Why should any person want to chain himself to a theological system, which has predecided for him individual items of doctrine that he has no intention of learning/studying/mastering for himself? What’s the motivation here?
If it’s important, why not look into it bit by bit for himself?
And if it’s not important, why get married to some camp’s systematic theology, as if it were important?
I think people do it for a number of reasons, many of them gravitating in this direction: They like camp and belonging. They like “safety in numbers”. They like looking to the church for answers, because it’s easier than studying the scriptures for that. They like creeds and bullet points, because they’re shorter than the Bible. They like experts, because experts respond to questions more conveniently than does the Bible.
And to be quite specific, they only like certain experts! (The ones whose opinions they find palatable.)
I think that these are some of the main reasons they choose camps and creeds over personal study. And as to the result of this, the words of Moses’ Uncle Jethro come quickly to mind: “What you are doing is not good.”
The result is a people much more mindless than they would be if they would turn their attention directly to the scriptures themselves—rather than to hearsay, creed, tradition, and expert. And besides, they don’t mind paying for such services, so there’s always room for a few experts to keep the camps running, and to earn a decent salary for it.
But where’s the money that comes from studying the texts themselves? Few can make a living from that, unless they’re adding their own customized spin to it, for their own purposes. That is, unless they’re making it more palatable to an audience than is the scripture alone.
