that’s right. You look at the different heresies about the person of Christ. Whether it’s Arianism on the one hand that says Jesus can’t really be fully, eternally God, or whether it’s Docetism, saying Jesus couldn’t have actually become really human and he must have just appeared to become human—they’re trying to explain it in human terms. You’re right, they’re trying to box it up in a way that our minds can fully swallow.

Matt Tully
You’ve mentioned the Trinity and the person of Christ. What are some of the other mysteries of the Christian faith that you would say theology can only take us so far in?

Jon Nielson
Definitely God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. I’m Reformed in my soteriology. I’m a Calvinist. And yet even a Reformed Calvinist has to—and our Westminster Confession of Faith acknowledges this too—that God’s sovereignty in no way does damage to real human responsibility. You see in the narrative, for example, of the Old Testament in Exodus phrases about Pharaoh: “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” “Pharaoh hardened his heart against God,” “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened”—the passive. And those are all true ways of describing what’s going on. Is God responsible for the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart? Is he raising him up so that he will get glory over Pharaoh in the deliverance of his people? Yes. But is Pharaoh actively, sinfully hardening his heart against God and against God’s word through Moses? Absolutely. So, that would be another one where there is tension there, and you have to at some point say, There’s still mystery there, and it is of God. And you have to rest by trusting in him.

Matt Tully
I was gonna say, what would you say to the person who is maybe on the other side? They don’t like the mystery. They tend to feel uncomfortable by the mystery, and they want to solve that riddle—If I can just think about it a little bit more, if I can just define things a little bit better, maybe I can get to an intellectually satisfying resolution to that. How do you counsel someone who’s on that side?

Jon Nielson
About that specific human responsibility?

Matt Tully
About that impulse. They don’t know how they can stop and be content with the mystery of God’s sovereignty and human freedom, for example. They feel the need to keep going in finding a way to reconcile those two things.

Jon Nielson
I would probably say it’s a both/and there. On the one hand, you want to say keep reading. There are brilliant minds who’ve written about all these things, so dig deep. I remember in my doctoral work there was this really helpful analogy from one of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons that helped me understand that interplay between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility a little better. So some of these great minds of the past can help us.

Matt Tully
There probably is more you could be reading profitably.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. But then there are times in Scripture where Paul will say things like, Who are you to answer back to God? Or the great example is Job. The amazing thing about the book of Job is God never gives him the answers. God could have easily said, Job, here’s the deal: Satan came to me, and I allowed him, and this is why this happened. God never tells him the why, but Job is called to, by the end of the book, putting his hand over his mouth and trusting that God is God and he is not. And that is the posture that I think a genuine believer needs to be willing to get to. Not that you don’t wrestle, not that you don’t seek a deeper understanding—we should—but there is a point where every believer is called to say, Okay, like Job, I spoke once. I’m not going to speak again. I’m going to trust that God is God.

25:44 - Objection #6: It’s too controversial.

Matt Tully
Maybe a last common objection that we often hear: Systematic theology is too controversial. It often leads to these discussions, and this focus on doctrine can just generally lead to a lot of division and discord and disunity in the church. And it’s kind of hard to disagree with that. We look around and we see the hundreds of denominations and even independent churches that don’t like this other church for this reason or they split apart. How do you respond to that kind of concern that theology leads to division?

Jon Nielson
I first want to say some divisions—not angry, sinful divisions, but some divisions, like denominational differences—I would say are okay. I’m an ordained pastor in the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America. Do I think that heaven is going to be broader than the PCA? Yes! Praise God! There’s going to be a lot of people in heaven who are not part of the PCA. But do I think that there would be practical difficulties for a PCA elder, with Reformed convictions and who subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith, worshiping with someone from a very staunchly Wesleyan, Arminian conviction, or someone from a more charismatic church, or whatever it is? Yeah, it would be hard to do church life together. And yet I think we’re going to share eternity together. So, I always want to say that denominational differences and theological differences in convictions are not bad in and of themselves. I also want to say you can’t, even if you think you’re staying out of the conflict, you’re actually not. If you take the approach where you just say, Hey, I don’t like this theology stuff. It causes fights. Just love Jesus and love people. That’s actually throwing a punch, theologically speaking.

Matt Tully
How so? Because the person says that thinking, Hey, this is the humble way. I’m taking the high road here.

Jon Nielson
Well, for one thing, what do you mean love God, love people? What does that look like? Secondly, if you’re trying to be atheological, that is actually a theological claim. You are saying that deeper knowledge, or doctrine, is not important; it’s not fundamentally important to a walk with Christ or to a way a church operates. That is a theological statement. Now, it’s a theological statement that’s against theology, but it is a theological statement. It’s saying that whole world, that whole realm, is not important for Christians or for the church. We just need this simple mantraL Love God, love people. So, in other words, you’ve entered the conflict, even if you feel like you’re not. So, I would urge people, no, you want to search the Scriptures, search good theological thinkers, figure out what you believe, and then pursue that.

Matt Tully
Have you ever wrestled with the question of, If theology is so important and if God has given us his word in order to teach us these doctrines about himself, why is the church so divided on so many things? Even if we’re not coming to blows, even if it’s not angry, hostile division, nevertheless, on something like baptism, for example, or something else, why is there so much disagreement? Has that ever concerned you or made you wonder about why God would do it this way?

