Even if you are not big sports fans, I’m sure you’ve heard of an NCAA Tournament Bracket.  We are a little early for that this year, because it happens in March every year, but we can still talk about it.  College basketball has a 64 team tournament at the end of their season, and all the teams are placed in a big tournament bracket.  If you win, you move on to play again, and if you lose, you are finished for the season.

But this blog entry is not about sports.  Its about our theology.  You don’t have to be a theologian to have a theology.  Everybody has developed their own theology, whether they realize it or not.  Your theology is defined by how you think and what you believe about God.  And regardless of how many Southern Baptists or Catholics there are, I’ve come to realize that our theologies are kind of like our fingerprints in that no two people’s are the same.  But unlike our fingerprints, our theology can change, and most often does.  I don’t imagine anybody would say they believe the same thing about God now as they did when they were 12 (unless they are still 12).

So what does theology have to do with an NCAA tournament bracket, you ask?  Well, we have a lot of theological decisions to make in our lives, and some of them build on the foundations of others.  I think we can relate our decision making to filling our own theological bracket.  Everybody’s will be different.  Take for example one of the foundational first round matchups: Inspiration of the Scriptures.  There are typically four main views of what it means for scripture to be “inspired” by God.  I’m not going to go into them, but depending on what view you choose, it will dramatically impact your other views.  Some views allows for their to be errors in the Bible, whether they are from the original writers themselves, or just copyist errors passed down over the years.  Some views say the bible on your coffee-table is completely free of even a single error.  If you are going to study the bible, at some point you will have to decide whether the words in your hands are true, or not.  That would be one of the first rungs of your theological bracket.  How can you support what you believe with Scripture if you haven’t even decided if the Bible is reliable or not?

I’m not going to get into a lot of theology here in Part 1.  I’m just trying to explain what I mean by our Theological Bracket.  Hopefully you get the idea.  We’ll take a deeper look into our bracket in the next extry, Part 2.