Jon Nielson
I would answer that by saying yes and no. I would say yes, I have struggled with that. And I do think about what heaven will be like, in terms of I think we’ll all have blind spots exposed. I hold my Reformed convictions strongly. I believe them for a reason. I affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith for good reason, I think. But certainly, when we get to heaven, I think there will be some blind spots exposed. But the reason I said yes and no is because there are such clear Christian beliefs that I think genuine believers do agree on. And it comes back to the clarity of Scripture, the perspicuity of Scripture, the sinfulness of humanity, the necessity of the work of Christ on the cross, salvation by faith alone, the authority, the inerrancy of Scripture. There are vast numbers of Christians globally who would affirm those tenets of the faith.

Matt Tully
It can be so easy to focus on some of the areas of disagreement, and we take for granted all the agreement that throughout history Christians have had.

Jon Nielson
If you would take something like The Nicene Creed—Nicene Christianity globally—there would be widespread agreement, even interdenominationally, on a lot of that. And we’ve seen some good examples of affirming those things like the Gospel Coalition—the gathering of those who would hold to a Reformed view of soteriology.

Matt Tully
But various ecclesiologies and all kinds of other issues.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, but all with core soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) agreement on those things.

31:05 - Lightning Round

Matt Tully
Let’s get into a lightning round of a few additional questions that I thought could be kind of interesting to hear from you. A lot of these will be your own personal opinions on things. First question: What’s your favorite doctrine, at least right now? I know it’s going to be hard to choose, but if you had to pick something right now, what would you say?

Jon Nielson
The doctrine is somewhat of a subset of the doctrine of God, or theology proper, but it was interesting how many times in the book and in the videos that accompany the book I kept coming back to the doctrine of the aseity of God.

Matt Tully
That’s a deep cut for many people, so you’re going to have to explain what that means.

Jon Nielson
Again ,I mentioned Dr. Carson before, and I remember him talking about this all the time. The aseity of God refers to the fact that God is of himself. He’s not dependent on anything else. He is completely satisfied in and of himself. As I was thinking through this introduction to systematic theology, it was interesting how many doctrines actually came back to that. You think about if God has existed from eternity past, long before the creation of the world, completely satisfied and joyful in and of himself, God in three persons, then what must that mean about his decision to create the world? He didn’t do it because he was deficient in any way. He didn’t do it because he needed the universe to save him from his boredom, or he didn’t create human beings because he needed friends and because he was lonely.

Matt Tully
Or because he needed worship.

Jon Nielson
Right. He doesn’t even need our worship. So what does that mean about creation? What does that mean about salvation? What does that mean about what God desires from his people? So many things flow out of that doctrine of God’s self-sufficiency, the fact that he is of himself. And just one of the conclusions, for example, of creation and why does God create is it has to be something along the lines of God created out of the joyful overflow of his own satisfaction in and of himself. The very act of creation is an act of his overflowing grace. And I think that ought to make us adore him even more.

Matt Tully
What’s a doctrine that you would like to learn more about, that you feel like if I had a week of free time with no responsibilities, I would just love to read books on this doctrine?

Jon Nielson
I’ve always been a little bit fascinated by the disagreements about the end times—eschatology.

Matt Tully
You would jump into that chaos?

Jon Nielson
I probably would just because so many people throughout church history have had sometimes wild views about the end times, and you see throughout church history the attribution of different things in Revelation to different historical figures. So, some of it is just intriguing.

Matt Tully
What’s the most misunderstood doctrine?

Jon Nielson
I’ll just pick one: total depravity, as a subset of the doctrine of sin (hamartiology) can be very misunderstood, both by people who affirm it and by people who don’t like it. Sometimes people who don’t like it, they’ll hear Calvinistic or Reformed people talking about total depravity and they’ll think, Oh man, are you saying, number one, that I’m as bad as I could possibly be? And number two, are you saying that someone who’s not a Christian can’t even do anything nice or anything good? The answer, of course, is no.

Matt Tully
On both of those counts.

Jon Nielson
On both of those counts. But understanding the doctrine of total depravity is that in our fallen state we have been affected in every way by sin. It doesn’t mean that things are as bad as they could possibly be. God’s common grace actually prevents things from being as bad as they could possibly be.

Matt Tully
Last question: Who’s your favorite dead theologian?

Jon Nielson
Well, I’ve mentioned before that I’m a Presbyterian, so I would probably have to go with John Knox. John Knox is the father of Scottish Presbyterianism. One anecdote about Knox is that when the Westminster Divines got together to write the Westminster Confession of Faith, it took them six or seven years and Westminster Abbey. And when John Knox sat down to write out the Scottish Confession, he did it in four days.

Matt Tully
He just knocked it out.

Jon Nielson
He just knocked it out. He was a fiery, Reformed guy. He had some very fierce words for Mary, Queen of Scots and her oppression of the church. He was just bold and courageous for the gospel. So yeah, I would say probably Knox.

Matt Tully
John, thank you so much for talking to us today and leading us through some of these objections, some of these myths that people often struggle with when it comes to systematic theology and showing why they might not be right.

Jon Nielson
Thanks. It’s great to do this and great to be with you, Matt.

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